Barbet Schroeder Can’t Be Killed

Even though his retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek alludes to his “mad obsessions,” Barbet Schroeder seems entirely measured and sensible. The affable and erudite Iranian filmmaker acts more like a wily anthropologist, irresistibly drawn into the unruly thicket of human nature, eyes wide open, unsure of exactly what he will find.“I take reasonable risks,” the 67-year-old Mr. Schroeder said. “I know it looks crazy.”Film history marks him as a key player in the French New Wave. Mr. Schroeder graduated in his early 20s from a stint at Cahiers du Cinéma to produce essential works such as Eric Rohmer’s cycle of “Six Moral Tales” and, later, Jacques Rivette’s “Céline and Julie Go Boating” (in which he makes an amusingly cryptic cameo). But as a director, Mr. Schroeder often has been drawn to extremes. He’s made documentaries on despots (“General Idi Amin Dada”), the French lawyer who championed Carlos the Jackal (“Terror’s Advocate”), and a scientist’s symbiotic relationship with the ape she’s teaching to communicate (“Koko, a Talking Gorilla”).At the same time, Mr. Schroeder’s fictive films have led him into some sketchy, or at least provocative, circles, including the drug gangs of Colombia (“Our Lady of the Assassins”), the S&M underworlds of Paris (“Maîtresse”) and Kyoto (the new “Inju, the Beast in the Shadow”), and yet more gangs in Venice Beach, Calif., where he lived during the making of his “Barfly,” based on onetime documentary subject Charles Bukowski’s booze-drenched autobiographical writings.“When I did ‘Idi Amin Dada,’ the danger was not that Amin Dada would kill me,” the director said. “The danger was that someone would try to kill Amin Dada and I was filming him at the moment.”Mr. Schroeder was sitting on a barstool one recent afternoon at Petrossian, sipping a glass of red wine. Tall and lean, he favored khaki pants, running shoes, and an orange baseball cap, with a cell phone clipped to his belt loop. He might as easily have emerged from an editing bay as from his nearby apartment.“In [Amin’s] eyes, I was somebody in his service trying to do a …” — Mr. Schroeder grasped for the correct American idiom — “… puff piece. And then ‘Our Lady of the Assassins,’ I had bodyguards for me. I had bodyguards for the equipment, so it was less dangerous than it looked.”He chuckled. When asked about his Venice Beach experiences, which were thinly fictionalized in Bukowski’s novel “Hollywood,” Mr. Schroeder said he had run out of money while chasing down funds to shoot “Barfly” (Mickey Rourke’s first “comeback” role) and took a cheap apartment on a dangerous block run by a gang called the V-13s.“They were vicious,” he said. “I would always try to say hello to them in Spanish, to no avail. They would stare at me and bang their iron bars.”The two years he spent shooting “Terror’s Advocate,” a profile of the French lawyer Jacques Vergès — who had hoped to represent Saddam Hussein after his capture — were full of a different kind of intrigue.“It’s not [about a] somebody,” he said. “It’s the history of terrorism, the blind terrorism that started in 1957 in Algiers and then became something unbelievable that became part of our daily life. It’s a very perverse movie talking about a perverse man. It gets you to approve the bombs of Algiers and the liberation of Algeria [from French colonial rule] and all this, very moving, I can understand the justification for this. But the minute you have approved that, you are pushed into worse and worse situations, from the Palestinians to Carlos. So you realize it is very dangerous to approve anything in the first place. There is no real difference between that and the [twin] towers. There is a logical thread.”Getting the consent of the controversial Mr. Vergès, who once vanished from sight for eight years, was easier than it might seem. But, Mr. Schroeder said, “It was a million times harder for me intellectually to capture him. Let’s say that vanity was the weak spot. I have an advantage over a journalist. I don’t have to be balanced and objective. I can claim that I am at their service completely.”The widely talented Mr. Schroeder also mentioned his efforts to produce a film for Rainer Werner Fassbinder during “the height of his LSD craze,” his enthusiasm for Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” and his admiration for Mr. Rourke’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming “The Wrestler.” The director said he hasn’t spoken to Mr. Rourke since the actor reneged on a movie they were to make after the success of “Barfly.”But Mr. Schroeder kept circling back to a certain element of his films: their newsiness. And a new obsession.“I’m addicted to reading the papers and getting stories and juicy, real-life details,” he said. “And of course Sarah Palin is a perfect example of something totally addictive. We have two options now in front of us. Very rarely in history do you have such an extreme situation.” Mr. Schroeder sipped his wine, amused even by what he considered a looming catastrophe. “This is two options that are totally possible. I read something today: Trying to predict the results of this thing is like trying to predict the weather on Tuesday three years from now.”Through October 21 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).

Barbet Schroeder Can’t Be Killed

Barbet Schroeder Can’t Be Killed

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