Paul Schrader

[jenkins]

I thought he'd gone sober but he sounds drunk. it's an adorable statement of course but it's sentimental rather than intellectual, Schrader, a human after all

[Rooty Poots]

I enjoy watching him get kicked out of every online poker room that makes the mistake of allowing him in. What a guy.

[WorldForgot]

Does Schrader livestream poker matches?? lol

[wilder]

Paul Schrader Sets Richard Gere Reunion; Antoine Fuqua and Elisabeth Moss Offered Scripts to Direct
The Film Stage

Enthusiasts of Paul Schrader's Facebook are well aware he's moved into a new Hudson Yards spot––I'd suggest this as essential viewing:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CpquspUL8p0

––and it's subject of a fascinating, deeply moving profile in Curbed anchored around caring for his wife Mary Beth Hurt (try reading the last couple lines and not sighing) and which portrays someone who finds enviable degrees of focus in doing their work. Mentioned therein are a few new projects: no indication of the Puerto Rico-set feature he teased last fall, but word he'll very soon stage a reunion from his most iconic writing-directing job.

If all goes well, Schrader is directing Richard Gere this summer for the first time since American Gigolo––or, had things had once gone to plan, The Walker––in an adaptation of an unnamed novel by Russell Banks, a personal friend and source for one of his best films, Affliction. Adriane Quinlan, author of the Curbed piece, has confirmed Schrader will adapt Banks' 2021 novel Foregone, which he hopes to title Oh Canada! and compares to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Harper Collins' synopsis would suggest interest for a filmmaker constantly dwelling on their mortality:

At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife's wife and alongside Malcolm's producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.

Imaginatively structured around Fife's secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself.

It's meanwhile said he's optioned an untitled, logline-free script for Elisabeth Moss to direct, which would mark a feature debut after dabbling in TV, and had been talking to Antoine Fuqua about helming his project Three Guns at Dawn––somehow not a western (à la his aborted Nine Men from Now) but "follows three brothers — a dirty cop, a serial killer, and a drug dealer — who hate one another." If we see even one, let alone two or three, we can consider it a verdant time for a tireless American master.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paul Schrader's Very Paul Schrader Days in Assisted Living
By Adriane Quinlan
Curbed



Paul Schrader is late and hasn't eaten. He's been stuck in his apartment on a Zoom call with Antoine Fuqua of Training Day, trying to get the director to sign on to a new script he's set on calling Three Guns at Dawn. It follows three brothers — a dirty cop, a serial killer, and a drug dealer — who hate one another. At 1:30, he appears in the restaurant, orders three eggs scrambled and a scoop of cottage cheese, mixes it all together, and huffs it down, his heavy gold bracelet thumping the table. Then he looks around. The space is sterile but tasteful: big windows overlooking Hudson Yards, vaguely mid-century furniture, an open kitchen. Everything smells of jasmine. "Living in this place feels like living on the Cunard Line," he says. "Sometimes I think, God, I've got to get to a dive bar somewhere."

This place is Coterie Hudson Yards, a luxury senior-living facility that Schrader, 76, moved into in February. It's a good spot to write in, he says, and he has been working near constantly since he arrived, managing to finish two scripts from the desk in his one-bedroom on the eighth floor. The first he optioned to Elisabeth Moss to direct; the second, an adaptation of one of the last novels by his friend Russell Banks, he is keeping for himself. He plans to shoot it this summer with Richard Gere in the lead role.

Schrader didn't necessarily need to move into an assisted-living facility. He told a documentary crew speaking to him about 2018's First Reformed that it could be his last film; it was not. Over the past few years, he managed (despite COVID-induced delays) to toss off two movies about afflicted loners distanced from society: The Card Counter, which premiered in 2021, and Master Gardener, set for release in May.

But eight years ago, his wife of almost 40 years, the actress Mary Beth Hurt, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At first, he quietly cared for her in the Putnam County home where they'd lived for years. That wasn't sustainable. "You have to strike a balance. You can't let her condition stop you from working," his friend and longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese advised him. He hired help, but recently that care "needed to escalate. I started realizing that we're not gonna be able to take care of her anymore and wondering, Where's a good place?"

His own health had also taken a downturn. Last year, heart issues landed him in the hospital; a bout of long COVID came with bronchitis. He was starting to skip events, such as the talk after a screening of Master Gardener at the New York Film Festival. Suddenly, Schrader — whose screenplays have honed the archetype of the lonesome American man driven mad — was afraid of becoming the character in his films. "Am I gonna be left as the lonely old guy at the lake house, walking into walls, drinking?" he says. "Is that gonna be my fate?"

So Hurt moved into Coterie in January, and Schrader arrived a few weeks later. Now, almost every day, he wakes up at nine, works for a few hours, then takes the elevator down to the sixth floor, where Hurt's apartment is. She lives in what Coterie calls Memory Care, a floor designed for people with cognitive impairment: Hallways flow in a circle so anyone who forgets where they're headed can just keep going, drifting through two living areas, a small café, and long rows of studio apartments. Hurt and other residents on the floor sometimes forget their room numbers, so outside each apartment is an illuminated glass box that residents and family can fill with mementos.  In Hurt's, Schrader has put a Playbill from the 1996 revival of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance signed by the rest of the cast. (Hurt played Julia, the troublesome divorcée; the show won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play.) Below that is a souvenir plate from a family trip to a crocodile farm in Thailand; in the middle of the plate is a photo of the family. The kids are around 9 and 13. Behind them are Schrader in a Hawaiian shirt and Hurt, with a backpack, smiling.

