In Tokyo for the screening of his 1985 biopic “Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters” at the 38th Tokyo International Film Festival, Paul Schrader was an upbeat mood when he walked the opening night red carpet, telling an interviewer that he thought of Japan as his “second home.”
Forty years ago, however, the organizers of the first TIFF declined to include the film in its program, with objections from Mishima’s widow to its depictions of the famed right-leaning writer’s homosexuality a major factor. But talking with Schrader at a coffee shop in the ANA InterContinental Hotel, the long-ago controversy, which kept the film from being released in Japan for four decades, seemed if not forgotten, forgiven. Also, he had much else on his mind, from the coming AI revolution to his latest projects.
At age 79, the veteran director, who first came to international attention as the scriptwriter on Martin Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece “Taxi Driver” and has more recently won kudos, including his first ever best screenplay Oscar nomination, for a trilogy of films on his favorite “man in a room” theme – “First Reformed” (2017), “The Card Counter” (2021) and “Master Gardener” (2022), is still very much mid-career.
We’re Facebook friends and I’ve been following you there for years now. Some time back you started posting AI images as a kind of joke. But not recently.
Paul Schrader: I’ve decided to stop. Because two weeks ago. I went to the protest against Trump, you know? And I put this photo of me at the protest (on Facebook). People thought it was AI. I said, well, I’m not gonna post anymore. You get the wrong, impression.
Now you have ads with AI actors, like the one they ran against New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. I thought it’s not just a terrible ad – you’re putting actors out of a job.
It’s a whole new world, and it’s happening very fast. Much faster than anyone thought. AI. It’s just a tool, you know, like a typewriter. But it’s a tool that may put me out of business.
Some of these action films now, the only thing that was not AI generated was the faces. Wait and then pretty soon the faces are going to be generated too.
Now there gets to be a big question. Will human beings pay to watch AI stars? And we don’t know the answer. But I think they will. I think you can create an AI star. Use a little bit of Brando, a little bit of Kevin Costner and make an exciting movie, and I think people will pay to see that movie.
I mean, they’ve already created this, uh, actress. You know Suzanne Somers? She was a TV star. She wrote around 20 books on nutrition and beauty care and stuff like that, okay? Now, they have created a clone of her with their website and they’ve fed it everything she’s written. You can ask her a question and she will very quickly process it and give the answer that real thing would have given, in her own voice.
We haven’t been around forever. We’re not probably going to be around forever. We just think we were around forever.
So when do the machines take over?
You know the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, right? Which now are nuclear war, global virus, environmental collapse and AI. They’re all coming down the back stretch.
The question is who’s going to get to the finish line first? As Al Franken, who’s an American comic, said, “My fellow Baby Boomers will understand what I mean, when I when I say we got the last helicopter out of Saigon.”
As a fellow Boomer, I get it. But I suppose we should talk about movies, beginning with “Mishima.” I’ve been in Japan for many years and I remember that controversy – and about how Tokyo Film Festival turned it down.
They didn’t even see it. They said they would, but they didn’t even bother to see it. Okay, and Tom Luddy, who was a producer on the film, helped set up the festival. So now, 40 years later, the festival that he’s helped set up is going to show it for the first time. That’s great. I knew this day would come. I just didn’t know if I’d be alive to see it.
They told me it has been seen by a lot of Japanese, but it has never been officially shown. So what will the effect be? I think it’s a kind of — you know the American expression “nothing burger”? I mean, it’s no big deal. At the time I was making the film, it was very much in the present consciousness of the Japanese, but now it’s old history.
In some ways, yeah. I saw it a long time ago on a pirated VHS and then again recently on Prime Video. When Mishima debated those radical students at the University of Tokyo, I was reminded of this documentary I recently saw “Mishima: The Last Debate,” which is also screening at TIFF this year.
That’s just resurfaced, right? Before there were just clips of it, but now you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
So I saw that and then, of course, your film. And I was thinking this guy was like the Charlie Kirk of his day, going into the lion’s den to confront all those students.
