ScreenLit report: Masterful Schrader gets lifetime achievement award

"EAST meets East" they called it - as in East Midlands meets the East Side of New York City. Whatever else, it was certainly a case of worlds colliding when Paul Schrader met Shane Meadows.

Schrader - one of those 70s movie titans who rubs shoulders with the likes of Coppola and Lucas and can call Scorsese and DeNiro "Marty" and "Bobby" to their faces - is a former enfant terrible-turned-legendary veteran. Meadows, who admits he would probably never have made a film without the example of Schrader and his collaborators, is a British movie phenomenon, the star ace up the Broadway's sleeve, whose Nottingham roots still shine through.

As such, Meadows was a natural choice to present Schrader with the first ScreenLit Lifetime Achievement In Scriptwriting Award. Schrader, dapper in suit and tie, seemed to enjoy crossing wits with the slightly more casually dressed Meadows, who immediately embarked on a cock-and-bull story about shoplifting video tape from Boots ("along with a breast pump and some sandwiches") to kick-start his film career.

More seriously, he called Schrader "an inspiration" and added: "If it had not been for Taxi Driver, I would never have made a film of mine called Dead Man's Shoes. I have been enormously touched by his work as writer and director - I admire his work in both fields."

After he presented Schrader with the award - an impressive piece of glassware by Nottingham designer Stuart Akroyd - the two stood there mugging for photographers, Schrader booming: "Sell the goods, sell the goods!" It was a scream.

Not many laughs, though, in Mishima: A Life In four Chapters, Schrader's extraordinary, idiosyncratic and ultra-intellectual 1985 film portrait of the celebrated homosexual and ultra-right wing Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide after taking over a military garrison with members of his own private army in 1970.

Interweaving scenes from Mishima's life, theatrical adaptations of three of his novels and an account of the last day of the author's life, it is an original and supremely intelligent film, setting its deliberately distanced view of its central character amid a series of dazzling visual showpieces set to a sweepingly operatic Philip Glass score. Subtitled, and in Japanese, it was shown in a restored new version replacing the original English narration by Roy Scheider with a Japanese version by leading man Ken Ogata.

Afterwards, Schrader was again hugely entertaining, whether telling of the death threats surrounding the shoot in Japan, the problems getting the finance from both the US and Japanese sides, the delicate negotiations with Mishima's widow, working with Glass on his score and the challenges of directing a film when the vast majority of the cast and crew spoke only Japanese.

It was a tale of massive Hollywood companies supporting the movie as a favour to George Lucas and mystery Japanese backers delivering suitcases crammed with millions of yen and then denying it.

And it was riveting, a glimpse of the machinery of top-level movie-making directly from the horse's mouth. Schrader, who knew going into the project that it was completely uncommercial, with none of the audience-friendly qualities necessary to ensure big box office, came over as utterly committed to his subject and methods.

Describing Mishima as a vastly important literary figure and a man who realised that the cult of celebrity would devour the cult of the artist before anyone else, he said: "He was mad, totally crazy, but he was not a fool. He knew what he was doing. His madness had a point.

"The sad part of our celebrity culture is that you get to be a star because you kill yourself but you don't have to do the work anymore. At least he did the work."

Asked if the film had been received the way he'd wanted it to be, Schrader replied: "It got exactly the reaction I knew it was going to get - the sound of a feather falling into a very deep well."

It was a privilege to be there.

SEAN HEWITT