Sometimes he'll bring her up to the main restaurant; other days he'll stay in Memory Care and play a game or read a book beside her. When a live band came to play for residents, a staffer says, Schrader made requests. Friends come by, too. Glenn Close recently popped in a few times before heading back to her house in Bozeman, Montana.

"Would I have moved here if I didn't have a situation with my wife?" Schrader asks. "No. Will I leave if she dies? No. I like it."

Schrader likes that Coterie feels like a hotel. "I've lived in hotels half my life when I'm on location," he says. "I like the room service. I like the bar. I like the maids." Plus, those hotels on location always offered Schrader another perk: someone at the bar he knew, someone from the crew, someone to talk to. At Coterie, where the residents rarely shift, he has been getting to know his neighbors, a group that includes a former cabaret singer and a onetime Broadway set designer. "They all tend to be kind of interesting because otherwise they couldn't afford to be here," Schrader says before sensing his snobbishness, "even if they are a little on the geriatric side. But then so am I."

Coterie does feel decidedly less nursing home, more Four Seasons, at least if you ignore a few details: leather banisters along the hallways, rugs whose edges are tamped down to prevent trips, and a bar furnished with armchairs instead of teetering stools. In apartments, Alexa reacts to voice commands to raise shades, read out the weather, or turn off lights. A tech specialist can help you set it up or assist you with the computer, and a receptionist downstairs is more of a concierge who can be tasked with booking theater tickets, restaurant reservations, or a ride anywhere in Manhattan; the fee is included along with daily housekeeping, use of a 1,500-square-foot gym and spa, and dining at three on-site restaurants (room service goes until ten, but if a resident wants to order a steak at 2 a.m., staff will help them find a local restaurant to deliver it). All this comes at a cost: A one-bedroom starts at $15,600 a month.

Schrader mockingly describes the aesthetic of his apartment as "Wayfair modern." But he's made it his own. The shelves are stuffed with awards (his Spike of Honor from Valladolid, a Golden Lion) and books (a signed copy of Revolutionary Road). In a bin in the hall are copies of the script he's planning to shoot this summer with Gere. ("My Ivan Ilyich," Schrader calls the project.) In early March, he had a party — a sort of announcement that he was back in the city in the neighborhood where, more than 20 years ago, he had shot Light Sleeper. "I thought it's very cool to live in Alphaville," he says, referencing Godard's 1965 sci-fi film. He invited 80 people, colleagues and critics and friends, and all of Coterie's residents. The party spilled over from the Brass Room restaurant to a lounge outfitted with a player piano and down the hall past Coterie's private theater. In that small dark room, Schrader played a single film on loop: Chilly Scenes of Winter, a 1979 romance starring Hurt in her early 30s, around the time they met. It's his favorite movie of hers.

[WorldForgot]

Wow. That's beautiful, graceful.

[wilder]

Paul Schrader Wants to Make Another Movie
By Alex Abramovich
The New Yorker, May 1, 2023



His new film, "Master Gardener," completes a trilogy that began with "First Reformed." But the writer-director is no longer content with it being his last.

Paul Schrader is seventy-six years old, compact, pugnacious. When production on his film "The Card Counter" was interrupted by the arrival of the pandemic, he took to Facebook and railed against the movie's producers. "I would have shot through hellfire rain to complete the film," he wrote. "I'm old and asthmatic, what better way to die than on the job?"

Last year, he came close to getting his wish. He was in New Orleans, working on his new movie, "Master Gardener." First, the retina on his right eye detached. Without surgery, he risked damaging his vision permanently. Afraid he'd never get the movie off the ground if he stopped for an operation, he bought an eye patch instead. Then, in the middle of filming, he started gasping for breath. covid tests came back negative, so he got a nebulizer and an oxygen tank. When production wrapped, he celebrated at Teddy's Juke Joint, outside Baton Rouge. The next morning, he flew home to New York.

Schrader was living in a brown shingled house on the edge of a man-made lake in the Hudson Valley. Near the driveway was a greenhouse he'd built for his wife, the stage and screen actress Mary Beth Hurt. She and Schrader have two children, Molly and Sam, both in their thirties, and Molly, who was living in Queens, had come to stay with her mother, who has Alzheimer's, while Schrader was on location. When he got back from Louisiana that night, his breathing was shallow; the next day, they had to call 911. He had contracted walking pneumonia.

He spent a week in the hospital, watching old movies on cable and posting to Facebook. "ambien dreams," he wrote, several days in:

Woke up in hospital room 3am this morn in a TOTAL panic. I was directing a sequence about an emergency room rescue. I was the patient. I could not get anyone at the hospital to help me or take me seriously. "He's gonna die!" I screamed for help—finally hospital workers came into my room. I begged for help. Gradually it became apparent that I was in a waking dream state and the staff calmed me down and got me back into bed. Adam Driver was there. "Fuck it," he said. "I'm outta here" and left. My chest was in pain. My blood pressure was 190/60. The staff got me on oxygen and I realized what had happened.

He was sent home later that day, a Friday. On Monday, he began editing his movie.

Schrader makes the sort of serious, character-driven films that always seem to be going out of fashion. He is perhaps best known for his screenplays for Martin Scorsese—"Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" among them—but he has made more than twenty films of his own, including "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters," "Light Sleeper," and "Affliction." His greatest commercial success, "American Gigolo," from 1980, with a young Richard Gere in Armani, helped set the tone and the look of the decade that followed.

