Development hell

Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel was deemd 'too cerebral' by the studio, who hired Renny Harlin to re-shoot it. But Schrader is satisfied that he made the better film, he tells Michael Dwyer. 

THE fourth Exorcist film was planned as a prequel in which the exorcist, Fr Lankester Merrin, is a young man experiencing a crisis of faith and his first encounter with the devil. John Frankenheimer was to direct it, with Liam Neeson playing Merrin. In the summer of 2002 Frankenheimer fell ill and left the project - he died a month later - and Morgan Creek Productions hired Paul Schrader to direct it. The delay clashed with Neeson's work commitments, and Stellan Skarsgard took over as Merrin.

Morgan Creek viewed Schrader's cut at an advanced stage in post-production and deemed it too cerebral to be released. Even though they spent a reported $40 million (€33.6 million) making it, they hired Renny Harlin to re-shoot it with some cast changes, a revised screenplay with far more emphasis on the horror element, and a similar budget. Harlin's film, Exorcist: The Beginning, opened to negative reviews and negligible business, while Schrader's Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist seemed doomed to oblivion until it was shown and acclaimed at the Brussels Festival of Fantastic Film last March.

"That was important," Schrader said when we talked recently, "because it gave the film the validation that persuaded Warner Bros to release my film. It had a token opening in eight US cities, basically to set up the DVD release. To be honest, a large part of my motivation in getting it finished was that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life explaining what happened to it."

Although Woody Allen once re-cast and re-shot an entire film, September, it is highly unusual for a company to shelve a film and get another director to re-shoot it, not least because it's so expensive. "Nobody does this because it's just so foolish," says Schrader. "If you've made the wrong film for whatever reason, usually you just release it, often with false advertising, and you move on. In this case you had a single individual who, for reasons of his own, decided to start over again." Schrader confirms that he's referring to Morgan Creek founder and chairman James Robinson. "This man has a reputation," Schrader says.

When Harlin's film opened in the US, Schrader watched it with William Peter Blatty, who had written the original novel, The Exorcist, and directed the second sequel, The Exorcist III (1990). "Blatty had his film taken away from him by the same man and a new ending had been put on it, so he had a lot of bad memories," says Schrader. "As we were watching the [ Harlin] film, Blatty was getting more and more agitated, but I was feeling pretty good because I thought the film was really bad. As I walked out at the end, I felt my film had a chance of being resurrected."

Did Robinson believe Dominion was just not scary enough? "It was he who gave me that script," says Schrader. "This was the movie he asked me to make. Maybe he then looked at the marketplace and the horror films that were coming out, and he realised he should have made a different film. Horror is having an innocent tormented while the clock runs, and my film had an afflicted boy healed as he is possessed, so you don't have a horror mechanism."

Schrader admits the experience was humiliating - "It's never good to be fired from a film" - and he was surprised when Caleb Carr, the novelist who scripted the prequel with William Wisher, started bad-mouthing Dominion.

"That was an odd situation because Caleb was at that stage in the employ of Morgan Creek. . . He was talking about things he knew nothing about. He was never on the set. I never met him or even talked on the phone to him about the screenplay."

Coincidentally, Schrader - who had scripted Martin Scorsese's hugely controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) - was shooting Dominion at the Cinecitta studios in Rome when Mel Gibson was making The Passion of the Christ there. "We were talking one day," Schrader says, "and Mel was complaining about some trouble he was getting in the press, and I told him that the moment anyone touches this material, no matter how you touch it, there's going to be a furore. When I mentioned Last Temptation in that context, he looked at me and I remembered that he was one of the people who hates Last Temptation."

Although Schrader scripted Scorsese's great early films, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, they have worked together only once since Last Temptation, on Bringing Out the Dead (1999). "I was even surprised that we did that," Schrader says. "If he called me and there was something he wanted me to do, that would be fine but I'm not expecting that call."

Having gone to direct some remarkable movies in his own right - Blue Collar, American Gigolo, Mishima, Affliction - Schrader will next direct Adam Resurrected, based on a novel about a circus clown who was spared by the Nazis so that he could entertain other Jews as they were brought to their deaths.

However, he fears for the future of cinema. "Movies are going through some kind of transition, and I don't think it's a phase," he says. "Audiences are changing and movies are changing, and so are the ways we absorb audio-visual information, what we want from movies, and the social role of movies. The most vibrant things in film now are the big-budget video-game movies, episodic television drama driven by character and humour, and reality television. The cinema business is not particularly vibrant. Something is going on.

"For example, Sydney Pollack made The Interpreter, by every measure a very good film with major stars and production values, but somehow it felt old because that kind of conventional movie has gone out of fashion. What happened to the world of painting with the advent of Warhol has now started happening to film.

"I don't know how it will all shake out, but I believe cinema attendances are going to keep dropping and probably will drop rather dramatically in four or five years, and cinemas will start closing. What's happening to music stores now will start happening to cinemas. I'm glad to be coming to the end of my career, because I'd hate to be starting out now."

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist is now available on DVD