The Big Picture - Making ‘First Reformed,’ the Best Movie of the Year So Far, With Paul Schrader | The Big Picture (Ep. 66)

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with legendary filmmaker Paul Schrader to discuss his powerful new film, ‘First Reformed,’ starring Ethan Hawke; his patient style of filmmaking, and his major career achievements, such as cocreating ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Raging Bull,’ and ‘The Last Temptation of Christ.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You want to give them less. In movies, we love to give viewers everything. We grab the viewers by the lapel and say, love me, love me, action, violence, pretty girls, car crashes, and here's music to tell you how to feel every second of the way. And so you create very, very passive viewers because everything's being done for them. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer,

and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most fascinating filmmakers in the world. First Reformed is not the sort of movie that undersells its metaphors. That's what Adam Neyman wrote on The Ringer this week. And if you know anything about today's guest and the film's legendary writer-director Paul Schrader, you know that underselling has never been much of a problem for him. In his screenplays for Martin Scorsese movies like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ, and in the films he's directed, which include American Gigolo, Cat People, and Affliction, Schrader has shown the world a bold, paranoid, violent, delirious vision.

Schrader makes films about obsessive, closed-off men constantly in search of an answer to life's existential mysteries. First Reformed, which stars Ethan Hawke in a career best performance, plays Reverend Toler, a classic of Schrader's single-minded men. He becomes consumed by the degradation of the environment, which triggers a crisis of faith before the movie's operatic and ecstatic finale. I talked to Schrader about the slow cinema he modeled First Reformed on, why he returns to these tortured figures, and why he no longer has a relationship to Hollywood. Here's Paul Schrader.

I'm truly honored to be joined today by Paul Schrader. Paul, thank you for coming in. Thank you, Sean. Paul, I want to know exactly why you decided to make First Reformed and when it dawned on you. Well, about three years ago, I had been a film critic. And I had written a book of aesthetics about spiritual cinema. But I never thought that I would make one myself. That wasn't me. I told people that I'm too intoxicated by the attractions of sex and violence and action and empathy to ever take a plunge in those icy waters of transcendence. About three years ago, I was speaking with Pavel

Pawlowski. I had just given him an award at the New York Society of Film Critics for Ido, the Polish film Baradun. And we were talking about spirituality in cinema and about the new economics of filmmaking, the lower costs, reduced costs. And I walked back uptown that night, and I said, it's time now. You know, it's time for you to write that movie you swore you would never write. You're going to be 70 next year, and it's finally time. And once I made that decision, then it came together quite quickly.

Was this always a story about a priest for you? It's not a priest. It's a reverend. Excuse me, a reverend. The differences of the whole issue of Catholicism and celibacy. Yes, it always was. And what were the movies that you went back and reviewed to kind of get yourself back in that mode? Well, the ones I've written about, which is the Rayson films, Country Priest, Big Pocket, Battlescape, The

Dryer, the Antonioni, the Rossellini, Voyage in Italy, Ozo, of course, and then some of the newer films, The Burgund, of course, and then then newer films like Carlos Vergados' Silent Light. Coincidentally, a month or two after I had that discussion with Pavel, I was invited to the SCMS annual convention in Atlanta where there was a panel called Rethinking Transcendental Style. And three scholars from around the world, Baylor, Israel, Portugal, were giving papers on that book I had written 45 years before and how it has stood up.

And I sat there and observed, and I thought, well, if anybody is rethinking Transcendental Style, it should be me. So then I began a simultaneous journey, which was also about three years of rethinking that book, trying to figure out why I had written it, how my ideas had changed, and what had become of that style I had written about in 1972. And that book will be published on May 22nd by UCAL Press. But what goes into the making of the film? Did the way that you saw these films change

in the way that you made the film then influence that? When films work on the quiet side, the contemplative side, they get involved with withholding techniques. And in fact, they sort of run against the very grain of film itself. Film loves action, it loves empathy, kiss, kiss, bang, bang. And so when you start withholding things, withholding music, withholding a certain kind of acting expression, withholding certain dramatic compositions, withholding editing patterns that tell you how to feel, then the viewer starts to feel an unease. And that unease is resolved either by the viewer coming toward the movie or leaving the theater.