Many of these movies feature an archetype Schrader calls "God's lonely man," or "the man in the room." Solitary, obsessive, in turmoil, this man writes in a journal and waits, trying not to boil over. Invariably, something terrible happens. Over the years, the character has been a cabbie, a sex worker, a drug dealer, a card sharp. In "First Reformed," from 2017, Ethan Hawke played him as a tormented pastor. Schrader had gone through years when his movies were panned or ignored, but that film attracted a passionate audience, who responded not only to its moral seriousness and its anxiety over climate change—the pastor counsels a would-be environmental terrorist—but to its depiction of Schrader's central theme, loneliness.

Then came covid-19. When movie theatres reopened, Schrader was in vogue. In New York, his films enjoyed a series of revivals. "Blue Collar," from 1978, screened at Film Forum in a run that was extended three times. "Light Sleeper," "Mishima," "Cat People," "Hardcore," and "American Gigolo" played at repertory theatres packed with people in their twenties. Perhaps, during lockdown, the idea of a man losing his mind in a room by himself had become more relatable.

Schrader was ready to screen a rough cut of "Master Gardener"—the third film in a trilogy that began with "First Reformed"—two weeks after leaving the hospital. He assembled a sympathetic audience in a private screening room and took a seat in the last row, so that he could gauge everybody's reactions. "This movie is going to piss people off," he said. "There are a number of hot-button issues."

Schrader's gardener, Narvel, played by Joel Edgerton, is a former white supremacist—as we learn when he takes off his shirt, revealing a raft of horrifying tattoos. The movie pairs him, awkwardly, with a young Black woman, Maya, played by Quintessa Swindell. Maya is the niece of the gardener's boss, played by Sigourney Weaver. Narvel becomes Maya's mentor, and then her lover. The film builds to a violent climax, then ends on a gentle note of grace.

"I need a moment to process," someone said when the lights came back on. She felt that the ending, in particular, had been too sentimental.

"How about the white-pride reveal?" Schrader asked. "Did that come as a surprise to you?"

"I have no context," she said, "for what a white-pride reveal would be."

He did his best to explain. The questions he fielded were smart; a few were quite helpful. But the consensus was that the film fell flat. When Schrader had screened his previous two movies, he knew right away that they worked. With this one, he wasn't so sure. Andrew Wonder, a filmmaker and a former assistant of Schrader's, said he felt as if he'd been watching several movies at once. As the audience filtered out, Schrader leaned over and asked him, "How much trouble am I in?"

Schrader is gruff. He is somewhat flamboyant—he likes fine things and first editions, wears a gold Rolex and several rings, and, on festive occasions, favors a jacket with Western trim and yellow piping—but he is not effusive. (Willem Dafoe, a frequent collaborator and fellow-Midwesterner, told me, "In some ways I feel very close to him, and in some ways I don't know him at all.") He is impish and ornery, a handful. Three times, when he's had a film coming out, the distributors have asked him to stop posting on Facebook, where he has a tendency to make impolitic comments, such as suggesting that he wanted to cast Kevin Spacey, an accused sexual predator, in a new project: "I believe there are crimes in life but no crimes in art," Schrader wrote. (Spacey has denied the allegations against him.)

Schrader completed his first script, "Pipeliner," in 1971, when he was twenty-five and living in Los Angeles. He described the broad strokes: "A kid whose life doesn't work out in California goes home to Oil City, Michigan, which is a real place, to work on a pipeline, which I used to do, because he has been diagnosed with a terminal affliction. He thinks this has given him the license to behave as he chooses. And he screws up the life of the girl who loves him. He screws up the life of an old guy, a friend of the family. And he doesn't die! He goes back to wallow in his own narcissistic demise and in fact just creates suffering for other people."

It didn't sell. His first marriage collapsed. He started living out of his car, a white Chevy Nova, and spent his time alone, in seedy places. "The porn theatres on Santa Monica Boulevard, in that stretch going west from La Cienega, were open for twenty-four hours," he told me. "You could go up in the balcony and sleep if you ignored certain sights and smells around you." He ended up in the emergency room with a bleeding ulcer and the realization that the only people he'd spoken with in a long while had been liquor-store clerks. "I was in the hospital when the metaphor came to me. A taxicab, like a yellow coffin floating around in the city." He wrote two drafts of a screenplay in two weeks, drinking whiskey mixed in with Mylanta.

Schrader wrote every scene from the perspective of his taxi-driver, Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro. The idea was to encourage identification by starving the audience of other inputs; by the time we understand that the man in the room is psychotic, it's too late for us. We're trapped. "It's a perverse trick that Schrader's very, very good at," the filmmaker Richard Linklater told me. "He's the master, pulling you into someone's life. Getting you to feel for them as a human being. And then they shoot up the place." Linklater was a college dropout in Houston, working on oil rigs off the Gulf Coast, when he saw "Taxi Driver," at a repertory theatre. The next day, he drove out to some land his family had in East Texas. "I remember just hiking through the woods. Beautiful nature, big thickets, and I was on the streets of Manhattan. I couldn't get out of that movie," he said. "I couldn't get out of that headspace for, it felt like, days. I don't know if I've ever been affected so much by a movie."

It was a common experience. "People forget," Bruce Springsteen, another Schrader fan, told me. "At that time, 'Taxi Driver' was 'Jaws.' Everyone in America went to see it. That feeling of someone speaking to us was unique. If you were a product of the fifties, and a deeply religious background, an Italian background—or even an Irish background, which is my neighborhood—it cut through so many existential issues you didn't even realize you were dealing with, but you were. The film was incredibly important. It was an amazing event in my friends' lives."

