"Ooh la la, those are dangerous," says the director, sitting in a café and turning his Rushmore-like face towards the dogs' owners.
His disapproval is direct.
"Those are very dangerous. Those are super dangerous."
He turns back and sips his espresso.
His chuckle is made of three deep, measured utterances.
Snarling pit bulls is a weirdly appropriate analogy for the types of characters who appear in Schroeder's movies.
The director has made a career of pursuing monsters and wrestling them into the view of his camera.
He did so first with 1974's General Idi Amin Dada, in which Schroeder persuaded the infamous Ugandan dictator to play (and practically direct) himself, then did so again through two actors: Mickey Rourke, who portrayed the brutish avatar of drunk poet Charles Bukowski in Barfly in 1987; and Jeremy Irons as accused murderer Claus von Bulow in 1990's Reversal of Fortune.
Now Schroeder, 66, has made Terror's Advocate.
The film explores the conception, birth and maturation of terrorism through the career of Jacques Verges, the French lawyer whose life's work is defending the indefensible: right- and left-wing terrorists, Nazi war criminals, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic and, most recently, officers of the Khmer Rouge.
His client list is a who's who of real-life villains.
Verges even lobbied to defend Saddam Hussein.
"I was asked, `Would you defend Hitler?'," Verges muses in Schroeder's film.
"I said I'd even defend Bush. But only if he would plead guilty."
