Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader (birthname: Paul Joseph Schrader) is one of the essential American writer-directors of his generation and one of the few major American filmmakers with a grounding in film criticism. Suppose there’s a good argument for the auteur theory in practice. In that case, it may be Paul Schrader, whose screenplays and films as writer-director are consistently infused with a uniquely dark, existential, and sometimes Calvinist-inspired point of view, usually about men reaching their Dark Nights of the Soul.

Long a favorite of international cinephiles and too often scorned by the Hollywood film establishment (reflected in the fact that he was only nominated for an Oscar in 2017 for his script for First Reformed, his 31^st film as either writer, director, or both), Schrader received a Career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival in 2022.

Paul Schrader’s first real mark on cinema was as a critic (for such Los Angeles-based publications as Cinema magazine and the Los Angeles Free Press) and author of the seminal 1972 book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, which introduced many readers to the masterpieces of Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer, and remains an essential text on three of cinema’s most important artists.

Schrader’s first four film projects were screenplays, starting with The Yakuza (1974), co-written with his brother Leonard Schrader and Robert Towne, and culminating with the groundbreaking script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), starring Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. It established Schrader as the rare American screenwriter regarded on the same level as the rising directors of the time, like Scorsese. Paul Schrader took this success and got behind the camera as director for the first time with the powerful Blue Collar (1978), again co-written with brother Leonard, and starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto.

His taste for morality-inflected drama surfaced with his second directorial project, Hardcore (1979), starring a galvanic George C. Scott, Season Hubley, and Peter Boyle, and premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. Following the release of the Joan Tewkesbury-directed Old Boyfriends (1979), co-written by Schrader and his brother Leonard, Paul Schrader’s next film as writer-director was the crime drama, American Gigolo (1980), in a career-defining role for Richard Gere, with Lauren Hutton (in roles originally cast for John Travolta and Julie Christie, respectively), and imagined by Schrader while teaching screenwriting at UCLA. It started with this film when some U.S. critics began negatively and positively commenting on Schrader’s “clinical” filmmaking style.

Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, enjoyed another remarkable moment of acclaim with his script (with Mardik Martin) for Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), again starring De Niro, with Cathy Moriarty and Joe Pesci, soon becoming an iconic depiction of radically toxic masculinity run amok. The 1980s, though a mediocre-to-poor decade for American movies, was a fascinating one for Schrader, whose work alternated between biographical and historical projects, adaptations, originals, and remakes, like Cat People (1982), his elegant reworking of Jacques Tourneur’s classic, with Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, and John Heard.

One of Paul Schrader’s most unusual and striking films was Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), a by-product of his time spent in Japan and his fascination with the controversial Japanese author Yukio Mishima, enacted in the film by Ken Ogata. Adding to the unique flavor of the film was its exceptionally theatrical visual nature, as well as the fact that it was co-written (again) with brother Leonard and Leonard’s Japanese-born wife, Chieko Schrader, produced by cinephile and Telluride Film Festival co-founder Tom Luddy, with one of Philip Glass’s first original film scores.

After his script adapting Paul Theroux’s novel, The Mosquito Coast (1986), directed by Peter Weir and starring Harrison Ford, Paul Schrader wrote and directed the rock n’ roll-themed Light of Day (1987), with Michael J. Fox, Joan Jett, Gena Rowlands, and Michael McKean. The movie had a significant impact, with the script inspiring Bruce Springsteen to write his iconic ballad, “Born in the U.S.A.” Schrader’s next as director only was his nuanced true-crime account, Patty Hearst (1988), with Natasha Richardson, William Forsythe, Ving Rhames, and Frances Fisher.

Paul Schrader’s third film as a screenwriter with Martin Scorsese was his brilliant adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), with the creative casting of Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton, and David Bowie. Director Schrader collaborated with acclaimed British authors Harold Pinter (screenplay) and Ian McEwan (novel) for the taut chamber drama, The Comfort of Strangers (1990), with Christopher Walken, Natasha Richardson, Rupert Everett, and Helen Mirren.