Schrader and Springsteen—who can quote the last lines of "Blue Collar" by heart—share certain themes: isolation, entrapment, escape. The men they write about could be brothers. A few years after "Taxi Driver," Schrader wrote a partially autobiographical script and asked Springsteen to play the lead. Springsteen declined, but he liked the title: "Born in the U.S.A." He nicked it, and, in return, wrote Schrader a song called "Light of Day." Schrader retitled his script accordingly and cast Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett. Like a lot of critics, he was disappointed with the result. "It just never worked," he said.

Schrader hit the road as soon as the "Taxi Driver" script was finished. He was in Winston-Salem when he got a letter from his brother, Leonard. Older than Paul by two years, Leonard had gone to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and then to Kyoto, to escape the draft. In Japan, Leonard's life fell apart, too. "He lost his marriage," Schrader says. "Lost his job. His health declined, and he took to watching Toei films, which were the real, hard-core, genre yakuza movies." Leonard described them to his brother, who saw commercial potential and pitched the idea for a script to an agent. He and Leonard wrote "The Yakuza" together. Like "Taxi Driver," it drew on John Ford's Western "The Searchers," telling the story of an American veteran who served in Japan and must return to rescue a friend's kidnapped daughter. The script got sixteen bidders at auction and sold for more than any studio had ever paid for a screenplay.

Schrader became a hot property. He wrote in the evenings—one screenplay after another, for Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Joan Tewkesbury (one of the only women to direct a Hollywood movie in the seventies)—and spent Sundays at a house that his friends, the producers Michael and Julia Phillips, were renting north of Malibu. Spielberg, De Palma, and Scorsese were all regulars there. Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne lived up the hill and could see the house from their terrace. Didion said she could imagine all of Los Angeles being powered by the ambition she saw there. "We were all teeth and elbows," Schrader says. "We were all fighting for every inch of territory we could."

As a kid, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Schrader was always brawling. "You would have all this ad-hoc football you'd play," he says. "I remember going down, hitting people as hard as I could, and getting an asthma attack. I would lay on the ground, wheezing until I could get my breath back—and then going back and bam. I guess that's just temperament." He barrelled through Hollywood, too, adopting a wild-man persona, playing with guns, and practicing a discipline he called "fucking up," as in up the food chain. "If you're going to get anything done in this business, you've got to start fucking up," he explains. "Don't talk to anybody unless they can do something for you. Don't waste your time on losers. That kind of thing. Obviously, it creates a bad impression. But there's hardly anybody who's been a success in this kind of atmosphere who doesn't believe that."

For some, Schrader's persona was part of his appeal. I asked Scorsese how much of it was a bluff. " 'Bluffing' implies inauthenticity," he said. "For us, the construction of personae was a kind of by-product of the fact that we were filmmakers. In other words, it was always in the service of getting our films made." He added, "Paul had his troubles, and he led a complicated life. So did I. We both went to extremes—just extremes of a different nature. All I know is he was the only one I could talk to about matters of the spirit, matters of existence, of faith. I think we shared that."

Schrader's mother, Joan Fisher, was raised on the family farm in Muskegon, attending Christian Reformed services. She met Charles Schrader at Herpolsheimer's, a department store, where they both worked as clerks, and converted him to Calvinism. Charles took to it with a fervor, though his dreams of becoming a seminarian were derailed by the Great Depression. He became an executive at an oil company instead, running pipelines from Canada to Ohio, but in the basement of their house there was always a room dedicated to his theological library. Paul and Leonard did their homework there, seated at desks that faced each other. Charles hoped they would grow up to be ministers. When Paul was eight, he copied the Book of Genesis out, line by line, on a yellow legal pad, filling forty-two pages and getting as far as Chapter 17—because, he says, he wanted to "own" the words.

Belonging to the Christian Reformed Church meant professing belief in the total depravity of humankind, through original sin, and in the impossibility of being good apart from God's grace; it was the height of vanity to think that one's actions could lead to salvation. Schrader and his first wife, Jeannine Oppewall—who also grew up in the church and met Schrader at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids—have identical, not quite canonical versions of Isaiah 64:6 stuck in their minds: "My best works are like filthy rags in the sight of the Lord." Although man had free will, it was impossible for him to choose or work toward salvation, because God had already selected the saved.

Schrader found this troubling, because it seemed to leave no room for personal determination: how do you have free will, he wondered, when, in fact, you don't? There seemed to be no escape from God's sight and judgment, from his own guilt and shame. Max Weber wrote that the doctrine produced a "feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness," and that work, though it would never be sufficient, was the only available consolation for its adherents. Growing up, Schrader went door to door selling marigolds, petunias, and tulip bulbs his uncles grew on the family farm. He carried crates of soda-pop bottles, and unloaded freight cars, hauling hundred-pound sacks of potatoes. He worked in a furniture factory—the same one that he later filmed in his movie "Hardcore." But none of the work brought him closer to God.

When the time came for him to make a public profession of faith, at sixteen, he told the minister that he couldn't. The minister spoke to Schrader's father. It was decided that, on Friday nights, instead of going out with friends, Schrader would sit with a church elder discussing religious concerns. After two weeks of this, he relented and agreed to make his profession. "I remember standing there in front of the congregation, thinking, I don't believe a word of this," he says.

If Schrader's own life were a movie, the next scene would show his escape, into the world of the movies themselves. But the Christian Reformed Church grouped moving pictures in with other forbidden "worldly amusements," such as card playing, dancing, and pop music. Schrader knew about rock and roll; his mother had caught him listening to Pat Boone in the basement and had smashed the radio against a wall. The movies were harder to get to. One afternoon, he took a bus downtown, snuck into the old Majestic Theatre, and watched one: "The Absent-Minded Professor," about the invention of something called flubber. "What is this all about?" Schrader recalls thinking. "Why all the drama?" Later he would dine out on the story. His friends and competitors in Hollywood grew up obsessively watching and making movies, but he hadn't, and when he had finally seen one he was unimpressed.

