New York born Eric Schaeffer Actor, Director Producer of the award winning film, After Fall, Winter, opens at the Quad Cinema on 13th street in NYC.
Set in Paris After, Fall Winter is the second in a quartet of movies spanning over 30 years, said Eric Schaeffer about one man’s journey and his relationship to love in his life.
“I made the first installment, which was called Fall, in 1997, about a writer who picks up a model in his cab in New York, and Paris played into that film. It was such a beloved film over the years that about a year or two ago, I decided that it would be very interesting to make four of them, Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, about the same character. No one has ever done that, there have been things that approximate that but no one has ever done a 60-year span of a man’s life, that wasn’t a documentary. I decided to make the second in the quartet and went to Paris to shoot it. Last year I spent 6 months in Paris writing, producing and shooting the film. It’s a very, very dark Romeo and Juliet love story with a BDSM backdrop, about the same writer from New York who is down on his luck. His Parisian friend invites him to Paris for the winter, to get a new perspective, and he meets this very crazy, beautiful, French hospice worker with a secret: she is a dominatrix. He doesn’t tell her that he has some interest in BDSM. So they have this big secret, that’s sort of the same. So that’s sort of the movie, without giving anything away.
So why Paris? This is an interview for the French Culture Guide. What was so intriguing to you to shoot there?
I always wanted to make a film out of New York. New York is my home. I love New York. All my movies are like love letters to New York and New York is like a character in all of them. But I also love other places. Paris had an aspect of Fall, the first film. I’d shot two days in Paris in 1997, and I thought it made sense to the evolution of the story that this take place in Paris. And I love Paris. It also made sense for the quartet of films and could satisfy my need to shoot elsewhere. It was also a great challenge because I speak no French and know no one in Paris. One of my co-producers, Deborah Twist, got me in touch with some of her friends in Paris, some ex-patriots and some not. Michelle La Rue helped produce it. I had a thumbnail for the movie but really hadn’t filled it in so I was going to go there for five days to soak it all in and go back home to New York and write in October and November, and go back to shoot in December. So I got there and thought, “Wait, why am I going to go home to write a film about Paris?” I had my mother send me my sneakers and more underwear and I ended up staying straight though. It was sublime. I’d never spent five months straight away from the island of Manhattan. I’d been other places, but always with a trip back. It was very interesting living in a different culture.
So it took you five months to make the film?
I wrote it in October and November, pre-produced December, and shot it in January. It was three, six-day weeks.
So you are the lead character in all the films?
This is the secnd in an intended quartet. The intention is every fifteen years to make another installment. In my sixties the next one. In my late seventies I would make the last one of these four. I’ve made six movies in between these films, so hopefully I’ll make other stories. At least in the first two it’s me playing the lead character. I guess if I died in this one, the next one will have to be a prequel, like The Godfather series. Although I could age down a bit I don’t know if I could play myself, at this point, in my twenties and be believable. So I would either have to have someone play me, or if I die in this one and the next one is some kind of an ethereal, otherworldly film.
How was the first movie received?
Fall came out in 1997 and it played in five cities in America. Back in that time there was a very big foreign market for small, independent films with nobody in them. Amanda de Cadenet, was the star with me in that story. I sold it to a German company and it came out on DVD all over Europe. My movies are very polarizing, people seem to deeply love them, or deeply not love them at all. Many, many people loved Fall – it was an extremely romantic, poetic film. Over the years people have continued to write me from all ends of the Earth. I don’t know where they get the copies – Kazatan, Eastern block countries, on the black market. I get emails about how the movie changed their lives, got them into a different career because they were impassioned by the film, or used the poetry in the film to woo their wives. Life-changing commentary, which is very moving to me, and it’s happened over generations. I’ll get emails from eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who didn’t see the film then, because they were three. So that say’s to me that it is being passed down.
Where can I see it?
You can see it on Netflix, Showtime, and all over the Internet.
Does one have to see Fall before seeing After Fall, Winter?
No, it’s a stand alone film. Fall plays into it, but it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen the first. In Fall, After Winter, he is a writer, he talks about writing a book called Fall. The reception of Fall has been so strong over so many years, I though it would be interesting to check in on this guy years later. And the end of Fall is a bit cryptic, you don’t know what happens with him and his lover, and people write me, “What happened in the end?”
How did you start writing? What do you prefer to do?
I write, direct, act and produce. All feel very organic to me. I don’t have an interest in acting classically, morphing myself into other characters, like Sean Penn. Those people are brilliant at that. I’d rather play characters loosely or closely based on myself, loosely or closely based on my life.
Do you always act in all your films?
There was only one of my movies that I didn’t act in. Never Again, which Jill Clayberg and Jeffery Tambour starred in in 2002. It was about characters in their fifties and sixties. A passionate love story. I had fun. I thought “why not?” Although, I’m pretty good at it. On most of the days which I’m shooting, I’m also acting. I’m happy when it’s over. Acting is very nerve-wracking to do.
Does anyone every direct with you?
Two of my films, My Life in Turnaround and They’re Out of the Business, which came out on IFC last April, I made them with Donny Ward, a dear friend. We made our first film together, we co-wrote, acted, directed and starred. Then we had a TV show together on Fox in 1995, then we went off and did projects on our own. The year of the sequel, maybe it’s because I’m turning a certain age and closing out the first part of my life. We always thought it would be fun to see what happened to the two characters from the first movie: a knucklehead bartender and a cab driver get together and make a movie. That movie started my whole career. The sequel is what happens with the boys twenty years later, after having a ten year falling out. A lot of Turnaround fans were very happy we did that. I drove a cab for eight years in New York City. I would drive for forty hours a week from Friday to Sunday, and write forty hours from Monday to Friday. It was in the eighties when spec scripts were what was happening. I banged out twenty scripts, a book, and a couple of plays, all while driving the cab, but couldn’t get arrested. I finally got a meeting, with Molly Ringwald, and ended up writing If Lucy Fell, for her. Molly ended up not doing it, but Sarah Jessica Parker did. That got my foot in the door. I directed and starred in that, and that was my second film after My Life in Turnaround, but I went back to driving a cab after that.
Is there anything you’d like to say to the American public coming to see your film?
I think anyone interested in French culture seen both from and American and French perspectives will be really drawn to the film. The film captures Paris and is beautiful. It’s hard to shoot a movie in Paris with out shooting beautiful images. The lead character was a hospice worker taking care of a dying, thirteen-year-old boy. We shot at Hospital de Dieux, one of the most beautiful hospitals in Paris, in the Notre Dame area. Notre Dame was in almost every shot. I shot in other locations, as well in canals in the outskirts of Paris. I’m American I have the American perspective, the lead actress is French she has the French perspective. A part of the film is the interesting, at times combative, at times coalescing, at times abrasive, marriage of those two perspectives. Certainly, it’s a very difficult, challenging film by subject matter, whether its shot in France, New York, Budapest, or Columbus, Ohio. It’s up to one’s own sensibilities whether it jives with them. I’m very pleased with the film. It’s like an Eric Schaeffer film in New York, set in Paris.
After Fall, Winter won “Best Actor” at the Boston Film Festival, and won a total of eleven awards at The Wild Rose Film Festival in Des Moines, Iowa. It will be available January 31, 2012 on VOD, iTunes and Xbox. For more information go to www.mericschaeffer.com.
By Judie Beecher
