Canyons’ director says film overcame Lohan horrorshow
TORONTO — For a long time, it looked like director Paul Schrader was digging himself into a deep, deep ditch while making The Canyons.
After all, a widely read, schadenfreude-thick New York Times story earlier this year portrayed a troubled film production held hostage by the persistently erratic behaviour of star Lindsay Lohan. The film seemed to feature every necessary element of a roadside disaster ripe for rubbernecking: a squabbling production team headlined by discontent screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis; a practically mutinous, oft-unpaid crew; and a 67-year-old director hanging by a thread as robust as dental floss.
It’s thus surprising when, reached seven months after that piece was published, Schrader seems so positive about his supposed bomb-to-be. The boundary-testing screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of American Gigolo says the momentum has shifted in favour of his micro-budget erotic thriller. The Canyons has struck a distribution deal with IFC Films, found entry into the upcoming Venice International Film Festival and merited a splashy première at New York’s Lincoln Theater.
As far as Schrader is concerned, everything is going according to plan.
“The first storyline is Bret and Paul make the movie. The second is the Lindsay Lohan horror show. And the third story behind the film is: ‘Hey, it’s pretty good after all,’ ” the twotime Golden Globe nominee said in a recent telephone interview.
If that really is the unlikely ending to this convoluted tale, it will validate a series of Schrader’s decisions that he’s joked had others in Hollywood questioning his sanity.
The journey began when Ellis and Schrader became frustrated after funding for two previous projects disappeared. Schrader subsequently suggested that they — along with producer Braxton Pope — fund The Canyons themselves, telling Ellis: “What you do — which is beautiful people doing bad things in nice rooms — is not that expensive.”
Each of the three creatives behind the movie contributed $30,000 of their own money, and they funded the rest of the film’s $250,000-plus budget via the crowd-sourcing website Kickstarter after auctioning off prizes including a personal lunch with Schrader ($4,999) and a money-clip given to the writer-director by Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver ($10,000).
The Canyons is a pitchblack, sexually graphic film about a love triangle between three lost Los Angeles souls. James Deen, a porn star with no dramatic acting experience, portrays Christian, a deadeyed trust-fund kid producing a horror film out of aimless boredom (he was cast after interacting with Ellis via Twitter over Schrader’s objections, which proved short-lived).
His girlfriend Tara is portrayed by Lohan (who demanded star billing after being initially approached for a supporting turn), while Vancouver’s Nolan Gerard Funk plays Ryan, an actor whose past relationship with Tara and still-simmering passion for her sends the trio down a path of deceit and violence.
As documented in the Times piece, the involvement of Lohan — the notoriously troubled actress whose 90-day sentence in a lockdown rehabilitation centre was to end this week — brought the film an endless series of complications. Fired and re-hired by Schrader before filming even began, Lohan was reportedly frequently absent from set, clashed with Schrader and her costars while trying to assert influence over the movie’s content and occasionally arrived unfit for filming.
It was even reported that persuading Lohan to shoot the film’s climactic fourway sex scene required Schrader to strip naked himself, a charge the film veteran didn’t deny.
“It all happened very fast,” he said, a note of amusement in his voice. “We were already shooting before the crew really realized that I had done this, to call her bluff. So it wasn’t quite as dramatic as the Times made it sound.”
He has other misgivings about that much-discussed article, arguing that tumult on a film set is “standard operating procedure.”
“It’s crisis and ad hoc decisions and melodrama and arguments — that’s part of the fun of making a movie. … A lot of great films have a lot of production troubles and a lot of films that really worked smoothly were awful.
The Canyons opens theatrically Friday in Toronto and will be available elsewhere via video-ondemand.