That changed when Schrader arrived at Calvin College, on the other side of Grand Rapids. A neighborhood movie theatre started showing films by Ingmar Bergman, and he was hooked: Bergman seemed to be asking the same theological questions that Schrader had been wrestling with. He began to write about movies, joining the editorial staff of The Chimes, Calvin's student-run paper. He started a film club, renting 16-mm. prints from Janus Films and arranging post-screening panel discussions with professors and pastors. He screened Robert Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest" and Carl Dreyer's "Ordet," and caused a minor scandal with a showing of Luis Buñuel's "Viridiana."

Schrader likes to say that he got out of Grand Rapids "the same way a bullet gets out of a gun." The actual path was more circuitous. He spent the summer of 1967 in New York, taking film classes at Columbia. One evening, at a bar in Morningside Heights, he was reading Pauline Kael's first book, "I Lost It at the Movies," and he struck up a conversation with another patron, Paul Warshow, whose father was the late critic Robert Warshow. Warshow knew Kael; he brought Schrader to her apartment the next day. "Sitting around an oak table, beneath a spider-patterned Tiffany lamp, we ate and drank and argued," Schrader later recalled. He slept on the sofa. In the morning, Kael said, "You don't want to be a minister. You want to be a film critic. We are going to keep in touch." For years afterward, Schrader sent her everything he wrote. She offered to help him get into film school, and he started at U.C.L.A. in the fall of 1968.

After Oppewall got her graduate degree, at Bryn Mawr, she joined him in California. She told me that she and Schrader "used each other to escape the gravitational pull of the Christian Reformed Church." They married and settled in Hollywood, in a three-bedroom bungalow on Sycamore Avenue. The back yard was dominated by a half-dead grapefruit tree whose fruit was so sour it was inedible. "We were kids," Oppewall told me, "and had no idea how to take care of a yard, and no interest in it." Schrader made a student film, now lost, about a Maoist cell that takes over the radio station at U.C.L.A. With Kael's help, he got a job as a film critic at the Los Angeles Free Press, where he wrote about "Belle de Jour," "Midnight Cowboy," and "The Wild Bunch." He met Hitchcock, Renoir, and Peckinpah. He was fired for panning "Easy Rider"—not a popular take with the alt-weekly's staff—and then hired to edit Cinema, a vanity publication that became serious under his watch. He wrote a book, "Transcendental Style in Film," that is still read by film students.


A young Schrader standing in his father's shadow in Grand Rapids, Michigan

One day, Schrader went to visit Charles and Ray Eames at their famous design studio in Venice, hoping to interview them for Film Quarterly. Oppewall, who had been teaching in Watts, came along and ended up quitting her job to work for the Eameses. She later became a production designer, collaborating with Spielberg and Curtis Hanson and earning four Academy Award nominations. (Schrader has one, for writing "First Reformed.") The encounter changed his life, too. "Eames was my first insight into the poetry of images," he told me one afternoon at the lake house. Schrader's dogs, Harley and Tick, were darting in and out of the room. Hurt wandered in to poke around in the fridge. He put a mug down on the kitchen table.

"Coffee cup," he said. "Two words, three syllables. That is a verbal code for many things, all of which are coffee cups." Schrader pointed at the mug: "This is not a 'coffee cup,' except in verbal code. It is what it is: an object, an image. It's an idea." He picked the mug up and held it away from himself at an angle. "That's another idea. Move the image, the object, and you have another idea. Shift your perspective: another idea. As you move or the light moves, the geometry changes. This was something I'd never come across when I was growing up."

Schrader has been in and out of psychoanalysis; he views filmmaking as a form of therapy. "Taxi Driver" is a case in point. "I realized, if I wrote that guy, I wouldn't have to be him," he says. Schrader is not the man in the room. ("He's me without brains," he told Kael, about Bickle.) But, in weird, unpredictable ways, there is blurring and bleed-through between them.

"Let me tell you a story," Ethan Hawke said. "I can't read without my glasses. I really can't see at all. And we're doing this scene—it's outside, there's a crowd. My character's reading Scripture, and he's got a Bible. So, instead of memorizing the lines, I had printed them out in a bigger font and stuck them inside of the Bible. Just as we're about to start shooting, Paul runs up to me. He takes the Bible away and puts another one in my hand. I open it up: 'Merry Christmas—From Mom & Dad, Grand Rapids, 1959.' Of course, the rest of it's too small to read. But if you ask me, How personal do I think these films are? That's how personal."

As the years passed, Schrader tried to envision happier endings for the man in the room. Time and again, he lifted the last scene of "Pickpocket," Bresson's 1959 movie about a young man who has never felt human connection. The character ends up behind bars. When Jeanne, a woman who loves him, visits the prison, he cracks and allows her to reach him. Physically, he's imprisoned, but spiritually and emotionally he's been set free. "Oh, Jeanne," he says. "What a strange path I had to take to come to you."

"American Gigolo," "Light Sleeper," and "The Card Counter" end on the exact same note. ("Cat People," Schrader's stylish, slightly unhinged remake of Jacques Tourneur's nineteen-forties horror movie, also recycles the ending, albeit with a zoological twist.) These films about men on the margins, trying to find a way back in, are like a puzzle that Schrader can't quite give up on or solve. He says that the problem he's addressing in his most recent films is "despair and acceptance." But, with "Master Gardener," Schrader wanted to move the man in the room to the other side of the bars—to free him once and for all. He recut and rescreened the movie several times. Every edit improved on the first, but the film was still missing something. What it was missing, he decided, was a clear sense of Maya's inner life.

