Paul Schrader on the 50-Year-Old ‘Obsession’ That Broke Him and Brian De Palma Apart

Fifty years ago this week, director Brian De Palma had his first legitimate mainstream hit with “Obsession.” The thriller stars Cliff Robertson as a real estate developer who becomes fixated on a young woman (Genevieve Bujold) who bears a striking resemblance to his late wife. A riff on Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Vertigo,” the movie teed De Palma up for the even bigger success to come a few months later with “Carrie,” and got strong reviews from critics like Roger Ebert, who already saw the potential for De Palma to become Hitchcock‘s successor as a master of suspense. Ironically, one of the movie’s pans came from De Palma partisan Pauline Kael in one of the few negative reviews she ever gave the director. That Kael disliked “Obsession” probably had less to do with the film‘s actual deficiencies than with the fact that her one-time protégé Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay; for years, Kael seemed to hold a grudge against Schrader for turning his back on criticism, managing to find fault with nearly every movie he would go on to write or direct, including classics like “Raging Bull” and “American Gigolo.” (Even Kael had to admit that the Schrader-scripted “Taxi Driver” was pretty great, though she gave most of the credit to director Martin Scorsese.) When “Obsession” came out, Schrader was just on the cusp of becoming one of the most celebrated screenwriters of his generation. He had only two earlier produced credits, but they were for big movies: the 1974 gangster film “The Yakuza,” which Sydney Pollack directed, and “Taxi Driver,” which was shot after “Obsession” but came out earlier and met with enormous box-office and critical success. Schrader was on a roll, and he knew it — and knew how to take advantage of it. ‘Obsession’Courtesy Everett Collection “ I had written ‘Taxi Driver’ essentially as self-therapy, and then this weird thing happened,” Schrader told IndieWire. “My brother and I wrote ‘The Yakuza’ and sold it for what was then the highest price in Hollywood, $325,000. A bell went off — I knew that I was the hot new kid in town, and if I didn’t grab this moment immediately, in the next year the moment would pass. I started writing as fast as I could.” “Obsession” was written in the same mad rush that yielded “Rolling Thunder,” “Old Boyfriends,” and two of the films Schrader would come to direct, “Blue Collar” and “Hardcore.” The movie grew out of a discussion Schrader had with De Palma after they attended a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” a film that was then difficult to see. “Paramount had kept it under wraps, so this was a special screening at LACMA where a lot of people saw it for the first time in years,” Schrader said. Schrader and De Palma were immediately taken with the movie, and taken with the idea of creating their own variation on its themes. “It’s one of the great movies, so of course you’re obsessed with it,” Schrader said. “You’re obsessed with it the way you’re obsessed with ‘Persona’ and ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘The Wild Bunch.’ On top of which, the idea of remaking someone is so compelling.” Indeed, with “Obsession,” Schrader and De Palma would, in essence, do to “Vertigo” what Scottie (James Stewart) does to Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Hitchcock’s film: recreate the original through their own tastes and sensibilities. Had De Palma been faithful to Schrader’s original script, “Obsession” would have differentiated itself from “Vertigo” more dramatically; Schrader wrote an entire third act that De Palma never shot, softening what Schrader intended to be a portrait of all-consuming obsession. “Brian and I had a falling out over it that was never fully repaired,” Schrader said. “The original script was called ‘Déjà Vu,’ not ‘Obsession,’ and it was a triptych; the events happened in the past, then again in the present, and then happened again in the future. I think the year we picked was 1985.” When there was pressure to cut the budget, De Palma and producer George Litto simply lifted the third section out of the movie, an excision that Schrader felt irreparably damaged the story. “I thought that was the most inspired thing about the script, this idea that it was an obsession so great that it projected itself into the future,” Schrader said. When De Palma altered the structure, Schrader lost interest in the project, though he did take advantage of the fact that the movie was shooting in Florence to visit the set in Italy. “I went up to Florence with Marty [Scorsese], and then we went over to Parma because De Niro was there shooting ‘Novecento’ for Bertolucci. He wanted me to read the voiceover in ‘Taxi Driver’ to him.” When Schrader saw “Obsession” as De Palma made it, his reaction was closer to Kael’s than Ebert’s. “I disagreed with the casting,” Schrader said. “Cliff Robertson was a one-trick pony who happened to have one hit [Sydney Pollack’s ‘Three Days of the Condor’]. Unfortunately for me, he happened to have it the year before. I didn’t have that much antipathy toward Genevieve, although I wasn’t that excited either. Brian really liked John Lithgow; I didn’t care for Lithgow. So a whole series of things made me unexcited about the film, and I’ve never gone back to see it again since.” By the time “Obsession” came out, Schrader had already moved on and was heading toward one of the great directorial debuts of all time with “Blue Collar.” “I wrote ‘Blue Collar’ with my brother because I was already writing another script, and I got the idea for ‘Blue Collar,'” Schrader said. “So I said, ‘I’ll write this script with you while I write the other one by myself.’ I’m not quite sure whether or not I had written ‘Hardcore.’ At the time, I was just stacking the airplanes up over the airport and seeing how many I could land.”