In a nice bit of cinematic serendipity, Paul Schrader’s singular 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters arrives on Blu-ray from Criterion at the same moment that his latest movie, First Reformed, is enjoying a deservedly successful art house run. Mishima remains perhaps Schrader’s most original and idiosyncratic film, which is really saying something; a meditation on the life and writings of Japanese author Yukio Mishima, it’s neither a conventional bio-pic nor a straightforward literary adaptation, though it combines elements of both forms. Schrader, writing in collaboration with his brother Leonard (Kiss of the Spider Woman) and sister-in-law Chieko, […]

Paul Schrader returns to form with a deeply introspective film, First Reformed, which, following screenings in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, screens tonight at the New York Film Festival, where it was a late addition to the program. The writer of films including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of films including American Gigolo and Affliction delivers a new work that both contains echoes of his previous pictures depicting “God’s Lonely Men” while also being quite unlike anything he’s ever done. (Plus, argues Vadim Rizov, something of a treatise on the role of Slow Cinema today.) Ethan Hawke stars as a former […]

In an interview in March, Paul Schrader questioned the ongoing usefulness of Slow Cinema. “It had a real interesting moment in the last 10 years, but now the novelty has worn off, and people are not as mesmerized as they were when the slowness was really being used as a new concept of film time,” he said. “It’s a dead end. […] There are still bits of transcendental style. It was a precursor to slow cinema, but it’s not really that slow. A terrific film like Silent Light is closer to transcendental style than slow cinema, but they lump it in […]

Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1975) is an idiosyncratic but fascinating blend of incongruous tones made all the stranger by the difference in sensibilities among the men behind the camera. The film started as a script by brothers Paul and Leonard Schrader, who sold it for a boatload of cash thanks to the high-concept premise: an ex-soldier from the U.S. travels to Japan and infiltrates the underworld in a mash-up of the American action flick and the Asian martial arts film. Once Pollack came on board to direct the movie became something less commercial but, in its way, more compelling; uncomfortable […]

Last night at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP, Paul Schrader had a conversation with Marc Schiller, as part of the latter’s Future State of Entertainment Speaker Series. Perhaps more than any other director of his generation, Schrader seems to have embraced the democratic technologies available to today’s filmmakers, between crowdsourcing on The Canyons and his recent intent to make a web series. Indeed, if the protest surrounding his latest film is any indication, he may be done with studios for the foreseeable future. Throughout the two hours, Schrader and Schiller covered a variety of topics, from new technologies to the phasing out of […]

Swede: to remake a film with limited resources, cheap effects and obsolete technology, as per Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. The idiosyncratic Frenchman put his own concept to the test with his low-budget re-imagining of Taxi Driver. Upon watching the short, screenwriter Paul Schrader had this much to say: “I always maintained Taxi Driver should never [have a] sequel or [be] remade. Michel Gondry is making me rethink this position.” With Schrader recently dismissing talk of a Lars Von Trier Taxi Driver remake, now is the time to revisit Gondry’s version.

Paul Schrader presented a screening of Taxi Driver in Toronto last weekend and spoke to the capacity audience of 450 at the Royal Cinema for an hour afterwards about his career and the changing state of filmmaking. As part of the Seventh Art Live Directors Series and presented by The Royal, he also showed a scene from his forthcoming The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan. Many in the audience watched Taxi Driver for the first time on the big screen, since many were not even born when the film shocked audiences in 1976. A major critical and box-office success, it launched […]

Over on the Sundance website, Liz Holm — Kickstarter’s Film Program Director, as well as being a film producer in her own right — has a piece up about The Canyons, the collaboration between director Paul Schrader and novelist Bret Easton Ellis. The project is arguably the most high-profile film to turn to Kickstarter for funding and, understandably given the talent involved, it has already surpassed it’s fundraising goal of $100,000. (As I write this, it’s $40,000+ over its target, with 8 days still to go.) What I think is most interesting about Holm’s piece is not so much her […]