Paul Schrader

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Paul Joseph Schrader () (born July 22, 1946) is an American screenwriter, film director, and film critic.

Schrader wrote or co-wrote screenplays for four Martin Scorsese films: Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

He has directed 18 feature films, including his directing debut, the crime drama Blue Collar (co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader), the crime drama Hardcore (a loosely autobiographical film also written by Schrader), his 1982 remake of the horror classic Cat People, the crime drama American Gigolo (1980), the biographical drama Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), the true life biopic Patty Hearst (1988), the cult film Light Sleeper (1992), the drama Affliction (1997), the biographical film Auto Focus (2002), the erotic dramatic thriller The Canyons (2013), and the dramatic thriller First Reformed (2017), which earned him his first Academy Award nomination.

Early life and education

Schrader was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the son of Joan (née Fisher) and Charles A. Schrader, an executive. Schrader's family attended the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church. Schrader's mother was of Dutch descent, the daughter of emigrants from Friesland, while Schrader's paternal grandfather was from a German family that had come to the U.S. through Canada.

His early life was based upon the religion's strict principles and parental education. He did not see a film until he was seventeen years old, when he was able to sneak away from home. In an interview he stated that The Absent-Minded Professor was the first film he saw. In his own words, he was "very unimpressed" by it, while Wild in the Country, which he saw some time later, had quite some effect on him. Schrader attributes his intellectual rather than emotional approach towards movies and movie-making to his having no adolescent movie memories.

Schrader earned his B.A. in philosophy with a minor in theology from Calvin College, but decided against becoming a minister. He then earned an M.A. in film studies at the UCLA Film School upon the recommendation of Pauline Kael, who encouraged him to be a film critic.

Schrader first became a film critic, writing for the Los Angeles Free Press and later for Cinema magazine. His book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, which examines the similarities between Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, was published in 1972. Other film-makers who made a lasting impression on Schrader are John Ford, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Alfred Hitchcock, and Sam Peckinpah. Renoir's The Rules of the Game he called the "quintessential movie" which represents "all of the cinema".

Personal life

Schrader battled a severe cocaine addiction, which contributed to his divorce from his first wife, art director Jeannine Oppewall. He then moved from Los Angeles to Japan in hopes of getting his life on track, finally quitting drugs around 1990. His second marriage is to actress Mary Beth Hurt, who has appeared in smaller roles in a variety of his films. Together they have two children, a daughter and a son. In 2012, Schrader participated in the Sight & Sound film polls of that year. Held every ten years to select the greatest films of all time, contemporary directors were asked to select ten films of their choice. Schrader gave the following ten in alphabetical order.

In September 2022, Schrader was hospitalized for COVID-19 and pneumonia which had resulted in "breathing difficulties".

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Film career

Schrader and his brother Leonard co-wrote The Yakuza, a film set in the Japanese crime scene in 1974. The script became the object of a bidding war, ultimately selling for $325,000. Sydney Pollack and starred Robert Mitchum in the film. Robert Towne, the most well-known for Chinatown, was given a nod for his rewrite.

Although The Yakuza's commercially disfunct, it brought Schrader to the attention of the new generation of Hollywood directors. Brian De Palma's script for Obsession was written in 1975. Schrader wrote a early draft of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but Spielberg reacted angrily to the script, calling it "complete guilt-ridden" and opting for something lighter. He also wrote an early draft of Rolling Thunder (1977), which the film's designers had to reworked without his participation. He disapproved of the final film.

Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver, directed by Schrader, was nominated for Best Picture at the Cannes Film Festival and received the Palme d'Or award. Besides Taxi Driver (1976), Scorsese also drew scripts from Schrader's book Raging Bull (1980), co-written with Mardik Martin, The Last Temptation of Christ (1989), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

Schrader's first film, Blue Collar (1978), co-written with his brother Leonard, was partly due to critical acclaim for Taxi Drivers. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto are among the autoworkers struggling to break the vicious cycle of robbery and blackmail in Blue Collar. He has characterized the film as difficult to make because of the artistic and personal tensions between him and the cast. During principal photography, he had an on-set mental breakdown that caused him to rethink his career. John Milius served as executive producer on the following year's Hardcore, a film with many autobiographical similarities in his portrayal of Grand Rapids' Calvinist milieu, and in the character of George C. Scott, which was based on Schrader's father.