The female characters in Schrader's films, Sigourney Weaver told me, "are the answer, somehow. They are able to convert the violence, the cost to the human soul, into something ecstatic and glorious." For the same reason, these women are also at risk of becoming symbols. With Maya, Schrader thought the solution was to give her more of a voice. "I needed a scene that would show her anger and assertiveness," he said. In the spring, he wrote one: a fight between Swindell and Edgerton. "If they bring it," Schrader said of Swindell, who is nonbinary, "the movie will work." In order to shoot the scene, he would need to raise money, get the actors back together, hire a crew. It took a month. In the meantime, he wrote another script, about a trauma nurse, called "Amber Light."

Before the pandemic, Schrader had a standard routine when beginning a screenplay. He'd tell the germ of a story out loud; if the tale held a small group's attention for ten minutes, he'd go home, write it down with more detail, and run through the process again. He'd get up to twenty minutes, then forty-five. If the story still kept people interested, he'd set it all down on a legal pad, devoting a handful of words and a time stamp to every scene he envisioned. These final outlines are dense, uniform—almost without exception, they fit onto one page—and visually striking, like mathematical proofs. "Paul's writing is all about concision," Scorsese told me. "Everything counts, there's not a word out of place, and all the parts work together like a Swiss watch." Scorsese cited that precision as the reason he and Schrader eventually stopped collaborating—he had "evolved into a different kind of storytelling," he said, making movies that were "more like frescoes that keep widening, encompassing, and gathering more and more."

Schrader's papers, which are held at the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, contain ideas and outlines for dozens of movies that never got made, including other Scorsese projects—most notably, there is a full script for "Gershwin," a life of the composer, written with De Niro in mind. In 1998, De Niro approached Schrader with another idea. "Dear Marty," Schrader wrote to Scorsese afterward, "I've had a day to ponder that peculiar lunch yesterday with Bob. It seems he actually is talking about something like 'Travis Bickle 25 years later,' which we both agree is a terrible idea." A week later, he reconsidered: "After deciding not to think about De Niro's Taxi Driver suggestion, an idea unexpectedly popped into my head: Theodore Kaczynski."

The ideas still come, at all hours. During the time that it took him to make "Master Gardener," Schrader pitched two television series—one set in Biblical times and the other set, atypically, in the future. (Schrader has never made a sci-fi film, though he did write the first full draft of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," for Spielberg, who had envisioned a Watergate movie with aliens and hated the screenplay.) The trauma-nurse script was another departure. For the first time, he had imagined the man in the room as a woman.

On a drizzly morning in June, two trucks, a trailer, and a fifteen-person passenger van pulled into the parking lot of the Jacob Burns Film Center, in Pleasantville, about half an hour south of the lake house. The actors arrived an hour later, Edgerton clean-shaven and purposeful in khaki pants and a flat cap, Swindell in paint-spattered jeans and Chuck Taylors. Schrader, all in black, nibbled on a blueberry muffin, which he put down before taking the actors into a side room.

Alan Poul, a director and producer who worked on "Mishima" and "Light of Day," describes Schrader as a man who gets what he needs and moves on—he is not a perfectionist, Poul said, "in the vein of obsessively trying things a million ways and shooting twenty takes sometimes just to exhaust the actors." Still, Schrader will go to considerable lengths to get a performance. He tells a story about working with James Coburn and Nick Nolte on "Affliction," which he adapted, in 1997, from a novel by Russell Banks. Coburn plays a dominating, alcoholic father, Nolte his son. Schrader knew that Coburn had a tendency to coast on his voice. "Nick will get very intense on you," he warned him. "He may bust you. And, if he does, I won't defend you." "I get it," Coburn said. "You mean like real acting? No one asks. But I can do that." Then shooting began and, sure enough, Coburn started leaning on his voice. Schrader invited him to his hotel room and had him read all his lines in falsetto. "He was a man's man," Schrader told me. "A baritone. And if he's hiding behind his voice, and I take it away, he's got to find some new place to hide. And that's going to be inside his character." Echoes of the falsetto readings made it into the film; Coburn won his first Oscar.

Swindell told me that they and Schrader talked for hours about the script, going over it line by line and discussing the meaning of redemption and whether people change. At Jacob Burns, they had time to ease into the scene. Schrader was filming in front of a green screen, which meant that he had to shoot several takes, from several angles. Swindell shouted. They whacked a glass of water to the floor. They stormed off, again and again. Some of the readings were intense, others more fragile. Schrader hadn't meant to wear them down by shooting excessively, but the effect was the same, and it worked. Swindell brought it, he said.

There was time for an additional shot, a wordless scene that conveyed a bit more of Maya. To create the effect Schrader wanted, a team of electricians put a blind up on two lighting stands, then attached a five-thousand-watt tungsten bulb to a dolly's pneumatic boom arm, which moved up and down: car headlights coming through a window, via movie magic. Swindell sat, silently, while shadows passed across their face and shoulders. The scene re-created a famous shot from "American Gigolo," which had itself been a quote from one of Schrader's favorite films, Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist." "I needed something to give the idea of change," he said. "So, I rolled up the light on Quintessa. I did that Bertolucci thing, and it became an idea. What is the idea? When you put it into words, Quintessa's rethinking the relationship. They're wondering, 'What am I going to do?' But that pales beside the image of it."

