The New Yorker Radio Hour - Paul Schrader: Movies as Religion

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

Paul Schrader made an auspicious début as the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and the director of “Blue Collar” and “American Gigolo.” But as Hollywood turned away from serious drama, Schrader struggled. Schrader is, above all, serious about filmmaking: the product of a strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing in which movies were forbidden, he first fell in love with directors like Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman— icons of the European, intellectual tradition in cinema. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody considers Schrader to be a true auteur and one of the greats of American film. They spoke about religion and movies on the occasion of Schrader’s new film, “First Reformed.” It stars Ethan Hawke as the troubled pastor of a small church, and it reflects Schrader’s obsession with morality in a fallen world. Plus: on-the-job horror stories from three great writers—Gillian Flynn, Akhil Sharma, and Alison Bechdel. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you're any kind of film buff, you know the name Paul Schrader. He's one of the great screenwriters of our time, the collaborator with Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ. As a director, though, Schrader has struggled to get his own films made. So alongside acclaimed titles like American Jigel, and Mishima, there are movies like an exorcist prequel that are probably best forgotten. Schrader's new film First Reformed has just come out starring Ethan Hawke. And in the view of Richard Brody, who writes about film for the New Yorker, First Reformed is one of the best movies by one of our great filmmakers. Paul Schrader is one of Richard's heroes, an otor in the true sense, a writer and a director with a distinctive style informed by his predecessors,

but with a set of concerns that are all his own. Exactly what the company wants. To keep you on the line, they'll do anything to keep you on their line. The pit the life is against the new boys, the old, against the young, the black, against the white, everybody to keep us in our place. I mean, can't you understand that? A lot of people, when they hear the name Paul Schrader, they think of taxi driver. I first knew of his work from Blue Color, which was, I thought, a fierce and passionate movie.

You're trying to hurt somebody instead of helping yourself. That's your problem. I got a problem now. There's a kind of shattering, awe-inspiring intensity to the best of Schrader's films, but no other living filmmaker can match. All right, so how do we help ourselves? Black male. Black?

I think the reason why Schrader is not thought of in the same way as, certainly Spielberg or Coppola or Scraise, is that precisely because of the nature of his upbringing, his films don't have the same pop culture hooks as theirs do. Schrader grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a strict Dutch Calvinist community, and he depicts that way of life in his 1970s. 2009 film Hardcore.

Well, T stands for total deprabt. All men, through original sin, are totally evil and incapable of good. All my works are as filthy rags in the side of the Lord. Paul Schrader, you were brought up in a very stern religious environment. Well, in retrospect, you know, I mean, you're not quite aware how you're different when you don't see anyone else who is different. And so if you go to church three times on Sunday with a Dutch service in the afternoon, and you go to a catechism twice a week, and then you have Bible classes every single day in school,

and all your activities are church-sponsored, you're just normal. You're not different. You're like everybody else. In truth, it was a very good upbringing. And Calvinism is a rather intellectual form of Protestantism. So they believed in education. Calvin believed you could actually think your way into heaven. So there's no sense of extreme authority placed on you at home?

Well, yeah, I mean, there were certain things you did and did not do. Well, you didn't see a movie until you were how old, 17? Yeah, well, our denomination had a prescription against, to worldly amusements of which movies were one. But because we didn't have TV and movies, there was a lot of storytelling. Sundays go over to their grandmother's house after the service, and the uncles would sit around the table and tell what happened that week. And if you were a kid, you could sit in the room, you couldn't speak.

And you tell me, which is better, sitting in front of a TV, you know, hearing, you're a that manufactured plot lines or hearing your uncles it's all about their day. Two of Schrader's early influences were Bergman and Brussels. Both of them made films that dramatized varieties of spiritual torment. I didn't think too much about movies until I got to college.

And this was in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And there was a soft-core porn theater, Russ Meyer kind of place that was running out of business. and the owner had this brilliant idea to have a three-week Ingmar Bourbon Festival and I guess he got a real bargain on them

and kids from the college started going over there and I went over there and I saw it through a glass darkly They're saying that he comes which o'gummolmissom he must be here and you know Burbin is talking about the very same things we're talking about in class and in church.

