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Constructing Story and Character: A Conversation with Paul Schrader
From: American Film Institute
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
A former film critic, Paul Schrader (right) is often credited as one of the most influential  postwar screenwriters. In addition to Taxi Driver, Schrader wrote Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), Raging Bull (1980) and American Gigolo (1980), among others. He has also directed an impressive roster of films, including Affliction (1997), Light Sleeper (1991) and The Comfort of Strangers (1990). In addition to superlative artistry, Schrader has also contributed key works to film studies, including the landmark essay, "Notes on Film Noir."
In an AFI Harold Lloyd Master Seminar held on April 28, 1976, Schrader discussed the writing of Taxi Driver (1976) and issues crucial to character development and story construction. |
 ou have to start at the beginning of the process. I'm now teaching screenwriting courses, and the very first day I ask everybody to write on a piece of paper their most pressing personal problem. I take all those problems and put them in a briefcase and I keep them and look at them, because that's what it's about, that's where it starts. It starts with a problem. |
Then you go to film metaphors. What film metaphors can help me confront, deal with, explore, maybe solve, but probably not solve, the problem? Because, you know, one of the tragedies of life is that it really affords us very few problems. It more often gives us dilemmas, and dilemmas don't have solutions, problems do. One of the great reasons that movies are attractive is that movies more often deal with problems than with dilemmas. Therefore, a movie can pose a problem then solve it, and you walk out of the movie and say, "Gee, isn't life great? There was a problem and now it's over." |
But life isn't like that. Life gives us dilemmas and they don't get solved. They never get solved. That's why I like a movie that keeps going, that plays its last scene on the sidewalk, because the movie doesn't end, the dilemma remains. |
So, you have to go to the beginning of the process. The process begins with a problem, and you find a film metaphor. The problem in this case [with Taxi Driver] is the total attenuation, feeling totally cut off. You find a film metaphor for it, which is a taxi driver: a man who lives in this thing, who is surrounded by people yet he has no identity. A man in front of whom people would do or say anything, a part of the machine. And then you say, "How can I explore my problem through my metaphor?" |
So you create a situation in which the metaphor explores the problem. Okay, so the problem is loneliness; the metaphor is the taxi driver going through the city. What do you do? You get two people who represent both sides of the problem. You get the girl who he wants but cannot have, and the girl he can have but he doesn't want. Therefore, you see that he enforces his own problem. Then you realize, as you structure it out, you say, "I'm creating a movie in which he is the source of his problem." It's not New York City that creates Travis Bickle. |
On creating Travis Bickle
The film [Taxi Driver] is riddled with fear and racism, and Travis, the main character, is a racist not by conviction but by fear. I mean, he is everything by fear. He has very few convictions about things except immorality. But when you feel the pressure coming down, when you feel the world shrinking, one naturally looks for enemies, and what better enemies are there than people who are not like you? |
Travis's enemies are people who are at ease. He hates people who are comfortable. He is extremely uncomfortable, he is not at ease anywhere. |
This is where Travis's feelings about blacks come in. He sees them out there having fun, he sees them out there jiving, he sees them with women, he sees them dancing, he sees them relaxed, and he is so uptight, himself, and he is so constipated and so attenuated, that the blacks begin to be for him a sort of a focus for the thing he can't have--that relaxation that he lacks. So the racism starts to run through the film. It starts to rear its head very overtly. |
You see him looking at these people and you know it's not a matter of conviction, because he doesn't have any real beliefs or real strong theories about blacks. It's just that he has this thing about these people who are at ease and who are out there against him. |
Disclosing a character's history
The question is often raised, "Why don't we know more about [Travis]?" I think we know a lot. My feeling about the film is that symptoms are universal, causes are particular. The film deals with symptoms, it doesn't deal with many causes--it deals with causes as they are implied. |
The problem with dealing with causes directly in movies is that causes are so particular that they let the viewer off the hook. The moment you're watching In Cold Blood (1967), when Perry Smith's father is hitting him with his belt and pointing a gun at him, you say to yourself, "Oh, his father used to beat him. That's the reason he's like that. Boy, I'm glad my father didn't beat me. I'm not like Perry Smith." But I didn't want the audience to think for a second, I'm not like Travis Bickle. So it just dealt with the symptoms, the things that we all share, which are frustration, anger, attenuation and alienation. Just a sense of being totally a nobody cut out of society. Just deal with those symptoms and let the causes evolve in the viewer's consciousness. Lay in a few hints and see which way the viewer goes. |
Some people see the movie and say, "He was in Vietnam." The movie doesn't say that, but it's implied in a way, and it's a valid justification. But if we had said in the movie, "Hey, it was Vietnam," you would immediately turn off from the movie because you would say, "That's too superficial an explanation for his behavior." |
If we had said something about his parents and his upbringing or his religious background, you would say, "That's too superficial an explanation," and it would let you off the hook. To keep the audience right at the moment of pressure all the time, you have to deal just with the symptoms. |
Now, I can explain to you what I think his problem is and why I think it is possible to get that out of the movie: I think Travis's essential problem is that he has a total view of morality that has been placed in his head that has no relationship whatsoever to the world around him. He is attracted to this world, and he cannot make the connection between what he believes, what he has been taught and what he feels. He's come from somewhere in the Midwest--where he was a freak, too, because there he was attracted to the underworld of wherever he was, and he was an outcast--so he felt uncomfortable and left home and came to New York, to the biggest sewer he could find, and he dove in. |
And because he is too American--American in a quintessential way--he is too American and too uneducated to solve his existential drama on the stage of his own body. I mean, if this were a character in a French or a Japanese film, this would simply be it. Bang! And it would be the end of the movie. |
There's a line in another script I wrote where a character says, "In Japan, if a man cracks up he closes the window and kills himself. In America, if a man cracks up he opens the window and kills somebody else." And that's what's happening in this movie. |
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