IfOh, Canadawere to be his last, he says, Its a good last one.
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A couple of years ago, Paul Schrader was convinced he was dying.
Thats sort of what talking to Schrader can be like.
He loves discussing serious, existential subjects, but he always seems to do it with a chuckle.
ForOh, Canadas opening, he even hosted a screening of the film for some of his fellow residents.
(Coterie has a screening room that might put some Manhattan venues to shame.
Through it all, Schrader continues to work at a furious pace.
Any number of actors could knock this out of the park, but youve seen them do it.
You need a hook, to catch peoples attention.
I was thinking,Richards never played old.
(2) Will I get an answer in a week?
(3) Do you understand my financial parameters?
And if I dont get three yeses, I dont send a script.
So I never sent him a script.
And after he agreed to doOh, Canada, I reminded him of that conversation.
I said, Youre going to find out now.
You probably helped create some of those mannerisms withAmerican Gigolo.Yeah.
He very quickly understood that was the instruction.
You would have to do that maybe once a day, maybe every other day.
Hes always been such a physical actor.Yeah, the walk, the strut, the swagger … And he welcomed it, because people were getting a hermetic idea of what a Richard Gere role was.
The buzz factor had gone down.
So him playing aged and infirm theres going to be a buzz.
In fact, it was harder to make him look 80 than it was to make him look 40!
That had to do with the color of his skin.
Tan as a mailman!
He said to me, Im always the reddest person onscreen.
I remember one day on the set, he said to me, This is really fun.
I forgot how much I liked it.
And I realized that he hadnt been working that much.
Soon afterward, he accepted a ten-episode thing.
This is a problem many actors run into after a certain age.
But after a certain age, the great roles really start to dry up.
Yet you have to keep working.Also you had to deal with the devil.
The devil was namedMike Ovitz.
Mike had a scheme.
He would find something that an actor or a client liked.
Marty was good at preservations.
And somebody else was paintings.
With Bobby, it was real estate.
What do you do when you need money?
You work for it.
Oh my God, I just got the film for you.
Its not a great film, but its a great paycheck.
Thats how Mike would trap these guys into doing it.
He tried to sign me, but I didnt go for it.
And I said to his office, I just met with him.
I dont want to be with him again.
They said, Mike is asking you to sit with him at a Lakers game.
Yeah, no, but I dont feel like it.
That was the end of that.
I enjoyed how you used Phosphorescents songs inOh, Canada.
It reminded me of the way you used the Michael Been songs inLight Sleeper.The song cycle.
Originally, I proposed it to Bruce Springsteen.
He said, Thats an interesting idea.
Why dont you send me the script?
Then I hung up the phone and I thought,Wait a second.
I want an anti-anthem of the Canadian national anthem in the film.
Bruce cannot do an anti-anthem.
And what you have now at the end is this dirge and this wavering voice.
It wouldve been cool, but I dont think it wouldve been right for the film.
When you showedOh, Canadaat the New York Film Festival, you got climate protesters.Oh, yeah.
A very brief interruption.
I think it does feel like we got whisked away.
Theres an article in the front of theTimesyesterday about the decrease in grandchildren.
And my kids dont have children.
I dont know if they believe in the future.
I believe in the future.
I dont know if they do, and I dont know if they have reason to.
I know thats an important film for you.The Conformistfor me is a lodestone.
Youll find something fromThe Conformistin everything I do because I think its a foundational film.
But that idea of the flexible time frame, its getting very common.
Last night, I was watchingLincoln Lawyer the episodic, not the Matthew McConaughey one.
Its just lingua franca now.
Thats a bit of a departure for you, at least in your recent work.
Generally, your movies tend to be fairly linear.Yeah, I call them monoscopic.
Its a mosaic of the book, mosaic structure, likeMishima.
But when you do a complicated style, you have to take a stab at make it simpler.
Thats to make it easier to watch.
you could do that now in a film thats digital, but you couldnt do it withMishima.
When you have a 35-mm.
print, you set the curtain, youre stuck in your aspect ratio, whatever it is.
Now, it’s possible for you to go wherever you want.
Really, there are no rules anymore.
But the rules were never that ironclad, were they?
You guys broke a ton of rules.Well, thats because of the fundamental shift in the industry.
With studio control, they would decide your career for you.
When Billy Wilders career was over, they phased him out.
You knew your career was over when the phone didnt ring.
And if you might still put together a project at the age of 80, you might make it.
They both were tepid, whileEasy Rider, a nothing film, exploded.
Well, the handwriting couldnt be bigger on the wall.
So there was a period there from about 1970 to 79 where the studio executives were floundering.
They knew that the old wheels werent working, but they didnt understand how the new wheels worked.
You could go in there and pitch them and they would be very receptive.
I only care about making money.
This is our lucky day.
