Paul Schrader introduces Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Introduction
Paul Schrader introduces Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
By Paul Schrader
In January 2020, the director presented a screening at Metrograph of his 1985 film about the renegade Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters screens at Metrograph on Thursday, January 27 and Saturday, January 29.
Looks at watch. I remember when I used to see movies at 10pm. Chuckles. So thank you for coming.
This is a very unique film. I say that not out of boasting but just because it’s true. I don’t think there’s ever been a film like it. It’s a very unlikely film. I’ll just quickly say how it came about, and then you can watch it.
I had written Taxi Driver, which was a film about the pathology of suicidal glory. And I like this theme, I thought I’d write about it again. I wrote a script about Hank Williams, which didn’t get made because of a rights situation. Then my brother who was teaching in Japan, he had been telling me about Mishima. I said, “You know, that’s it. That’s it.” If you want to make another film about the mythology of suicidal glory, this idea that we can merit our own transcendence by our own suffering, that we can become characters in our own uber-fiction, go to the other side of the world. Go to Japan, the other side of the bookcase: a successful man, a literary man, an educated man, a family man, a homosexual man, a wealthy man, a rewarded man, caught in the grips of the same pathology as Travis Bickle but in an entirely different context. Because the pathology is universal, this idea that we can, through our own suffering, merit our transcendence.
"a writer’s life really exists inside his own imagination... how can you tell a writer’s life without telling his stories."
And, obviously, there’s a lot of Christianity in that, all the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam, Christianity are all based on, you know, in the blood and through the blood. But this also exists in the East, too, and Mishima participated it through Bushido, and this concept that he could transform himself.
So that was my entrance into the concept. Once I got involved in all the research, I realised that I had to excerpt the novels in the screenplay, because a writer’s life really exists inside his own imagination, and how can you tell a writer’s life without telling his stories.
So is it a kind of a grid of three levels of reality: the past, his literary work, and his last day. Then they’re cross-sectioned by the four stages of his ideological career. So it’s a puzzle book thing, and it kind of works.
One of the reasons it works is because of Phil Glass. I said to Phil, “Look, I’m making a lot of little boats. And a lot of these boats don’t even look like each other. What I need from you is a river that they can all float in.” And so that was the score, and he created the river, and I created the boats.
I hope you like it.
