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[Paul Schrader] So much of the arts is about
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being the right place at the right time.
I think I've been involved in four great films
and I thank them for extremely good
films and the rest fall behind.
And the great ones are Taxi Driver,
Mishima, Affliction, and, now, First Reformed. Then
they've all come about 20 years apart.
So you think to yourself, if you're a good
artist, why can't you make
something great every time?
Why do you have to wait 20 fucking years before
you're doing again?
Well, that's what it is.
And sometimes you wait 20 years and
you don't ever do it again.
If it's a matter of luck
and preparation and
serendipity.
[Alex Ross Perry] You know, I would argue that
American Gigolo is as great as it gets.
Mean, what's interesting to me as a director
is to keep trying to do
things A.
Could I make a horror film? Could
I make a working class movie?
How do you make a gangster film in 2015?
Could I do a DIY movie? I'm
could I do a spiritual movie?
There always has to be something
that sparks the imagination and a challenge.
Can I do this?
Will I pull this off?
Ethan is a damaged guy
who is sort of on
a certain Diary
of a Country Proest trajectory,
you know, there's a bit of 'Country Priest in
this, a bit Winter Light sort of premise
And then Ordet and then
some of Ida here
as well. Like, you know, winter
like for the young couple comes and the Max Von
Sydow character kills
himself. Well, in this case, the young couple,
the girls pregnant, who's Amanda Seyfried and
her husband wants her to have abortion because
he's an eco warrior or he doesn't believe that he
can bring people into the world with it to be in
the world in 2050.
And and
so they are counseling him, but he kills himself
anyway. And he has a, he
has an explosive vest, which our
character and
starts to take on his personality and
starts working in soup kitchens and
going around with the explosive vest on.
And it's all building to the
250th consecration of the little church, which is
being financed by the big church, which is being financed
by environmental horrors.
So it's ecology
and God. This is literally a pop -- we will
be out of here in a flash.
Ethan is sitting at the
sushi bar with
an insert miso.
So then we're going to cheat him over
there, shoot across him and he's going
to look back and we're gonna find
two.
And Balk and some business
men will be in that both and
throw focus back to that.
And those are the only, the
only shots we need here.
Part of the slow cinema
experience is committing yourself to
the experience.
It's like going to church.
You know, you don't leave halfway through a
service because you think it's boring.
You want a tombstone?
Yeah.
You went you made a commitment and
you're gonna have to stay over so
that when people watch at home, they don't have
quite that sense of
commitment that they do in the theater.
And I've made an effort to go to the
theater.
So it is harder to hold them.
Certain of these slow films
really are designed for museums,
you know, they're installation pieces, you know.
It's such
a tricky balance of how to keep a viewer coming at you, while
you're pushing them away.
Well, we're spending
a lot of time in this room. This is Toller's sort
of monastic cell that the desk he
writes his journal on the bed is
here, mirrors there and
of some shelves with a
little bit of a closet there.
But basically, it's just barren
This room is going to be basically empty.
He lives in that room.
I think we're going to have to take out
that table and I would put a chair in here and
I'm going to be up for this room.
Maybe know maybe something on the walls.
You know, the whole, the whole strategy
behind this film is if it moves
take it away.
So we are dealing
with as many empty spaces as we can.
What set this all in motion.
It's two years ago I had dinner with Pawel
Pawlikowski, who did Ida, you know?
I was talking to him and I had written a
lot in the past about spiritual set among
transcendental cinema.
And I left that dinner with him and I
said, it's time.
Well, I never tried to
work in this field before.
And I said "you're going to be 70 and
it's time you make a film like this." So I
wrote one and then now I'm making it.
Perfect.
Good. It's a good film to make for your last
film.
Is that what this is?
Well, I mean, obviously, when you get to a
certain age, you know, you're always thinking
that.
Yeah.
You know.
You know, if this was it, it's a good place to
stop.
Yeah.
I think it's like that quote from Ride the High
Country. Joel McCrae says to Scott.
He says, "What do you want?"
His character's name is Steve Judd. "What do you
want, Steve?" Steve says, "All I want
is to enter my house.
Justified." So
that's sort of what First Reformed is -- I
guess I'd like to into my house,
justified.
I want, want to walk in, standing upright
and proud of myself.