He was respected. He was very successful. He was a major cultural figure in the world. Like Charlie Kirk was a cultural player in the world. But I’ve never thought that debate was about politics. I don’t think he actually thought for a second it was about politics.
It was a theater piece. Theater. Just like he and his poor cadets would do their final theater piece [when he committed ritual suicide by sword in 1970]. That was the theater of ecstasy that would liberate him from the body.
People are now saying “Mishima” is your masterpiece. Would you agree with that?
It’s the damnedest thing. I mean, I don’t know how I made it.
I don’t know how it ever came to exist. To me, I feel a film of mine like “Affliction” (1997) or “First Reformed” is more cohesive. I mean more cohesive to me. But the ambition of this thing, the wackiness us of doing it, I have to sort of stand back in sort of awe. Yeah, that I actually ever did that? I don’t know where I got the hubris to say let’s do it. And where I got the money.
Some from Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, no?
They got half from Warner Brothers and the other half came from Toho-Towa and Fuji TV.
When I started shooting at Toho I was worried. I wore a knife-proof vest, you know, because Japan is knife culture, not a gun culture. So if I was going to be attacked, I’d be attacked with a knife, right? And so I had this vest on.
Then, after about four or five days, the producer came to me and said, you can take the vest off. They’re gonna let us make the film.
The vest was for protection from an attack. I didn’t think we could finish if something happened. That would shut us down, whether it’s an attack on me or an attack on someone else. And I found out years later that there was a meeting. Because Toho-Towa didn’t want to be in the position of shutting down a major international production that they were financing.
So they met with figures on the right, the guys with the sound trucks and the megaphones. And they said if you don’t shut the film down, we’ll shut you down. The agreement, I found out years later, was the right said to Toho-Towa we will let you make the film if you promise it will never be shown in Japan. And there was not a contract, it was not written on any piece of paper. But it held for 40 years. And now everybody who made the deal 40 years ago is dead.
Yeah, that was a different time. And there have been other films since then that got that sort of push back here, you know? If you show this, we’re gonna protest, we’re gonna maybe use violence.
Yeah, it happened with [Scorsese’s] “The Last Temptation of Christ” too. But yeah, no regrets. Well, I think we baby boomers, you know, we lived in a bubble of middle class, wealth, and peace. I mean, we got lucky.
Yeah, it’s a different era. So we’ll see what happens [when the film screens at Tokyo]. I’ve never seen this film with a Japanese audience before. I have no idea what what the response will be. Maybe they weren’t going to show it before because someone’s afraid that if one kid stands up and starts screaming, it will ruin it for everybody.
So why take that chance? So it’s great, great, great they doing it now. They’ve had bodyguards with me. Uh, because it only takes one crazy person like the one who killed the Prime Minister [Shinzo Abe]. I just hope it goes well.
I think you’ll get a big standing ovation.
I think so too. But you know, the trucks are still out there. I heard them on Sunday. Yeah, it just takes one. And yeah, sometimes things happen. People do get stabbed or whatever, right? I mean with “The Last Temptation” there was a bomb in the theater, and somebody was killed. Okay. And I went when they were showing “The Last Temptation” at the Ziegfield. My office was right by Marty’s, And, he said let’s go to the first screening.
So I went over and it was a full house, with two cops on either side of the stage, protecting the stage from someone attacking with a spray can or a knife. I thought, like, wow, I made a movie that had to be protected by New York’s finest.
You have all these other projects you’re working on?
Yeah, I have scripts finished, and uh, yeah, when I go back I’ll do the final mix on the latest one. We’re doing the color correction right now and I’m going to do the final mix next week. It looks like I have two films set up for next year. If, of course, my health holds up, you know.
I’m at that age where you’re one phone call away. You know when the doctor says, “Oh, would you come by?” You never know, right? It’s happened to a lot of my friends. My good friend, Russell Banks. And David Lynch was my age.
It wouldn’t be a surprise, you know? I had a very rich and productive life. I just want to make a couple more. I mean, you just keep going, right?
AloJapan.com