Schrader returns to the night

The Walker attracted a stellar cast despite its small budget

Writer-director Paul Schrader has revisited his ongoing interest in night workers - which began with iconic film Taxi Driver - in his latest film The Walker.

The Walker, which stars Woody Harrelson in the title role, centres on a homosexual man who escorts the wives of Washington's most powerful men - but who ends up being implicated in a murder.

It is the latest of Schrader's scripts centring on people whose jobs begin as most people are going to bed.

The first, Taxi Driver - directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert de Niro - is generally regarded as one of the greatest films made. Others in the sequence include American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and Bringing Out the Dead.

"I guess I'm drawn to a certain kind of character, more than anything else, more than plot, and more than theme," Schrader told BBC World Service's On Screen programme.

"The essence of character is contradiction: 'I loved her so much I hit her', and 'I loved her even more, so I hit her again'. So when you find a character who lives a contradiction, you have something really interesting to work with."

Lazy writing'

Harrelson plays Carter Page, the titular Walker, whose job is to escort the wives of congressional politicians to operas and social events when their husbands are unable to attend.

However, his life goes into turmoil after one of the women, Lynn, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, finds her husband stabbed to death.

WRITTEN BY SCHRADER Taxi Driver (1976) Rolling Thunder (1976) Blue Collar (1978) American Gigolo (1980) Raging Bull (1980) The Mosquito Coast (1986) The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) Affliction (1997) Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

Renowned actresses Lauren Bacall and Lily Tomlin also appear in the film.

But despite the talented cast, and the fact that two of Robert de Niro's most famous roles are in Schrader-scripted films - Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, - Schrader said that he never writes with a specific actor in mind for a part, fearing it creates "lazy writing."

"You start to see whomever - Al Pacino or Johnny Depp - in your mind, and you say 'oh, that's going to be great', and then of course the film, if it gets made, gets made with someone else," he said.

"It's a very bad way to think. If anything, you have to think about a very mediocre actor. The dialogue really has to sparkle so that even a mediocre actor can make it work."

He had not actually considered Harrelson for the title role in The Walker, considering it to be a character not typical of the actor.

But he said that following a call from Harrelson's agent, whose client was looking to do "something different", he became intrigued by the idea.

Owning the role

However, Schrader said he was worried at first about Harrelson's ability to get into the character, as he had gone into production immediately after finishing performing a Tennessee Williams play in London's West End.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them Paul Schrader

"I remember saying to someone 'I'm worried we may be jumping into an empty pool here', because he really was not sunk up with the character when we first started," Schrader said.

"Sometime in the middle of the second week, it locked in, and he started becoming Carter Page.

"It's a very mysterious process. You can talk to an actor till you're blue in the face, but at a certain point, the actor starts to own it and it becomes his."

Schrader explained that because the films he writes and directs tend not to have very large budgets - The Walker is estimated to have cost just $6m (£2.9m) - he has to write better characters to attract acting talent.

"If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them," he said.

"If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialogue, actors are drawn to that... You have to have a role where an actor says 'OK, I'm not going to get as much money as I want, I'm going to have to work on a shorter shooting schedule than I'd like, but the role's really interesting, so let's do it'."