And that's a delicate dance you do when you withhold because you want the viewer to start to come toward you. And you want to give them less. Movies, we love to give viewers everything. We grab the viewers by the lapel and say, love me, love me. Action, violence, pretty girls, car crashes. And here's music to tell you how to feel every second of the way. And so you create very, very passive viewers

because everything's being done for them. Did you miss the action? Was there ever a moment where you felt like, man, I really need to get a gun in this scene? No, I mean, and it was hard not to move a camera. That's the hardest part because all your instincts, all your training is just crying out to be dynamic. But then once you accept the new rules of engagement,

the rules of imprisonment, we're not going to pan or tilt. We're going to shoot in a square format. We're not going to use foreground. Boom, boom, boom. Then, like all forms of restraint, it encourages a certain creativity. So if I said to you, you know, I want you to design a hip modern chair for a man who weighs 500 pounds, that will make you think because it's no longer a hip modern chair. You have a real task in front of you.

And out of that challenge comes imagination. Much more imagination than you would have if I just said hip modern chair. Why Ethan Hawke? Well, there's a certain physiognomy involved. Suffering men of the cloth, like the country priests, like Montgomery Cliff and I confess. And so he had that look. And so then I was thinking of actors who had that look, who I liked, like Jake Gyllenhaal

or Oscar Isaacs. But Ethan had 10 years on them. And he was just starting to get older in a very interesting way. And I think even though I don't like to think about actors while I'm writing because it makes you lazy as a writer, I started thinking more and more about Ethan. I started thinking, you know, maybe

this is it. This is the right one. Because I'd always admired him. And I knew he had a history of spirituality. I knew that he had been to spiritual retreats I knew that his former father-in-law

was one of the foremost authorities on oriental religion and so I knew that he was aware of the work of Thomas Merton so I figured he would be receptive there's a lot of time spent on the crevices in his face in a way that we don't get usually in movies.

You know, was it easy to convince him to do something that really has a real lack of glamour? Yes. Yeah. And one of the reasons you're looking at the crevices of his face is because I'm not cutting it. I'm just holding there. And so finally your eye starts to explore. You know, if I don't do the work on the editing bits for you, you start thinking of other things yourself. You say, oh, look at that.

Look at that thing there. And obviously the less I put on screen in terms of decor, the more you look at the person. Yeah, we spend a lot of time on his face. You know, even though the technique and some of the structure of the movie is different from some of your previous work, it does still have this sort of tortured man in a room questing for truth feeling. Well, I mean, this is what caught me a little by surprise

because I had set out to make a slow cinema, a slow movie, and I had incorporated all these other films, these influences. But I'm in the editing room, and the editor says to me, you know, there's a taxi driver in this movie. I said, yeah, I know there's some. I put it in there. I didn't realize there was so much. And what I realized is that these various disparate religious elements that I had cribbed from around the world were in fact being held together by the obsessive glue of that Travis

Bickle character. What is your relationship to your previous films, like Taxi Driver, like Hardcore? Do you watch them? Are you thinking about them when you're working? No. I mean, occasionally, if you're working, you say, I did this shot before once. I said to Nick Cage once, I said, when was the last time you played a scene that you had never played before? He said, it's been a long time.

He's made a lot of movies. And so you do think about it, but I don't watch them so often. If I'm at a retrospective, which I will be at tonight, and the audience has just seen the movie, well, they know the movie much better than I do. And I have to sort of ask them, you know, what was that character's name?

Yeah, you're showing what, Light Sleeper tonight? Yeah, and Affliction. We had a filmmaker in here last week who talked about ripping off a shot from Mishima straight up and just said that he loved it. Which filmmaker? His name is Boots Riley. He has a movie that's played Sundance. And he said there's a segment in the elevator in his film that he was pulled just straight from you shot for shot. Do you have that happening often now where you have filmmakers come up to you and say, Oh, you inspired me and I stole this from you.

Well, what, what I do have most often is a filmmaker say taxi driver is the film that made me want to be a filmmaker. And then I say, let me guess. You saw it when you were 14 and they're always bail. And they said, yeah, how'd you know? I said, let me guess, you saw it when you were 14. And they're always bail. And they said, yeah, how'd you know? I said, well, that's it. That's that sweet spot. Age 14, 15, a young man, been watching action movies, all of a sudden stumbles across Taxi Driver, which he thought was going to be an action movie, which is a different kind of action movie and gets his mind going.