Lets make some money together.
And theyll believe you because they want to believe you so much.
Youre telling them a story: Were going to do this kind of film.
Lets doThe Strawberry Statement.
And I remember when it came to an end.
So the message was absolutely clear: We used to not know what we wanted.
We know what we want now.
Were you able to tell at the time that period was ending?
At that time, it was calledBorn in the USAwith Bruce Springsteen.
So I thought, Well, its maybe a good time to go down.
Mary Beth was pregnant, and Tom Luddy said, Come to Japan while shes pregnant.
Itll force everything into action because theyre dragging their feet here.
If she comes over and she cant go back, things will start to happen.
So we went over; my daughter was born there.
I forget what company he was with at the time.
And Mike called me and said, Oh, this is a really great film.
I really loved it.
But you understand, we dont make this anymore.
That simple.We dont make this film anymore.It was that cold.
Around then, you started doing more independent films.
People I very quickly came not to respect myself.
And so that was a mistake.
And then I had this thing withDying of the Light, which I raised the money independently for.
And I wanted to reshoot the ending of that.
We can make 17 percent on our investment.
Why should we reshoot anything?
They were right by that logic, because he wasnt making a movie, he was making an investment.
Thats when I realized that I needed final cut.
Before that, you had kind of a de facto final cut.
So then I switched to final cut, and I used Nic to get me there.
He said, Okay.
Bingo, I had final cut.
And then once you nail it, its harder for them to take it away from you.
MyWinter Light, myDiary of a Country Priest.
I never wrote it because I knew I couldnt sell it.
When I started making movies, the average shooting days were 40, 42; now theyre 20.
My last film was 17.
A few name actors.
And then get that budget way down there.
And they probably are; in other hands, it might be an $8 million film.
Youre making a lot of money right now, making diapers or diaphragms or whatever.
Wouldnt you rather try this?
So thats their payday.
And if they could get made whole, then thats all they really care about.
The problem is loss of faith, and the metaphor is climate collapse.
The problem is midlife crisis, and the metaphor is a drug dealer.
So theres a problem and then theres a metaphor.And then theres a plot.
But you would always add, Well, Im not these people.
Im not a drug dealer.
Im not a gambler.
So that was the distance Russell put between him and the character, which was quite autobiographical.
If you read his autobiography, youll see a lot of the same incidents.
But Ive also never been a documentary filmmaker.
If it had been about a screenwriter, I probably wouldve changed it.
And he sent it to me.
He called it hisIvan Ilyich.
In fact, he hadIvan Ilyichon the desk beside him.
So it became myIvan Ilyich.
I would spend a week during the summer with him.
About two years ago, I called him up and said, Whats a good week this year?
And he said, Not this year.
Ive got cancer, Im taking chemo.
And I knew he had written this book about the death process.
I said, Well, I should read that.
I was thinking of doing something else, and I said, This is what I should be doing.
I should be doing a movie about dying.
Because you cant do a dying movie on your deathbed.
You have to be pretty healthy to make any movie.
Its not like writing your last poem as you die.
So I thought,If youre going to do a dying movie, you better hurry up.
Id had some health difficulties with COVID, bronchial pneumonia, in and out of the hospital.
I actually thought when I was making it,Okay, this is the last one.
Its a good last one.But then I bounced back from that.
So now Im trying to figure out how to make the last, last one.
And maybe after that will be the last, last, last one.
He had been kept from using that title.
You mentioned thatFirst Reformedwas a film youd thought about writing for years but were almost afraid to.
So much of your career, youre working on the stepping stone of a project.
How will this film get me to a next film, a bigger film?
If Im fortunate, Ill make another one just like it.
And Im writing another one of those right now.
I wrote a very nice scene yesterday.
This one is calledThe Basics of Philosophy.
And the narration, the voice-over, is from his book on Spinoza.
Im in touch with Spinoza scholars.
I did the equivalent of a grad-school course on Spinoza in a week.
Now, I have to find his diary voice.
I think thatll be more effective than having it be a straight diary.
Getting back to this idea of why your films resonate so much now with todays viewers.
Later, I discovered that hed owned videos of all my films and my brothers films.
Still in their shrink-wrap.
Ive bought the movies.
I never looked at them.
But I think theres something there that relates to your work and the things youre drawn to.
The struggle to feel like you have a code, or to present yourself as having a code.
Freud said it was five years.
I think its more eight or nine years.
But anyway, that software gets loaded in.
And then your stuff, youve got to run it the rest of your life.
And my software was full of guilt and predestination, original sin and predestination, and we wereguilty.
And anybody can identify with that because its true.
when you obtain that in the back of your head, its always working its way through.
Well, that doesnt leave a lot of room for social improvement.
Its all a career lie.
I did an interview with Richard this morning.
Its almost like we need guilt.
