Reading over my notes after interviewing Paul Schrader, thewriter-director of "The Walker" and many other splendid films, Iheard his voice coming through so loudly and clearly that it struckme the conventional form of an interview ("He paused," "he said,"etc.) would only obscure his style. In London, the newspaperssometimes string together quotes and present them as if the subjecthas written them for publication. I thought I would try somethinglike that.
All you need to know going in is that Schrader's film stars WoodyHarrelson as a gay escort of society women in Washington, D.C. Oneof his friends, a senator's wife, finds the dead body of her lover.(My review appears Friday.)
On the origins of "The Walker":
This film started with my "American Gigolo." I was wondering whatthat character would be like in middle age, and I realized he wouldbe funny; that his skills would be social. He'd be like a societywalker, and that struck me as an interesting occupational metaphor.
All of my man-in-a-room films are occupational service metaphors:a taxi driver, a drug dealer, a gigolo, now a society walker. It fitrather neatly into a kind of age 20, 30, 40, 50 progression. If in"Light Sleeper," I took him out of the front seat and put him in theback seat, in "The Walker," I took him out of the closet and put himin Washington, D.C. In my mind, those three films are linked.
It's a character piece, and one of the reasons that I had troublegetting it financed was that everyone wanted me to hype up theWashington thriller aspect. But that's such a set genre, theWashington thriller, that I figured if I went into that, I wouldn'thave a character piece anymore. Movies are about things that happenand people who do things, and this guy's mantra is, "I'm not naive,I'm superficial." So he's not the stuff of which movies arefinanced. I knew I needed to have some plot because otherwise peoplewould tire of these ladies talking. So I created a kind of a plotbut I tried to keep it far enough in the background. It's similar to"Taxi Driver" or "Gigolo" or "Light Sleeper" in that way; they allhave a plot but you don't really remember the plot so much as youremember the character.
On casting Woody Harrelson:
[He] arrived as a surprise to me because I when I wrote it I hadsort of financed it with Steve Martin and Julie Christie, and thenthat fell out. Now I was looking for an actor. Woody's agent calledme up and asked, "Have you thought about Woody?" I said no. I mean,nothing Woody's has done would make me think about him for thisrole. Jeremy, his agent, said, "Well, I was talking to him. He wantsto do something really different. Would you like to meet with him?"I said of course I would, because I've been looking for an actor whocould do comedy, and Woody is a good actor, despite his publicpersona of being a kind of a doofus. And so we met, and he wasplugged into it and off we went.
There was some trepidation; there was a point in pre-productionwhere I felt I might be jumping into an empty pool, but he finallygot into it and took off.
On working with Lauren Bacall:
Betty is a tough old bird. She has a reputation, which she hasearned, as being a tough lady. My initial response to her was toplay her game. She wants a lot of praise, and after a number ofdays, I realized that there was no praise that was enough, and shewanted to be praised in the presence of other actors so that you gotstuck if you had to tell her how great her last take was and therewould be Kristin Scott Thomas sitting there, Woody there. And nomatter what you said to her, it wasn't quite enough. So I decidedafter about a week to just be real professional, basically: "Good,very good, Lauren, thank you, let's move on," and not get into theeffusive flattery.
She didn't like that and Kristin told me that I was the maincourse for dinner on a number of evenings as Lauren launched intome. But I think her work started getting better when it wasn't allthis courtship and flattery. It's interesting about Lauren, becauseshe's just 83 now. She is the same age as Sidney Lumet, younger thanArthur Penn, yet you think of her as being older because she wasfamous so young. She was 19 when she was married to Bogart, so youthink of her as somehow an actor from the 1940s, which she was, youknow, in a way.
On the essence of character:
The Woody character genuinely sympathizes with the women. It'snot a job. These guys who do this, for the most part, don't do itfor money. They may get gifts. They love girl-talk. It's a veryancient profession. I'm sure Versailles was full of them. And thekinds of things that would make a heterosexual man wither in agony,endless talk about fabrics and who's done what, is endlesslyentertaining. What makes Carter interesting is he's using it as aprotection against the legacy of his father and grandfather. Hecan't compete with them, except as a black sheep, so he can becomethe guy that's whispered about. That's why he's still in Washington,D.C., and that's what makes the character interesting, because heshouldn't be [there] anymore. The essence of character iscontradiction. Why is he still in Washington? Why is he both in andout of the closet? Then you start to have an interesting character.
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