How do you feel about that, being part of your legacy as a filmmaker? Because it can kind of cut in a negative way too. Not really. Not for me. Because having that kind of validation so early on, having stumbled onto the zeitgeist and having a film that keeps renewing itself. I know people my age who have been working decades who still are looking for that validation.

So having it in my 20s was, in fact, freeing because I could say, now I can just go on. I can make films. I can never, I never have to worry about having not made a film that people think is important. That said though, it does feel like this film now is the first time in a while that a lot of people are saying,

and you'd be a better judge of this than I would master filmmaker, Paul Schrader. He has, he has done something that is extremely important. You should see this. What's that like to have that come back around? Well, it's extremely gratifying, intimidating. What do you mean by that?

Well, because now you start thinking about what I'm going to do next. Really? Yeah. I mean, you see, this current phase of my career began about four or five years ago when I was devastated by an experience I'd written and directed a film called Dying of the Light, it was taken away from me. And I was being treated by people who did not respect me, who I did not respect. And in fact, I really felt that they were trying to kill me. And maybe they were, because it threw me into despair.

It threw me into alcoholism. And I thought, you know, this is how it's going to end. You know, my final film is a debacle. And I will end my days in regret and resentment. And so, you know, I said to Nick Cage, I said, you know, we've got to work again. We've got to get this stain off our shirts. I actually meant to stain up my shirt. He's impeccably dressed. And then a project came up, a doggy dog, that I thought would be good for Nick. And I told the people, I said, I think I can get Nick Cage for this,

but only on the condition that I have Final Cut because of what just happened to us. He won't even take my call if I don't have Final Cut. They said, okay, you can have Final Cut. Then I had Final Cut. And I had not really felt I needed Final Cut earlier because I'd always been making films in a system with people who knew films, liked films, understood films, and there would be some disagreements in the post-production. Sometimes films get better, sometimes maybe not, but there was a meeting of the minds. Now, in the last 10 or so years, this money has come into the film business that is non-film money, that doesn't like films and doesn't watch films.

And they have economic formulas. And so you all of a sudden need to have Final Cut because these people, all they care about is their formula. So now I got Final Cut on Doggy doggies, and I can do anything I want. I put together this young team, and I said, let's just do anything we want. To be as outrageous as we can. So we did this Tarantino-esque kind of film, and it's full of outrageous propane and vulgar and completely. It's very much a film made by a director with Final Cut. Yeah.

And then I started working on this new idea. And I said, wait a second. I can go back to these people. I can get Final Cut again, only this time I'll use the freedom not to do things. Rather than having the freedom to do extravagant things, I will use my freedom to be quiet and not cut and not be commercial. So that's how that experience of Dying of the Light, which I've now on my own dime re-edited and made into a film called Dark, which cannot be shown. I was going to say, where can I see that? Okay, that cannot be shown. I was going to say, where can I see that? If you do Google Schrader, Dark, Rotterdam, a lecture I gave earlier this year will show up

where I describe the entire process and show long clips from the new film. I can't show the film, but I can use clips as a teaching device. Interesting. So are you now thinking of every film that goes forward as an individual challenge? Is there something about doing something you've never done before? Well, I've always felt that. You know, Canyons. You know, I said to Brett Ellis, let's just do it ourselves. You know, you write it, I'll direct it. We'll put our money together.

We'll do a little crowdfunding. We'll do a DIY movie. I don't even know if it's possible to do a crowdfunded movie, but let's find out. And we did it. What did you learn from that one? Oh, I learned never do it again. I mean, it's a lot of work.

Yeah. It's a complicated thing, right? I'm interested in that for you because you have to be one part showman to do this stuff and to get attention on the movie and to get people to see it. So you cast Lindsay. Lindsay is, of course, a celebrity. You've had many celebrities in your movies, and then that draws attention. But then inevitably people end up looking at what they came for, which is the idea of the celebrity and not the thing itself. Yeah.

