Friday, November 20, 2009 East Central Illinois

11th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival 2009

Biopic rooted in writer-director's notion of suicidal glory

By: Melissa Merli
Sunday, April 27, 2008

CHAMPAIGN – Like many young men, Paul Schrader once was enamored of the notion of suicidal glory.

"As a young man, I totally bought into it," the director and screenwriter said early Saturday morning at Roger Ebert's Film Festival after his biopic, "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters," was screened.

That along with other factors led Schrader, who grew up in a Christian fundamentalist family in Grand Rapids, Mich., to make a film about the celebrated Japanese author Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in 1970.

Schrader said he had first considered making a biopic about country singer Hank Williams. The job of getting the rights to Williams' music was never completed, though.

Anyway, Schrader said, Williams is "another semi-literate American guy like Travis Bickle."

Bickle is the deranged protagonist of "Taxi Driver," the Martin Scorsese film for which Schrader wrote the screenplay.

So Schrader figured he would go to the "other end of the bookshelf" to find an author he could make a film about, someone who, like himself as a young man, was caught up in the idea of suicidal glory.

He settled on Mishima, a "fanatic traditionalist who exalted the medieval code of the samurai," Ebert wrote in his review of the 1985 release. Schrader also had a connection to Japan: His brother, Leonard, had gone there during the Vietnam War to avoid the draft.

Leonard Schrader, who died in 2006, collaborated with his brother on the screenplay, and Leonard Schrader's Japanese wife, Chieko, co-wrote the Japanese dialogue.

Mishima, who opposed the post-war Allied constitution imposed on Japan, created a private army. With four of his cadets, he drove to the regimental headquarters of the Japanese army in 1970 and held a general as hostage.

The author demanded to be allowed to address the troops and then committed ritual suicide by disemboweling himself while having one of his cadets behead him at the same time.

Ebert, who is absent from his film festival due to health problems, has described "Mishima" as the most unconventional biopic he has ever seen. The highly stylized film shows Mishima's formative years in black and white, scenes from three of his novels in brilliant colors in theatrical sets, and his later years in realistic hues.

Schrader said he added the tableau scenes from Mishima's books because he doesn't like biopics of authors that portray just biographical material. "If you have to tell a story about an author, tell his stories," he said. "I was dealing with a man who was not schizophrenic but compartmentalized."

Mishima, a bisexual, was involved in body-building, a homo-erotic crowd and his family, among other things. He kept those areas of his life separate, with the people in each not knowing one another. The film sets reflect that.

Schrader asked Eiko Ishioka, then a graphic designer and now an award-winning costume designer, to design the sets. She appeared onstage at Ebertfest with Schrader and film scholar David Bordwell after the screening, and was to appear again early this morning after the sci-fi film, "The Cell," was shown.

"At that time, I was not a visual-set designer," she said. "I was then a graphic designer and directed advertising campaigns and TV commercials. I never studied film or set design ... I was like a blind horse running in Paul's direction."

She called "Mishima" a "really complicated intellectual film." Yet her main influence for its design, she said, was "Japanese bad-taste culture based on American bad-taste culture," particularly for the tableaus from Mishima's novels, which mirror his own life.

For those, Ishioka came up with modular rooms, some of which were shot from above.

Bordwell said "Mishima" probably couldn't be made today – it grossed only about $500,000 in the U.S. box office but cost $10 million to make. New Criterion, though, will release a DVD edition in June, Schrader said. He said his film was never shown theatrically in Japan because Japanese society is consensual and could not agree on the controversial Mishima.

Schrader, though, disagreed with Bordwell on the viability of making a movie like "Mishima" today. He said it would only require the director to find enough financial backers.

"All you need is fools with money," he quipped.

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