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If so many of Paul Schrader's films depict characters tormented by inner anxieties and harshly judged by their peers, then these qualities have uncomfortable echoes with his own efforts to get them made.
He has scripted stories about everyone from Christ to Jake La Motta, from doomed Japanese writer Yukio Mishima to deluded vigilante Travis Bickle, and along the way he has survived the debacle of having his Exorcist prequel taken out of his hands and re-shot by someone else.
So you might expect the 61 year old writer director to be a round shouldered grump, a man trapped in the vice-like grip of existential angst - or at least professional ennui - rather than the dapper, Donnish figure who is presented before the UK press to talk about his new film, The Walker. But he admits that it was a bit sticky there for a while.
"If you're originating a project and it's off kilter you're going to have to scrounge the planet like a scavenger dog looking for the scraps of international funding," he says, "and it takes a while. The Walker was particularly frustrating because I did have it financed on a couple of occasions when it fell through. I ended up doing that whole debacle with The Exorcist prequel, just because I had been offered the film after The Walker fell through.
"I jumped into that project as therapy, it turned out to be therapy of the wrong sort. It was really brutal, there was a real chance that that could be it for me. Then all of a sudden The Walker got financed, and at the same time Adam Resurrected got financed and I had to juggle the two and try to keep Adam, so I lined them right up behind each other."
Where Adam Resurrected is an epic tale set during the Second World War, The Walker is a more intimate drama set against the world of Washington society and the political hypocrisy that attends it.
"There are only two cities in America where sexual hypocrisy is mandated," Schrader adds, "Washington and Salt Lake City - and I didn't want to do it in Salt Lake. So there I was in Washington. The character got much more interesting because he's in a city built on hypocrisy. But then, because of the Iraq War and because of the headlines, the script and therefore the film, started getting more and more political, just because I couldn't ignore it."
The Walker of the title is Carter Page III, a flamboyant gay man played by Woody Harrelson who gossips with the widows and wives of the cream of Washington society. But when a murder is discovered and a friend is implicated, Carter finds old loyalties melt away like so many political promises.
At its heart is a powerful performance from Harrelson, playing a role that Schrader has returned to intermittently during the course of his career, from Taxi Driver, to American Gigolo, to Light Sleeper to this.
"As I've gotten older the character has changed," Schrader explains. "In his 20s he was angry, in his 30s he was a narcissistic gigolo, in his 40s he's an anxious drug dealer and now at 50 he's a superficial walker. That's a kind of progression of a certain character, it may mark the progression of my life, it may mark the progression of society - I don't know - but it is a sort of progression. I think I'm done with it now.
"Of course the original idea came from Gigolo, just wondering what would that character be like at 50, now that his skills would be social and not sexual. He'd probably be out of the closet, stuff like that. That's why there's a reference in the film to Gigolo, because it does sort of come out of that. I put that little dressing montage in at the beginning just to tell the more film savvy viewer that 'yes, you're right if you're thinking this is connected to Gigolo'. And here's the difference, at the end of this scene he takes his hair off."
When Schrader laughs his face crumples and his voice gets wheezy. Having enjoyed the most hectic period of his directorial career these latest 18 months, and endured the sudden, tragic death of his brother Leonard, he has reached a level of professional contentment that might have seemed unimaginable to those who knew the intense, angry young man of the 1970s.
He may have a few unproduced scripts, but he is no longer driven to get them made for the sake of it. "Just because you wrote a script doesn't mean it should get made," he says with a wry smile, "the history of cinema is filled with directors who made scripts that they should have left in the drawer."
Not that is averse to doing a bit of script 'polishing', those anonymous, well remunerated studio jobs that help pay the bills between truly meaningful projects.
"I'm writing a script right now that is so beneath me that I had to get smaller to write it," he chuckles. "But it's a nice change to write strictly on assignment, strictly for money, strictly within a genre, with rules. I come to them with the script and if they don't like it they change it. That's okay."
If this is the sign of serenity granted to accept the things he cannot change it has been hard won, but well deserved.
"What's the alternative?" he asks quizzically. "The alternative is to actually work for a living. This is a nice life, living in your imagination, being able to write and work on this kind of timetable."
ANWAR BRETT
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