Film: No rest for the afflicted

Paul Schrader's new film, Affliction, is a hard-hitting tale of violence, isolation, family ties and the dark, hidden depths of the male psyche. He talks to Kevin Jackson

Paul Schrader has never been thought of as the most happy-go-lucky of film-makers. His screenplays include a trio of savage character dramas for Martin Scorsese - Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ; his directorial credits include the likes of The Comfort of Strangers, from Ian McEwan's novel about murderous perversity in Venice, and Mishima, which (to the best of my knowledge) is the only Hollywood production ever to be shot entirely in Japanese, and to take for its hero a bisexual, quasi-fascist writer who cuts his own belly out in the last reel.

Even so, the title of Schrader's latest film is uncompromising to the point of commercial seppuku. It's hard to imagine many lovers scanning though the listings pages and cooing: "Darling, how about going to the cinema next week? They're showing Affliction."

Schrader's production certainly won't be offering much competition to Shakespeare in Love as an ideal date movie, and yet in the US, where it was released last year, Affliction ended up on the Top Ten lists of several critics for Film Comment - laurels were piled especially high on the craggy head of its leading actor, Nick Nolte - and the film has been hailed as a major return to form for one of America's most gifted and intelligent directors.

All this thoughtful acclaim has been an unexpectedly happy ending to a pre-production history so protracted and frustrating that the project seemed to be starting to live up to its name. "After four or five years, I had pretty much given up on ever getting it made," Schrader confesses. But, thanks partly to the commitment of Nick Nolte, who was anxious to act in a really big, red-corpuscled role again, after wasting too much of his time in high-budget fluff, and partly to the sheer tenacity of Schrader's regular producer, Linda Riesman, a deal was made: "I was off directing Touch (an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel about a faith- healer) when the word came through that Affliction was finally going to happen."

Affliction is closely based on a novel by Russell Banks. Schrader simply "picked the novel up in a bookshop. It just grabbed me, I optioned it myself, wrote a screenplay and took it straight to Nick."

One of the qualities that made the novel so irresistible for Schrader was its reflective treatment of a subject that has preoccupied him in some of his earlier films: "The whole issue of male violence, those anachronistic genes, where we have all this stuff in our DNA that we don't know what to do with any more - that need to go out and kill, and eat what we've killed."

While shooting the film, Schrader handed out dozens of copies of a recent study of primate aggression, entitled Demonic Males. "One of the guys on the crew had baseball caps made up for everyone that said, `Affliction: Demonic Males on Tour'."

Russell Banks came along for a good part of the shoot to see how Schrader was putting this novel into images, and liked what he saw. "Russell says that it's the most autobiographical of his books, though he doesn't really say whether its about him and his father, or about his father and his grandfather." And Schrader had several discussions with him about the book's less easily summarised themes. "As I got deeper into it, I became more fascinated by these ideas about the burden of memory, the elusiveness of memory, and the compulsiveness of the storyteller.

"Then there's the complexity of the narrative - it pretends to be about one thing, about a murder, when it's really not about that at all... and underneath it there is a hidden main character who is slowly revealed to you."

That "hidden main character", played in the film by Willem Dafoe, is an ostentatiously gentle professor of history who comes back to the small, snowbound New England town where his older brother, Wade (Nolte), the local cop, is enduring a mid-life crisis of catastrophic dimensions. He's divorced, estranged from his little daughter and humiliated by all the locals, and he thinks he's stumbled across a conspiracy to murder. He's also tortured by a rotten tooth which, in the film's most wince-inducing moment, he wrenches out of his jaw with a pair of old pliers.

More than enough woe for any son of Adam; but Wade's real misery is shown to have begun years before, in the beatings he took from his father - a sneering, shambling, alcoholic thug, played with appalling authenticity by James Coburn, who's not been on screen very often in recent years. (He's had afflictions of his own: arthritis in his hands and legs.)

Schrader called Coburn in to play the father because: "Nick and James are only 15 years apart, but they do represent two generations of Hollywood males. Coburn is of that Fifties generation, where men were men and women were babes - he's someone who isn't into sensitivity training. Nick is of that Sixties generation where men are partners, and think what do I do with this woman?"

"At one level," Schrader elucidates, "you're watching the disintegration of a man, and his problems with male violence and his father. At another level, you're watching a movie about the younger brother who observes this situation, has withdrawn from the conflict and, in fact, secretly envies his older brother for being on the front lines. The thematic exchange in the piece is that the younger one says, `at least I wasn't afflicted by that man's violence', and his brother says, `that's what you think'. Just because he's gone to Boston and become a professor doesn't mean he's escaped."

Fatalism of this order makes Affliction seem at times like a spiritual cousin of the less cheerful aspects of Scandinavian drama - an association made all the more plausible by the film's unremittingly bleak winter landscapes. Since Schrader himself grew up in a Midwestern counterpart of this landscape, it's also tempting to see the film as a kind of return to his childhood. He's tentative: "I was raised in that environment, I know those people. And there are some connections - I have an older brother, a strong father... But I always saw it as Russell's story, not my story. I knew that if I was as faithful to it as I could be, I would be in there somewhere."

Since completing Affliction a couple of years ago - for a while, he feared that it was going to take as long to find a distributor as it did to find a backer - Schrader has been, as usual, busy. Courting couples who think they might give Affliction a miss may be surprised to hear that his next film as director is an old-fashioned love story (very old-fashioned: it's inspired by Dante and Beatrice), with the appropriately seductive title, Forever Mine. Those who admire the fiercer strains of his work will be delighted to hear that, after an artistic divorce of a decade and a half, he's been reconciled with Martin Scorsese, and has written the screenplay for Scorsese's new film about paramedics in New York. And this one has a great title, too: Bringing Out the Dead.

`Affliction' opens on 19 February