Interview

Director is anything except desperate

A candid interview with Barbet Schroeder, director of 'Desperate Measures'

By Scott Foundas
Film Editor

Barbet Schroeder has turned out to be one of the more idiosyncratic filmmakers working today -- almost in spite of himself. After all, the path his career has taken thus far can hardly be called predictable. In fact, when Schroeder started out in moviemaking, he was far more concerned with fostering other talents than developing his own aesthetic skills. So, at the age of only 22, he formed Les Films du Losange, which would eventually produce all of Eric Rohmer's major works as well as the breakthrough films of Jean Eustache and Jacques Rivette -- including the seminal "Cline et Julie Vont en B‰teau."
Now, more than three decades later, the markedly intercontinental Schroeder is as American as apple pie, having tackled as his cinematic subjects the gutter poet Charles Bukowski, the decadent millionaire Claus von Bulow and the urban terror of "Single White Female." Yes, there's little of the dreamy (and often pretentious) European-ness which marked Schroeder's early works -- films like "More" and "La Valle," which featured scores by Pink Floyd, starred the wonderful actress (and Schroeder's wife) Bulle Ogier and captured the general trippiness of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"Desperate Measures," which opens in theaters nationwide this weekend, is Schroeder's sixth full-fledged American production. As I met with him in an office on the Sony Pictures lot just prior to the film's release, he couldn't have seemed more jubilant. As we began our conversation, I asked Schroeder whether or not he missed making films abroad, even though I was already anticipating the answer.
"I have not counted them (my American movies), so I'll trust you," said Schroeder, who was born in Tehran, Iran. "But actually, you could say it's the sixth or the seventh, because my first movie was an American movie -- `More.' It was American money, American producer, American star, and it was speaking American. So, for me, right at the start, I felt more at ease working within the American system than within the subsidized system of Europe. So it's not a surprise; it's just a normal evolution from the very first movie."
The 57-year-old Schroeder is unarguably a very passionate man. After all, he is notorious for once threatening to cut his fingers off in front of then-Cannon studio head Menachem Golan if Golan would not finance Schroeder's film "Barfly" (the picture was eventually made). So it doesn't really matter that "Desperate Measures" isn't very good, since Schroeder is always the star attraction. In addition, his body of work is largely comprised of stories which find their main characters at some heightened end of the emotional spectrum, be it at the peak of an adrenaline rush or in the depths of substance-induced depression -- and that's perhaps the only aspect of his new film that truly rings true.
Schroeder's recent stretch of films, including the "Kiss of Death" remake and the Meryl Streep melodrama "Before and After," has not been particularly distinguished. It is a far cry from the keen and satirical social commentary in "Reversal of Fortune." However, through all these years, his work as an independent producer has never ceased to be adventurous and prolific.
"Yeah, as a producer I'm not doing as well," Schroeder said, "because it takes too much work, and I can't really do it. It's so exhausting to do my own movies -- and it's so much work to do other people's movies -- that I don't have enough organization to do both."
So, does that mean an end to Schroeder's landmark company?
"No. Les Films du Losange are doing very well, because there is an extraordinary (person) running them, and they can go on... well without me."