And I realize that, you know, these two items are not incompatible. We were just taught they were incompatible, but they're not. And because my first real love of the movies was the intellectual European cinema of the 60s, that has informed me. You know, you never forget your first love. Right, exactly. But when you got to Hollywood, many of your colleagues of your generation had already a great orientation in the commercial cinema, whereas you were entering the realm of commercial cinema

with an orientation in the severely intellectual movies. Yeah, and, well, something happened in March of 1969. I went to a screening of Pickpocket at the Los Felus. In Robert Brasson's film, Pickpocket. I know that, of the habitudes. I said, wait a second. I said, I could make a film like that. He writes in his journal, and then he goes out and commits some crimes,

and he comes back and writes in his journal, then he goes out and talks to the girl next door, and he writes his in the journal some more. I said, I could make that film. And then four years later, I wrote taxi driver. You wrote the film, but you didn't direct it. No, I didn't even write. I wrote it purely as a self-therapy.

I had hit a very, very rough period. I've been living in my car. I got a pain in my stomach, went to the hospital. I had a bleeding ulcer in 26. And I realized I hadn't been talking to people in weeks. There was something growing inside of me. I was becoming something. And if I didn't pull this thing out, it would become me.

And the thing that I felt I was becoming, with Travis Bickle. I just want to go out and, you know, like really, really, really do something. Taxi life, you mean? Yeah, well, it's, I don't know. I just want to go out. I really, you know, I really want to, you know, I got some bad ideas in my head. I just, I just, you know, Trader made one of the most auspicious debuts as a

director of any filmmaker of his time. His first three films are all classics in their way, Blue Collar, Hardcore, and American Gigolo. Trader himself has said that, you know, he really became a director with his third film American Gigolo. And I think in part that's true. That's the film in which he most conspicuously crafts a style of his own. Do you make the right decision to come here last was what you expected? No. It was like really making love. Throughout the 1990s, Schrader continued to make a series of films that were justifiably acclaimed, but that didn't quite establish him as a commercial filmmaker in Hollywood. Hollywood studio movies of that era were increasingly pop culture-oriented in a way that Schrader,

because of his own background, isn't. Because of his worsening relations with the studios, he got to the point with the Canyons in 2012, where he had to put in some of his own funds and raise other funds with Kickstarter. Schrader's main theme is the sin of doing for money what should be done for love, and in the canyons, he centers it on his own lifelong activity, namely filmmaking, filmmaking in Hollywood. I was going to do a film with Brett East and Dallas, but I said to Brett, the economy of the film business has changed so radically. I think we could just do what.

We'll put some money together. We'll raise some money over the Internet, and we'll just make the film ourselves. And so we were able to cast people We couldn't cast otherwise Lindsay Lohan because she is not insurable And then Brett was very keen on me Hiring this porn star James Dean And so we pulled it off

We sold it, we made money And I would never do it again Yeah, from what I've read The process was fairly stressful making of that film Well, it always is stressful For one reason or another And this reason had a lot to do with Lindsay and her problem behavior. You know, I, it's one of the really frustrating circumstances where you say to someone, you explain, if you do these things, it's going to be great for you.

You have 13 shooting days. If you can show up ready to work in good spirits for 13 days, you'll be back on the boards. She got it. She totally got it. She couldn't do it. And it's really unfortunate because I thought that her performance in it, the performance you elicited from her, and it was really pretty wonderful. You're not happy to her.

Who said anything about happy? He takes care of me, and he's in love with me. It's serious. Fuck it, Ryan. Who's happy? Who's really happy? Tell me. Gina.

Oh. Gina is. Gina's happy. Right, another reason why I couldn't stand being around her. Paul Schrader's new movie is called First Reformed. My hands shake as I write these lines. First Reformed looks like a sort of religious drama. I don't take it as a religious drama.

I take it as a work of political fury, where taxi driver was an eruption of rage at the duplicity, the corruption, the violence of the Vietnam War era. So First Reformed is a work of fury at the wanton violence of America's post-9-11 endless wars and the political and religious corruption that come along with it. In First Reformed, Ethan Hawk plays a minister in a small church in upstate New York, who's in a state of spiritual, emotional, and physical torment.