And sometimes you get burned. You know, if I cast, let's say, Brad Pitt as a homosexual, as a cross-dresser. Now, that's going to get a lot of attention. But it's going to make my job a lot harder than if I had cast, you know, Tom Pitt instead of Brad. Sure. Are you thinking about that a lot? I know when you're writing movies too, saying like, I know you don't want to write with casting in mind, but are you saying this has to be a movie star part or this should be an anonymous person? Actors with a history or with the public, you know, do bring a certain pleasure and a certain shorthand. You have to be careful that it's not a crutch.

I'm curious if there's anything in moviemaking that still scares you. Movies on water. So you won't be making one of those. The film that Brett Ellis and I were going to shoot that got thwarted was a shark movie. And we were going to do it in Spain. And I kept thinking to myself, you fool. Why wouldn't, God's name, would you want to do a movie on water?

And then when it fell through, I thought, wow. You caught a break, yeah. That's very funny. Are you nervous about the performance of movies at this point? How do you measure success? Well, as we were talking about earlier, it's a very odd kind of distribution world now because of all the multiplicity of outlets and the magnitude of the amount of product.

You know, 15,000, 20,000 independent films, 500 scripted TV shows, international cinema, you know, you just go through Netflix and you get dizzy. So, you know, how do you measure? And I guess you start to measure it in a way by longevity and persistence. You know, a book doesn't have to sell a lot of copies on opening weekend. And a movie doesn't have to anymore, unless, of course, you're a tentpole movie, and then, of course, you have to.

But if you can hang in there, you know, like get out hung in there, or like Stalin is hanging in there, or Lady Bird, then, you know, you can find a way to survive. What's your relationship to Hollywood at this point? I don't know what you mean by Hollywood. Well, I mean, the studio system is dead. Yeah, that particularly, I'm interested in your thoughts on it. I mean, Hollywood used to be the place you had to come to network.

But now you can even network all around the globe. You know, UCLA and USC were always the best film schools because they were closest to the networking community. More and more, you're finding little clusters of talent around the country because they don't need to network because they're making a film on their phone. And then, of course, you get the other side of the equation. One side of the equation is it's not possible for anyone to make a movie. And the other side of the equation is virtually impossible for anyone to make a movie. And the other side of the equation is virtually impossible

for anyone to make money making a movie. So many of these filmmakers are so happy to get their investment back when they sell off to Netflix or someplace. And Netflix is determined to possess the largest, most shallow body of water on Earth. But, of course, those films get lost. Occasionally a Netflix film will start to emerge. But, you know, like the latest ones that have emerged are Wild Wild Country and Berlin Babylon.

Berlin Babylon was also quite successful in Germany as well. But it does get harder. Are you watching as many films as you used to, or do you feel as engaged in that universe as maybe even when you were a critic? I try to watch everything, but it's not possible. And in fact, when you watch the first episode or two of Episodic and you decide to quit, that's quite a relief. Yes, it is. I know that feeling well.

I don't have to watch that anymore. Dodge that one. on Facebook is because I have a community of maybe several hundred cinephiles, most of whom I know, but others who I know their taste. And if they start to mention stuff, and if I see something and I mention it, they mention it, then you start to pay attention to it. Because I wasn't going to see Collateral. And then it got mentioned once. It got mentioned a second time.

And a third person started talking about it, David Ayers. I said, well, you know, maybe I'll give it a shot. And I watched it, and I loved it. Sounds like you do kind of like Netflix, though, a little bit. You're still trying some stuff. So what are you going to do next? Do you know what it is? Well, as I said earlier, I'm very intimidated by this film.

I know. As I've said about this film, I hope it's not my last film, but if it is, it's a very good last film. First reform, you mean? Yeah, first reform. Just to be doing something that you're going to regret doing is not where I want to be. So I am writing something now. I think it's a little too personal, but maybe I can scale it back.

And there's a couple other things that I'm kind of waiting on. But the truth is, I've decided to kind of enjoy this moment. Normally, I would be in production by now. I have forgotten this film already. But, you know, I thought maybe I would take the victory lap this time. That's why you're seated here with me. You know, I have a vision of you in the 70s up all night furiously writing and being very productive and very creative. You've written dozens of scripts now that have been produced, let alone things that are not produced.