Schrader sat down with the new footage early last summer. He was pleased, but there was still work to be done—C.G.I. shots to be inserted, colors to correct, sounds to mix. Devonté Hynes, who performs as Blood Orange, was writing a score, and Schrader had found a ballad, by the Kentucky songwriter S. G. Goodman, that he wanted to run over the closing credits. "I never want to leave this world," the song begins, "without saying I love you."

He spent a week in a midtown studio working with Hynes, playing Words with Friends on his phone during the lulls. Schrader has multiple games going, with multiple novelists. (I asked him how he does. "I win," he said. George Pelecanos told me that Schrader's lifetime record against him is 382–312.) By the end of July, "Master Gardener" was complete. The Venice International Film Festival asked to host the première, out of competition. The organizers also wanted to give Schrader a lifetime-achievement award. In the past year, festivals in Sarajevo, Kerala, Transylvania, and Victoria, British Columbia, have all reached out to him, but Venice, the oldest film festival in the world, was different.

The recognition would have seemed improbable at various points in his career. He'd endured his share of dry spells, long periods when the phone didn't ring. Quentin Tarantino was at Sundance in 1992, with "Reservoir Dogs," which became the talk of the festival, when "Light Sleeper" had its première. He was struck by how little attention the movie got. "I liked it so much," he says. "But I remember feeling sorry for Paul a little bit, because I felt that the critical community was taking him for granted. He had been around a long time. And then he came out with this really interesting movie. And no one cared."

Schrader got covid in August and nearly had to bow out of Venice, but he was determined to go. When he arrived in the city, he looked around and saw ghosts everywhere: critics, agents, directors he had come up with, now gone. Hurt was back at the lake house with a caretaker and Molly. But there he was, flanked by his stars on the red carpet. Scorsese recorded a tribute for the ceremony, and when it was Schrader's turn to give a short speech, he referenced the song he had used at the end of the movie. "I used to be an artist who never wanted to leave this world without saying 'Fuck you,' " he said. "And now I'm an artist who never wants to leave this world without saying 'I love you.' " He brought the award home in his checked luggage and put it on his bookshelf.

Schrader was having trouble breathing again. The next day his primary-care doctor told him to go to the hospital. The day after that, his pulmonologist said the same thing. Schrader packed a bag. After lunch and Martinis at his go-to spot, an Asian bistro in a nearby mall, his assistant drove him to the hospital, where he spent the next thirteen days.

He was discharged in time for the North American première of "Master Gardener," at the New York Film Festival, in early fall. It played to a sold-out house at Lincoln Center; there was knowing laughter when the film opened on yet another man in a room writing in yet another journal. But the occasion was bittersweet: the next day, on the way to a packed Q. & A. at the Walter Reade Theatre, Schrader told me that the time had come to place Mary Beth in memory care. Molly had first noticed something amiss with her mother in 2014. At Christmas that year, Schrader turned to Molly's then husband and said, "She's different, isn't she?" He said she was. "And I knew it," Schrader said. "I knew it."

Before he met Mary Beth, in the early eighties, Schrader had wrecked his life completely—"self-immolated," he says. His taste for alcohol dates back to Grand Rapids: "I found that there were all these little people who lived in the typewriter. But you had to offer them something before they came out. You'd offer them a little alcohol and caffeine and tobacco, and they'd come out and play." On the set of "Blue Collar," he had been introduced to cocaine. One night, a producer came into the office and said, "Here, this will help you work longer." At first, it took Schrader a week to go through a quarter of a gram; by 1981, he was using five grams a week. That year, while filming "Cat People," he had an affair with the lead, Nastassja Kinski, ruining a relationship with a woman he'd dated for several years and planned to marry. He went home and asked his fiancée for forgiveness. She granted it. Then the phone rang. "It was Nastassja in Paris. She said, 'I miss you, why don't you come over?' I went straight to the airport."

The affair fizzled, inevitably. He left L.A. for New York, thinking he could rid himself of his drug friends. "I came here and guess what? I made new drug friends." A publicist introduced him to Hurt. "Mary Beth saved me," he says.

She was wry, quick-witted, a little bit dark. Glenn Close, who started her career as Hurt's understudy and became a lifelong friend, told me Hurt had always liked bad boys. "When she married Paul, who was a consummate bad boy," Close said, "I thought, My God, this is not going to work." But, for four decades, Hurt rolled with the punches. Her attitude was the opposite of his Calvinist fatalism. "One thing or another will happen," she would say. "Then one thing or another will happen." They lived in Rome, Venice, Napa, Marrakech, Bucharest. They bought a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive and threw parties that were attended by movie friends, artists, writers, and musicians. They went to the theatre and the symphony and dined at Elaine's, Raoul's, Da Silvano.

Gradually, that world fell away. In 2019, around Christmastime, Schrader finally moved her into a home. But in the early days of the pandemic the home became a prison, and he brought her back to the lake house.

From the outside, it had always seemed evident that Hurt took care of Schrader. Now that the roles were reversed, friends were moved not just by the depths of his grief but by the degree of his attentiveness. He built her the greenhouse because she loved gardening. Their son, Sam, calls it her memory palace. "My dad wanted to give her a thing to look forward to and do in the winter that was warm inside and engaging," he says. "That turned into a thing with my mom's aides where she can supervise the gardening. They can go in there together and reminisce: 'Oh, tomatoes! I love tomatoes. When I was a kid, we would plant tomatoes.' "

Schrader feels that when he tries to write in a direct way about his family—his parents, his brother—he fails. He needs to come at his life slant. But as I sat through multiple screenings of "Master Gardener," which Hurt has seen but has no memory of seeing, I kept thinking about her greenhouse.