He counsels a parishioner who's an eco-terrorist, and he then makes that man's cause his own. What Ernst Toler, the protagonist of First Reformed, and Travis Pickle have in common is profound alienation and rage at the state of society. It's as if the violence of the outer world has seen, seeped into his own bones and now he's about to burst out. He has a sickness, sickness that Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death, despair. So he makes a leap that maybe a less, a more sanguine person wouldn't make.

You know, there's a lot of blood in the DNA of Christianity. And when Christians start to go off the rail, this is the way they often go. which is they start confusing the sacrifice that Jesus made for them with the sacrifice they can make for themselves. The idea that my suffering will earn me glory. Jesus didn't want our suffering. He suffered for us. He wants our commitment and our obedience.

And what of his creation? The heavens declare the glory of God. God is present everywhere in every. plant every river, every tiny insect. The whole world is a manifestation of his holy presence. I think this is an issue where the church can lead, but they say nothing. You were brought up in a religious household, and you've just made a movie about a minister.

Do you want to ask you, what is your particular relationship to faith now? I've gone through phases in my life. When I had children, I became Episcopalian because I was raised with all the rules and none of the ritual. And Episcopalians is all the ritual and none of the rules. So that that seemed like a good idea. But now recently I've switched the last couple of years, I'm a Presbyterian. What kind of believer am I?

I don't know. I mean, Camus said that I don't believe, I choose to believe. You know, I mean, there is something about setting some time aside on Sunday morning to organize your week. You know, people don't walk out of church because they're bored. They go to church to be bored and to have that quasi-meditative hour and a half. And so I still welcome that. In effect, the slow cinema of the spiritual life. Yes.

And that's one of the attractions of actual cinema, too, is. that you, just like you make a commitment to drive over to church, you make a commitment to drive over to the cinema. And do you have a sense that the faith in cinema, so to speak, is decreasing because it's being consumed at home more casually? You know, when people take movies seriously, it's very easy to make serious movies. When I was coming up in the 60s and 70s, people actually took movies seriously. They wanted to know.

They looked for answers. What about this women's movement, this gay movement, this drug movement, this drug. movement, you know, give us some movies that sort of explained that. And of course, we gave the movies that explained it, and it was a wonderful period. Now people aren't asking that question anymore. They're not saying, you know, explain Donald Trump in a movie because we've got, well, because he is a movie, I guess, I mean, because there's no real center to the culture. and it hurts us.

But that is a much bigger thing than movies. That was writer and director Paul Schrader talking with the New Yorker's Richard Brody. Schrader's new film First Reformed is in theaters now. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In the magazine, we've often asked writers to tell us about their most memorable experiences and jobs. You know the kind I mean. Not the jobs that you put on your resume, on the gliding career,

path to success, but the ones that you're still telling stories about 10, 20, or 50 years later. We're going to share three of those stories with you today. First off, Gillian Flynn, who wrote Gone Girl and many other books. My parents were a very budget-minded couple, so I did not have a lot of extra spending money, so a job was always in the picture. And I went through a whole series of jobs in my high school years, I first tried being a shop girl, which was absolutely completely pathetic because I was pathologically shy. So I never really talked to people. I would kind of hover near them, which everyone loves to have when they're trying on

clothes and feeling vulnerable as some idiot nearby silently smiling and shrugging their shoulders. So I got fired from that one. That's the only job I've ever been fired from. for cause. And I, for years, I would hire on at Honeybaked Ham, especially when they had their big holiday rushes. And so my job was basically a ham display girl. I was like the Vanna White of Ham.

So all these jobs, I feel like kind of prepared me to take on the most perfectly 80s job ever, which was to sell frozen yoke. at a mall by my house. And it'd be in the 80s. It was a very fast times at Ridgemont High kind of moment. It was very cool to be in the center of this mall. Frozen yogurt was blowing people's minds.

They were like it's frozen, but it's yogurt. And you can get it in a waffle cone or a cup of different sizes. They were going nuts. You know, are you telling me Reese's pieces can be put on this? What? Months into it. I arrived at work one morning and my manager asked to see me in back. This already felt very ominous.

