Made with Japanese money, it was shelved by its US distributors. “Let’s just say two very powerful people in showbusiness were partners in a company. One loved the film, and paid a lot of money for the American rights. His partner saw it six weeks later, blew up and said, ‘this is exploitation, a terrible film – we’ll just eat the loss and make sure that it never shows in the US’.”Schrader won’t reveal who the partners were (“I may want to work with them again”), but it’s easy enough to understand both their points of view The Killing of America is very, very violent It begins by bombarding us with statistics.

In 1980, when the film was made, there was an attempted murder in the US every three minutes and a murder victim every 20 minutes. “In the 80 years of this century,” the narrator intones, “America had more than a million murders, more than all her fatalities in all her wars.”No sooner has he informed us of this than we’re treated to slow-motion footage of John Hinkley shooting Ronald Reagan. Then follow photographs or newscasts detailing the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, as well as the attempted assassination of George C Wallace. Political violence is intercut with race riots, student protests, suicidal gunmen taking over television stations, and accounts of “the senseless killing of random strangers”. We’re exposed to the madness of Jonestown and of the Manson family. We see Ted Bundy in court and listen as Schrader interviews Ed Kemper, a serial killer who used to take his victims’ severed heads to bed.The violence is hardly gratuitous – it’s the point of the movie “Nothing has been staged If easily shocked, do not view,” we’re told at the outset.

This is an atrocity exhibition which proves, quite apart from anything else, how assiduous television crews and photographers have been in capturing death on camera: Americans may not know how to stop the killing, but they certainly know how to film it.Schrader first had the idea for making the documentary (which he co-wrote with his Japanese-born wife Cheiko) when he noticed an extraordinary discrepancy in the US homicide statistics. Between 1900 and 1963, the murder rate in America had hardly changed at all. “In terms of the population growth, it may even have gone down, but the rate just rackets after the assassination of President Kennedy,” he suggests. He can’t pinpoint exactly why.”Maybe the (social) fabric was ripped or there was a sense that anybody can be killed and the old rules don’t apply any more. There’s a lot of possibilities if you want to speculate, but if you look at the statistics, it’s pretty clear the assassination of Kennedy radically changed murder in America.” Murder became almost a fad, “a new form of self-therapy – Americans using other Americans in life or death situations to work out their problems,” as Schrader puts it. By 1970, there were over 100 million guns in America (that works out at about two for every household).To research the movie, Schrader scoured the country.

He bought footage from television stations and “secret, hermit-like collectors”. There were disappointments – a Ku Klux Klan shoot-out in South Carolina that he couldn’t get rights to and shots of actual murders on film that the television stations wouldn’t sell because the trials had all blown over and the killers hadn’t been convicted. He deleted certain scenes in case he offended victims’ relatives. He, Cheiko and his young editor Lee Percy (who has gone on to cut such films as Boys Don’t Cry and Reversal of Fortune) painstakingly assembled the film.

(“It was like climbing a mountain with your fingernails.”) A friend of his, Sheldon Renan, is credited as director, but Schrader insists that most of Renan’s footage was unusable and the final cut was all his work.The Killing of America was shot long before the television networks started showing “real-life crime” shows. Not that Schrader received any plaudits for patenting a new style of documentary – his film still hasn’t been seen in the US.As for the Japanese, they were both fascinated and repelled Ironically, 20 years on, their own murder rate has shot up. “Maybe it has something to do with affluence,” Schrader muses He has spent much of his career in Japan He’s an expert on Japanese cinema. For four years, he taught English literature at a university in Kyoto He and his wife have written Japanese plays. Back in the late Sixties, when he was studying creative writing with Nelson Algren and Kurt Vonnegut, he was introduced to Yukio Mishima. He became obsessed with the novelist, who committed suicide in 1970 and co-wrote his brother’s 1985 film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.