In November, Schrader decided that the screenplay about the trauma nurse, which he had thought would be his next project, wasn't his story to tell. He decided to sell it. "The film-entertainment industry now has many female writers and directors," he said. "I am no more comfortable playing in Jane Campion's yard than I would be in Spike Lee's." Elisabeth Moss plans to direct and star in the movie.

For his next project, Schrader thought of Russell Banks's most recent novel, "Foregone." The book is about a documentary filmmaker in Montreal—Leonard Fife, "the Ken Burns of the North"—who is dying, of cancer, and sits for a series of interviews. It had cinematic potential. In the book, we see the interviews and, in separate sections, the past Fife describes: the time he abandoned his first wife; seduced the wife of a friend; dodged the draft, fleeing to Canada. Half the film would be a monologue, perfect for an aging star. "Anybody from De Niro to Costner," Schrader said. "Maybe even Al," meaning Pacino.

Schrader and Banks had grown close during their work on "Affliction." It was one of Schrader's most personal projects: the portrait of an overbearing father, a submissive mother, and two sons, one more rebellious than the other. Every summer since then, Schrader had driven to Banks's home, in the Adirondacks, to hike, drink (one Martini a night), and tell stories. But, like his character, Banks was struggling with cancer. Last summer was the first one he and Schrader missed. Now Schrader e-mailed him about "Foregone."

The key inspirations for the novel, Banks said, were Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," both of which Schrader read, along with Philip Roth's "Everyman." He rewatched Kurosawa's "Ikiru," Bergman's "Wild Strawberries," John Huston's "The Dead." He told me, "One of the problems when you go down this rabbit hole is you meet up with all the long-ball hitters in the history of art. They're all in the batting cage waiting. Because it's the ultimate long-ball challenge, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Philip Roth, that of the dying man."

Schrader sat down to read Banks's novel, which he'd only glanced at before. Fife's missteps were less serious than he'd realized. To set a movie in motion, Schrader needed crimes, not minor infractions. He e-mailed his friend a series of questions, but Banks, who had weeks, not months, to live, replied that only Schrader could answer them, drawing on his own life. With Christmas nearing, and with Mary Beth's memory palace collapsing around them, Schrader was left with the difficult work of excavating his past and grafting it, somehow, onto Fife's.

He thought about happy trips to see his uncles in Muskegon, their homes "full of light, full of people." He recalled his mother, who had been joyous, and his father, forever scarred by the Depression, cautious to the point of paralysis. He thought about his brother. As a young man, Leonard had wanted to get on a motorbike and go on the road. Charles, their father, put his foot down, and Leonard yielded. Paul never did. At the age of sixteen, Paul went for a drive and came home at midnight, after drinking a beer. Charles was waiting in their darkened kitchen. "He started giving me this shit," Schrader says. "I didn't even think it through—I just hit him. Hit him hard as I could. He went down. He looked up at me and went back to bed. And I thought to myself, Well, you did it, didn't you."

Paul had pushed Leonard around, too. When they sold "The Yakuza," Paul fought to get more recognition: "I said, 'I want to have a career in this business. And I want the script to say written by Paul Schrader, from a story by Leonard Schrader and Paul Schrader.' " He got sole credit. "I did a bad thing," he said. He did it again when they wrote "Blue Collar." He shared the credit on "Mishima," but during the making of the film he'd elbowed his brother aside. "I stole Japan," he told me. "I stole Mishima from him." They had a final falling out a few years later, over a family Christmas; Leonard, at the last minute, refused to attend. He sent Paul a box of presents instead. Paul returned it unopened. "That tears it," he thought. Leonard died in 2006.

In the year that I spent talking to Schrader, most of his memories held up. A few didn't. One day, Schrader recalled that his mother had let him go to the movies, just once, to see "Spartacus." I pointed out that "Spartacus" was released a year before "The Absent-Minded Professor." Perhaps "Spartacus," which ends with a long line of crosses, made for a better story? "When you embellish an origin story," Schrader said, "there is a risk that you believe the embellishments. I have tried rigorously to separate what happened from what I say happened, but it's not always possible."

Russell Banks died on the first Sunday in January. By then, Schrader had started writing the screenplay. (He has since finished it and written another.) With each of his last few films, Schrader has said that he would be at peace if it were his last. "Now I'm going a step further," he told me. "I'm saying, I want there to be one more. I don't want an open-ended deal, just give me one more. Give me 'Foregone.' Give me 'Ivan Ilyich.' Give me the Huston 'Dead' film. Huston made that in a warehouse in Valencia. In a wheelchair. With oxygen." I told Schrader he wasn't there yet. "No," he said. Then he pointed to a tank in the corner of the room. "There's the oxygen."

A few weeks later, Schrader moved Hurt into memory care at a luxury assisted-living facility in Manhattan. In February, he took an apartment two floors above her. In March, Richard Gere signed on to play Fife. Forty-four years after they made "American Gigolo" together, it felt like the closing of a circle. Schrader would make at least one more movie, about a man whose past was also his own.

"You never get out," Springsteen told me. "You get out sort of. But what you forget is how much the past feels like home. No matter what it was like, you know? You're moved to move away from it. And then you're also obsessed. Artists are always trying to figure things out. They can't stop. Those are the people we're interested in." Schrader was one of those people. "Every artist has one story to tell," Springsteen said. "Over and over and over and over and over and over again. It varies, it changes, it shifts a little bit. If you're doing it correctly, it morphs every time you tell it. More information is revealed. At the same time, you're still rooted in where you came from. That's just us."