Film Career
His experiences with the Yakuza in Japan led to a collaboration on a story with his brother, Paul Schrader. This resulted in the film The Yakuza (1974), starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Sydney Pollack. Leonard and Paul also co-wrote Blue Collar (1978), a story of defiant auto-workers in Detroit, directed by Paul Schrader starring Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel, and Old Boyfriends (1979), about a woman’s cross-country trek to visit old flames, directed by Joan Tewkesbury and starring John Belushi, Talia Shire, Keith Carradine, John Houseman.
Schrader’s other screenplay credits include such popular Japanese-language films as Tora-san’s Dream of Spring (1979), The Man Who Stole the Sun (Japan’s Best Film of the Year in 1980), and Shonben Rider (1983). In 1982, with wife Chieko Schrader, he co-wrote The Killing of America, a documentary tracing the origins of U.S. violence. During this production, Leonard Schrader collaborated with New York experimental filmmaker, David Weisman.
Schrader’s background in Latin American literature and Weisman’s experience with Brazil led them to develop Kiss of the Spider Woman together. Schrader’s screenplay adaptation, based on the avant-garde novel by Argentinian Manuel Puig, earned him an Academy Award Nomination in 1986. (It also earned William Hurt an Academy Award for Best Actor.)
Schrader met renowned Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima while living in Japan. For a decade after the author’s ritual suicide in 1970, Schrader pursued the rights to Mishima’s life, and working with his wife Chieko and brother Paul, he co-wrote the Japanese-language bio-pic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters executive-produced in 1984 by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and directed by Paul Schrader.
Schrader made his directorial debut with Naked Tango (1991) for which he also wrote the screenplay. Produced in Argentina, with the 1925 period 'look' overseen by Oscar-winning designer Milena Canonero, the independent film starred Vincent D’Onofrio, Mathilda May, Esai Morales, and the late Fernando Rey.
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