Richard Gere (1980), his Cat People (1982), a remake of the 1942 film Cat People (1985), and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) were among Paul Schrader's films in the 1980s. The film, influenced by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, weaves scenes from Mishima's life with dramatizations of portions from his books. At the Cannes Film Festival, Mishima was nominated for the top prize (the Palme d'Or). Executive producers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas were Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.

Patty Hearst (1988), a Schrader aide, narrates Patty Hearst (1988), about the abduction and transformation of the Hearst Corporation heiress. He appeared in 1987 as one of the jury at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival.

The Comfort of Strangers (1990), a self-contained biography of a drug dealer struggling for a normal life, was included in his 1990s collection. Light Sleeper, Schrader's most personal" film in 2005, was described as his "most personal" film. He made Touch (1997), based on an Elmore Leonard book about a young man who seems to be able to heal the sick by laying on of hands, based on an Elmore Leonard book.

Schrader received acclaim for his role in the tragedy Affliction in 1998. The film follows a struggling small town policeman (Nick Nolte) who becomes fixated on finding the truth behind a deadly hunting tragedy. Schrader's script was based on Russell Banks' book The novel was based on Russell Banks' book. Multiple Academy Awards for acting were given to the film, including two Academy Award for Nolte and James Coburn. Schrader received the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award the same year.

The Writers Guild of America presented Schrader with the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1999.

He produced the critically acclaimed biopic Auto Focus, which was based on Hogan's Heroes actor Bob Crane's life and death in 2002.

After being fired from The Exorcist: Dominion, a prequel film to the horror masterpiece The Exorcist from 1973, Schrader made entertainment news in 2003. Morgan Creek Productions and Warner Bros. Pictures were greatly dissatisfied with the film Schrader had made. Renny Harlin was hired to shoot almost the entire film, which was released as Exorcist on August 20, 2004. The Exorcist was released with horribly poor reviews and disgraceful box office receipts. Warner Bros. and Morgan Creek invested over $80 million into the project, but Harlin's film only brought in $41 million domestically. The Exorcist: The Original Prequel, Schrader's version of the film premiered at the Brussels International Film Festival on March 18, 2005. Warner Bros. has decided to make the film Dominion: A Prequel to the Exorcist due to a huge interest in Schrader's version from critics and cinephiles alike. The film was only shown on 110 screens around the country and earned only $251,000. Schrader's version was much better than Harlin's. However, Schrader's film received mainly critical feedback.

Schrader produced The Walker (2004), starring Woody Harrelson as a male escort, as well as the Israeli-set Adam Resurrected (2008), which stars Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe.

Schrader was a member of the International Jury of the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival and in 2011 became a jury member of the continuing Filmaka short film competition. Schrader received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement in Screenwriting award at the ScreenLit Festival in Nottingham, England, on July 2, 2009. Several of his films were shown at the festival, including Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which came after director Shane Meadows' presentation of the award.

Schrader wrote The Canyons (2013), an erotic dramatic thriller written by Bret Easton Ellis and starring Lindsay Lohan and adult-film actor James Deen, after five years of trying and failing to find support for feature films. The film went viral because it was one of the first films to crowd-source funding on Kickstarter. Unknown actors were also encouraged to post their audition tapes over the internet by Schrader's website Let It Cast. Anybody from American Apparel stepped in to provide some costume for the film. Lohan's on-set presence, as well as the film's unusual production route, attracted national attention. The film was ultimately released on August 2, 2013 and had a limited theatrical debut from IFC Films. General critics and viewers were dismissive of the film. The film only grossed $56,000 in theaters, but it later found success when it was released on various Video on Demand platforms.

Anton Yelchin and Irène Jacob produced The Dying of the Sun, an espionage thriller starring Nicolas Cage as a government agent suffering from a deadly disease in 2014. Schrader's producers refused to cut him in post-production. Many film commentators had sluggish reactions towards the film, and it was classified as a box-office bomb. Dying of the Light was converted by Schrader later into a separate, more experimental work Dark, which received more favorable feedback.

First Reformed, starring Ethan Hawke, premiered at the 2017 Venice Film Festival and received critical acclaim. In the category Best Original Screenplay, Schrader received his first Academy Award nomination for the film.

Schrader produced The Card Counter, a crime drama starring Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish in 2021. Critics also lauded the film's premiere at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, which was widely praised by critics.

Master Gardener, Schrader's latest film, stars Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver. It is expected to premiere at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.

Theatre career

Schrader has written two stage plays, including in Berlinale and Cleopatra Club. In 1995 and its first foreign language debut in Vienna in 2011, the latter made its premiere at the Powerhouse Theater in Poughkeepsie, New York.

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