Schrader began his ongoing collaboration as director-writer with actor Dafoe in one of his most important films, Light Sleeper (1992), with Susan Sarandon, Dana Delany, and Mary Beth Hurt. Following his work on the drama, City Hall (1996)—with shared script credits for Bo Goldman, Nicholas Pileggi, and Ken Lipper—Paul Schrader made two written-directed films in 1997: The first was a faithful adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s non-crime 1987 novel, Touch, starring Skeet Ulrich,  Bridget Fonda, and Christopher Walken; the second was a fine adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel, Affliction (1997), with Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, and Dafoe, with Nolte nominated for a Best Actor Oscar and Coburn winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, following a world premiere at the Venice film festival.

Unfortunately, Paul Schrader’s next writer-director project, co-financed in the U.K. and Canada, Forever Mine (1999), with Joseph Fiennes, Ray Liotta, and Gretchen Mol, failed to receive a theatrical release, but 1999 was also the year of Schrader’s fourth, striking collaboration with director Scorsese, the dark drama Bringing Out the Dead, starring Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, and Ving Rhames.

Paul Schrader returned to the true-crime genre with a strange and disturbing account of the Bob Crane murder case, Auto Focus (2002), starring Dafoe, Greg Kinnear, and Rita Wilson. Certainly one of the oddest entries in Schrader’s filmography, the awkwardly titled Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (2005), with Stellan Skarsgård and photographed by the legendary Vittorio Storaro, is one of the most critically lambasted of Schrader’s directorial efforts (see “Some Facts” entry below for more background). The fourth film in Schrader’s so-called “Night Worker Series” (with Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, and Light Sleeper), The Walker appeared in 2007 (five years after Schrader wrote it) under the U.S. indie distributor, THINKFilm, with Woody Harrelson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Dafoe, Lauren Bacall, Ned Beatty, Mary Beth Hurt, and Lily Tomlin. Another study of a fallen man, Adam Resurrected (2008) was an interesting case of Schrader serving as director of Noah Stollman’s script adaptation of Yoram Kaniuk’s Israeli novel, with Jeff Goldblum in arguably his finest screen performance, alongside Dafoe and Derek Jacobi.

Paul Schrader again directed another writer’s drama (in this case, Bret Easton Ellis) with the ultra-low-budget erotic drama starring Lindsay Lohan, The Canyons (2013), a film rather publicly rejected by both the Sundance and SXSW festivals but embraced by the Venice and New York Film Festivals. Schrader (along with star Nicolas Cage) disowned his written-directed thriller, Dying of the Light (2014) after it was re-edited by distributor Lionsgate, leading to a wave of negative reviews. Schrader (as director only) turned up the volume on down-and-dirty with the manic crime film, Dog Eat Dog (2016), starring two of his favorite actors, Dafoe and Cage, and closing Cannes’ Directors Fortnight.

Recently, Paul Schrader has achieved some of the highest acclaim of his career with a string of intense and precisely realized dramas, starting with his Oscar-nominated script for First Reformed (2017), one of Schrader’s most immersive religious films, starring Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried. Four years later, Schrader was again writer-director with possibly one of his finest films, the gambling drama The Card Counter (2021), starring Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan, and Willem Dafoe, once again premiering at the Venice Film Festival and earning some of the best reviews of Schrader’s career.

Venice was also the premiere platform for Paul Schrader’s written-directed crime drama, The Master Gardener (2022), starring Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver. An oddity for Schrader in 2022 was the delayed and barely noticed release (via Paramount and Saban Films) of There Are No Saints, a gritty crime drama set in Mexico which Schrader originally intended to direct from his 2010 script titled The Jesuit, but which was subsequently produced by Alfonso Pineda Ulloa, starring Paz Vega, Ron Perlman, and Tim Roth. Schrader’s next project appears to be Nine Man from Now (date to be announced), reportedly a remake of Budd Boetticher’s 1956 Western, 7 Men from Now.