And when I went into this back room, I could see behind him in the dark, some sort of giant white orb and then a pair of long, slender, wrinkled slacks. And my first thought was, my God, I think he's killed someone? Am I going to be an accessory to murder? I'm going to have to like, this is such a bummer. I did not sign up for this. But it turned out it was actually much worse than that. It was an actual yogurt costume. He had bought at some sort of flea market.

It was clearly used. And that he wanted me to put it on. He thought I would be perfect for this job because every girl at 16 dreams of wandering around the mall dressed as a formal dairy product. So on went the giant white ore. which made me incredibly top-heavy. And then I put on these strange crumpled black pants, which turned out to be a tuxedo.

And I've always wondered ever since that moment, why the tuxedo? Like where did the yogurt think he was going? Was a prom? But he seemed too old for prom. It was like, well, maybe was it a wedding? was he tilted at the altar and now he's doomed to wander the mall

forever looking for his runaway bride and killing young girls on their way to get their ears pierced at Claire's accessories. It's what he looked like because he had a very grim face. There was no smile. He already looked sort of haunting and as I started wandering around the mall

I only made it more disturbing because, you know, again, I didn't want to talk or interact with anyone. So I just kind of floated in this top-heavy directionless way, carrying a tray of yogurt samples, which no one dared come near me to get. Inside the giant yogurt head was a mini-fan that I was very concerned about because it was whirling dangerously close to my beautiful, fantastic Sam spiral perm. So I did my... loop around the mall, dumped all my samples into a nearby trash can, and went to report back

to the yogurt store. And I was very close to safety. I was almost there when I kind of felt this tug and this heard this grinding whir and the smell of Aussie hair spray combined with smoke. And I realized that the minivan had gotten hold of. of some tendrils of my Fantastic Sam's spiral perm and had caught it up in the motor. I couldn't get it off my head. And I kind of panicked and I had to decide, you know, perm or freedom.

And I went for freedom and just yanked that thing off. Left some perm behind. But as I looked in the mirror, I realized that it was nothing, a ton of hair gel and a very carefully placed scrunchy wooden fix, and luckily I had a lot of both of those. But the moral of the story for me is to this day, I am always kind to people dressed as food. Gileon Flynn is the author of The Grown Up, Gone Girl, and other books. In the last few years, Akeel Sharma has published quite a few short stories and essays in The New Yorker. His novels include Family Life and an obedient father,

which won a Penn Hemingway Award. So we should all be thankful that his original plan didn't quite work out. I am a deeply lazy man who is also incredibly greedy. I went to law school and somebody told me that while lawyers make good money, investment bankers make even more money. And everybody was applying for these jobs because everybody had the same attitude. It was wretched in many ways. They were the very, very, very nice investment banks.

you know, the Goldman Sachs and the Morgan Stanley's. And they would have their interviews in at the Charles Hotel, which was a fancy hotel in Cambridge. And then the less prosperous ones would have their events at the Sharten Commander, which at least back then was sort of decrepit. And we would line up in the hallways of the Shartan Commander because those of us who were not especially good applied for everything. Because why not?

And so we would line up in the Sheridan Commander holding our little resumes waiting to go in for interviews. And even among a group of people who were unqualified, I felt that I was especially unqualified. I knew nothing about math. I had no background with suggested finance. I wasn't even sure what exactly finance was, what exactly investor bankers did. and I would arrive in these interviews and they would ask me things like what would you do

in this situation or that situation and the only phrase that I really knew was discount cash flow so I would offer that up for everything and at some point they said to me okay other than that how else can you value a company and then I just became quiet

you know I knew right away that there was no reason to hire me and so I thought the only way that they would hire me was if I could tell a convincing story. And so these guys looked at me. They saw that I was a brown guy, an Indian, and they were very open to the stories of me being an immigrant.

