P: Paul Schrader （编剧）
R: Richard Thompson （对谈者）
P: Staying in Winston-Salem, I got a letter from my brother with an idea for a film which turned out to be yakuza. I called Mike Hamilburg with it, and he said, "It's a great idea, I'll pay you boys to come back to L.A. and write it." So my brother Leonard and I stayed in a little apartment in Venice. We wrote the script in about a month, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and by the next February, we had sold it for $300,000.
R: For YAKUZA, the first script you sold, you ?were paid $300,000. How did you make such a deal?
P: Michael Hamilburg financed the script, and he got a part of the pie. He saw that YAKUZA was going to be a hot item: the intensity with which people became interested was clear. He knew he was incapable of handling a high-level auction, so he went to Robin French, who at that time was regarded as the best auctioneer in town. He auctioned and sold the script. After that, I stayed with Robin and Michael made a settlement for my contract.
R: What was it about the yakuza project that made it so clearly a high-potmtial project?
P: It's hard to see now, looking back at a film which completely flopped, but it was a very commercial idea. It had a lot of commercial hooks plus a strong love story, rich characters, and an "in" theme. It seemed to have all the elements for a rich, commercial action romance. People still consider it a commercial script today. I have a friend who thinks it should be remade already.
R: Was it a disaster, or did it break even?
P: It was disastrous. It cost five million and brought back maybe a million and a half.
R: Why did it cost so much ? Mitchum?
P: No. Sydney Pollack does not make inexpensive films. Also, movies cost a lot; the picture was all shot on location in Japan, ten or twelve weeks. Movies are very, very expensive. The million-dollar film does not exist anymore; one-and-ahalf to two million dollars is now the standard low-budget film in the studio system. And that's talking about a film with a thirty-day schedule, which is really hauling; and you know no big director will ever make a thirty-day-schedule film. YAKUZA was made in sixty days. So it just cost a lot of money.
R: What did your brother Leonard bring to you when he suggested the script?
P: What he had was the fingers. He had been seeing yakuza films in Japan. What had impressed him first was the presence of Takakura Ken, which is unlike any he'd ever seen; then came the rituals: tattoos, fingeren tri ng, the jinjis, or introductions. He said it would be an interesting premise to find a man who was there in the occupation and had to come back, get involved in the yakuza world, and make that ultimate sacrifice that is so foreign to a westerner. That is the premise we started out on, trying to create a plot that would result in that situation.
R: Had you already beai seeing yakuza films at the time?
P: No, I came back to Los Angeles from visiting Leonard in Japan and found that the Linda Lea showed Toei films. Before we started writing, we sat there for two months watching films - the Linda Lea changed its double bills three times a week. By the time I started writing, I was thinking like a Toei screenwriter.
R: You drew on the scheme of repeating conventions in the yakuza gen re which you described in your article in Film Comment [JanuaryFebruary 1974, p. 8].
P: Yes, it was almost a program script in those terms, using all the genre elements. There was an interesting kinky quality to the American hero that was lost on the screen. Maybe I exaggerate it in my memory, but he seemed more interesting than he finally appeared on the screen.
R: A little more contradictory?
P: Yes, the edges were rougher, the Mitchum character was tougher. At one point in the script, it's asked how he made his money. Someone explains that a couple of years ago Harry [the Mitchum character] was on a kidnapping case and was offered a couple hundred thousand dollars to forget something, and he forgot it. That was the character, a man who had a great deal of guilt for the way he had lived.
R: Provides a nice index of his price, too.
P: I think that in order to get to the point where you are able to make the sort of self-destructive sacrifice that Harry makes at the end of the film - a suicidal metaphor which is also the TAXI DRIVER metaphor - you have to have some rough edges, some problems that you feel the need of absolving. If anything, what I'm concerned about in films and in real life is redemption, because I do believe in purging and a kind of transcendence, either through contemplation or action. In taxi driver and YAKUZA, it's a redemption through action, self-destructive action. In the films I wrote about in the BressonDreyer-Ozu book, it was through ritual purification - more conventional church rituals.
R: What was the controversy with Robert Tourne over saeen aedit?
He rewrote YAKUZA. I took it to arbitration and tried to get his name taken off, and they decided that he had done enough work to deserve a credit. He probably won the case legitimately, although I argued against him. My reason for arguing against it was that it was my first screen credit, and I didn't want to share it.
R: Is there material in the finished film that Towne put in?
P: Towne wrote for Sydney Pollack; he wrote what Sydney wanted. That's the reason I was fired, because I was unable to write what Sydney wanted. Sydney and I did not get along well, and he needed someone of his own age, whose work he respected, for feedback.
R: Wliat was Sydney asking you for that you didn't want to give?
P: The softening. The softening of the Harry Kilmer character.
R: Were you pleased with Mitchum?
P: I was very pleased with Mitchum, though casting him probably hurt us at the box office. Redford wanted to do it for a time, but to his credit, finally decided he was too young. Looking back at it, if he had played Harry, too young or not, we probably would have made money.
R: Do you find other things wrong with YAKUZA?
P: Pollack directed against the grain of the script. I wrote a violent, underworld film about blood, duty, and obligation. He made a sort of rich, romantic, transcultural film. Either of those films would be interesting if fully realized, but the final product fell between those two stools; neither film was made. It didn't satisfy the audience that came to see the hard gangster world, and it didn't satisfy the JEREMIAH JOHNSON audience - Sydney's audience - which came to see some poetic realism.
The thing I regret most from the failure of yakuza is the loss of Takakura Ken. I am a great worshiper of Takakura Ken, and I know he is a star. If the film had been successful, he could have been an international star. We could use another star, someone like him, with incredible magnetism. But the film failed, and he'll never be anything but a Japanese star.
来源： SCREEN WRITER TAXI DRIVER's Paul Schrader
Film Comment, Mar/Apr 1976