Is it easy for you to write a film script or is there still like a difficulty in doing it? Well, because back when I was a nocturnal writer, that writing was being fueled by additives, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, alcohol, you know, sort of cycle. I like additives. That's a nice way of describing it. I'm going to steal that. But then when I had children, I had to switch to the day routine, and that took quite a while. But I still do almost everything I can to keep from writing. I keep working on the idea, telling it, outlining it, and so that by the time, you know, one of two things happens as you dwell on an idea.

Either it dies, and that's a happy day because you just saved yourself months of frustration. Or it finally just says to you, stop telling me and start writing me. It's time to go to work. And then, of course, the writing happens quite quickly. So I am not really a writer per se as much as I am a binge writer. And two weeks ago I was writing every day and then I had to interrupt and now I'm a little concerned about getting back at it. You've gotten off course. Yeah. So let's talk just a little bit more about First Reformed.

I think that there's still something very ecstatic in the movie even though you're making something that's transcendental essentially are you talking about ecstatic or static? ecstatic there is something static for sure the camera is very static at times but there are moments that are transcending in a different way I think

did that feel like something that you had to do in order to make a movie like this work in 2018? No, well, I mean, I knew at the end I had to jump from the material plane. I had to go to an ecstatic place. So that's when the Tarkovsky scene, the levitation scene came to my mind. I was sitting there and thinking to myself,

how can I not take this up a level? And then I actually said to myself, well, what would Tarkovsky do? I thought he would have them levitate. That was his go-to position. So I had them levitate. Yeah, there's something amazing. If done poorly, it ruins the movie, but done well, it takes the movie into a completely different place for people. Is it difficult to convince actors and say like, this is going to work, trust me? No, actors are trusting

people in general. You know, the kind of mistakes they make in their career are by trusting too many people too often rather than the other way around. So just talk to me quickly about movie endings because we were just talking a little bit about some of the ecstatic, but you are well known for your endings and I'm wondering how you approach them. Well, in this particular film, I said there's about three ways to go. One was, you know, the Peckinpah passenger ending, which is the explosion, and then you have four or five-minute montage, hyper slow-motion body parts drifting through the air, eyeballs floating into eternity. And, you know, I thought that would be kind of shocking. Yep.

Also kind of expensive, though. And then I thought, then there's the country priest ending, where the priest falls out of frame, he dies, and you're left looking at the crucifix, which I thought I would go there. And then I was talking about it with Kent Jones from the New York Film Festival, and he said to me,

you're going for the country priest ending, and I said, I thought you were going for the Ordet ending. And as soon as he said that, I said, wow, that's right. That's right. Now, Ordet is a 1954 film by Carl Dreyer about this religious sect in Denmark. And there's a young, attractive couple. And he has a brother who's a holy fool, who's a crazy man.

And he thinks he's Jesus Christ. And he gets lost in a storm, and they go out looking for him, and the wife falls sick, and the wife dies. And the man is heartbroken. And at the funeral, his crazy brother walks in and says, I've come back to raise her from the dead. And he's about ready to punch him. But his daughter says, why don't you let him try?

And so John goes over there, and he raises her from the dead. And his reaction, the main character's reaction, is not that I've seen a miracle, not, oh, my God, I fall on my knees. His reaction is, I've got her back. Pure carnal desire, hold her, clutch her, kiss her, squeeze her, hold her, and response to a miracle of being carnal. And so I think I'll go that way with it. I love that.

Paul, I end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what's the last great film they've seen. What's the last great film that you've seen? Well, I don't know about great. Decent? But the last good film I saw was Death of Stalin. Yeah, what did you like about it? Well, just, you know, it's smart. Mm-hmm. You know, it's perversity. Yeah, what did you like about it? Well, just, you know, it's smart. Mm-hmm.

You know, it's perversity. Yeah. Were you aware of Iannucci's work prior to that? I had heard his name, but I'm not aware of his work, no. Yeah, it's very good. Well, Paul, thank you again very much for doing this, and congrats on First Reform.

Thank you. thank you thanks again for listening to this week's episode of the big picture thank you to my producer Zach Mack what up Zach and if you

want to read more about movies check out the ringer.com where we will be covering solo a Star Wars story in a full assault and I'll have a podcast

later this week breaking down the movie with our pal, David Shoemaker. See you then.