And at some point, I decided to start lying. I began telling stories about working at a 7-Eleven, about working at gas stations. And then, because I was telling these stories, and these didn't seem pitiful enough, I also claimed that I worked at a 7-Eleven and a gas station at night. I was always something of a writer, and so I enjoyed making up these details. The kids who would come in Saturday night and begin stealing candy and comic books

and bags of potato chips or leaving in the morning when my shift was over and smelling like hot dogs, the alcoholics who would show up at 2 in the morning to buy beer or the fat, blonde prostitute who would come out and hang out at the gas station. They loved this stuff. There were great stories because they weren't true. Look, I grew up with nice middle-class parents in Edison, New Jersey. You know, I did not grow up in great deprivation. I was playing right along with their expectations, which frankly I did not mind, you know.

Like, hey, man, if you are willing to see me in this ridiculous way, then I'm happy to take advantage of that. And so I would keep getting, keep moving on and moving on to do these interviews. And usually the people who have no patience for stories are the people who actually do the work. So the associates and the junior VPs, because they're the poor schnooks who are up there late at night, you know, making sure that everything in the Excel model is working. And almost always they were the guys who would ding me, who would say, look, come on. This guy knows nothing. he would be terrible.

We can't have him around. What is he going to do? He's going to sit around and tell stories. And I finally did an interview with somebody. I think the junior VP I was supposed to interview with was called into a meeting, and so he couldn't interview me. And I knew right then that I was going to get the job. And a couple of days later, I got a job offer,

and I accepted on the spot. Because my thinking was, these people could come to their senses. So I said, yes, I'll take it. And the guy seemed quite surprised because I wasn't trying to negotiate. I wasn't trying to... You know, I didn't even say, hey, I'd love to work for you.

I just said, I'll take it. And then, of course, the next thing I asked was, when do I get my signing bonus? Former investment banker and novelist, Akeel Sharma. I remember later on, when I was a banker, I was great with clients because it was the same thing.

You know, the shtick I could handle. The actual work was a bit beyond me. Charma is a professor of creative writing at Rutgers University, and you can find everything he's written for the New Yorker at New Yorker Radio.org. I'm David Remnick, and you've been listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I hope you've enjoyed the show, and we're going to close up now with just one more job story about the shortest job that Alison Bechdel ever had. Bechdel is a cartoonist, the author of Fun Home, and Are You My Mother? Here she is. It was 1984. I was living in Brooklyn, and one lovely spring evening, my girlfriend and I went for a walk. And we were walking down one of those long downhill streets in Brooklyn down from the park. And we were young lesbians in New York City in the early 80s. And we were dressed as such. We were, I'm sure, both wearing Levi's. My girlfriend probably had her denim jacket on. I had very short hair. She had short hair on top and long hair in the back.

as people did in those days sometimes. And all of a sudden this guy on one of the brownstone stoops called out to us. And he said, hey, you fellas want to make five bucks? So we walked over, and as soon as we got close, he could see that we were not two boys, as he had thought, but two adult women. But he was sort of taken aback, but he didn't flinch.

He said, I need someone to carry this desk up to the third floor. And we were both pretty burly. I was in training for my black belt exam then, and my partner had just gotten back from Nicaragua where she was helping the Sandinistas bring in the coffee harvest. So sure, we could carry this desk upstairs. So we picked it up, and there we went. As we were carrying this heavy desk up the stairs,

I remember feeling this great sense of freedom, you know, that something, about passing for boys made me feel like safe and powerful. You know, as a woman walking down the street, you're always kind of a, you're very vulnerable. So this was a cool sensation of having this kind of mobility in the world that was really thrilling. When I tell this story now, it makes me think of my mother, the kind of things that my girlfriend and I were doing, those were not things women in my mother's generation did. And my mother would always say to me, you know, when I was young, I had three options.

I could be a teacher. I could be a nurse. Or I could go downtown and work at the Sylvania factory. Those were the only options for women to work. So we carried it all the way up to the top floor of this brownstone, up three flights of stairs with this heavy desk as the guy sort of nervously trailed along behind us. And at the top, we set it down and he pulled out his wallet and gone. gave us $5. And we walked downstairs, kind of rolling our eyes, very pleased with ourselves, and took the money and got ice cream cones with it. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianne & Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Mithely Rao, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Sharon Chetty, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.