I don't want to sleek in, Isneak in covered
with grime.
So these are the kind of tableaus in this film
so so
like this is, this is the angle
and this thing goes on for like 10 minutes and
people get up, people leave, bababa like that.
But, no, there are is other cutting.
And it really goes to this whole idea
of putting the onus
on the viewer, what is important to watch,
because obviously editing creates lazy viewing,
because you're being constantly told by the
editor what's important.
OK. This is important, his reaction is more
important than her statement now.
Well, if you feel anything
as a viewer, you sit there and say, well,
that's more interesting.
In 4, 3, 2 ... what's more interesting, the girl
talking about the abortion
or the girl listening to her talk about the
abortion? Because they're both on either side
of the room and we're not
cutting.
And so, you know, you just you track people back
and forth
Dog Eat Dog
before this. Our mantra
was "never be boring." And
the whole film was paced to
never have a dull moment.
And this film is
the opposite because it's boredom
as an aesthetic tool.
And how to use boredom the
same way you use action.
The pace is gonna be so slow
and people are gonna walk slow.
You know, if somebody enters frame right, which
you know, now you're not going
to cut 'til they exit frame left and
they're not going to walk fast.
People don't go to movies to be bored, you
know? So, look, it's a very
delicate little dance.
How do you distance a viewer?
How do you push the viewer away in a way
that makes him lean
in? Just the fact that it's a different format
unsettles the viewer. You get different
freedoms.
Rehearsal. Action.
They shoot a single shot.
I'm not crazy about. They'll
fix this up and we'll shoot it on Tuesday.
What are you doing instead?
We're doing getting them in place and they're
singles.
So you're covering this scene in how many shots?
Four. Establisher to
get them in place, the master, which is really
the main thing.
And wide definition of the singles, which is
right about here.
The Delayed
cut.
You know, normally you cut when the door opens.
Delayed Cut and you cut to the door.
One, two, three. Person walks in, person leaves.
One, two, three.
YOU HOLD. It throws the viewer completely off
because you are not servicing the viewer's
emotional and visual needs anymore.
You're making them stare at this doorway in a way
that they would never stare at it in real life.
Once that person left in real life, they would be
looking somewhere else.
They wouldn't just be standing there looking at
the door.
So you have to withhold
and then give, make a rule, break rule,
you know, and keep them interested with
the belief that it's going to pay off.
How much does an actor withhold?
You know, these movies are
always ... Bresson used Non-Actors, but
they always have restrained performances.
[Scene from Diary of a Country Priest].
When an actor starts showing emotion,
the viewer doesn't have to, you want the viewer
to show that emotion that the actor is showing.
So you keep tampering them
now, pushing them down.
[Scene from First Reformed, Ethan Hawke: "I wish I had not used the word pride.
But I cannot cross it out.
If only I could pray."]
[Paul] You know, this film is full of self
-references as well.
I mean, you know a lot of kids are going to be
able to write their term paper on this
film because it's just full
of references both to my
own work and to work of other filmmakers,
you know?
But what I found in this film is we've had,
I think, maybe four or five Taxi Driver shots
that are right straight out of Taxi Driver and
two of the five was intended to
be a straight out of Taxi Driver. The other three
just fell in because of
the nature of what I was shooting.
I'm shooting Ethan putting on a suicide vest
in front of a mirror and watching him do this
and I said well this is like Travis.
It's the same shot.
The only thing he's not doing twirling the gun.
Ethan's stomach is bothering him, but he's also
a drinker.
The shot where he pours himself some whiskey,
because his stomach is not feeling
well, so he pours Pepto Bismol into
the whiskey.
And then we did a high speed shot like Marty did
in the Alka Seltzer, which was stolen from
Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her.
[Shot from Two or Three Things I Kniw About You]
You do incorporate other people's work because
you know it works.
There was a point in my career where
I can lie and say, you know,
I'm just a carpenter, I'll build anything
you want.
But at this point, no one believes that lie
anymore. I've
gotten into two films now where
I wasn't a good boy.
So I've been here
editing First Reformed
and we're sort done with that.
We locked picture yesterday.
But we're also editing a second film, which I'm
calling Dark.
[Alex] That's incredible, that's great.
[Paul] I didn't realize what technique I should
have been using until I worked with Ben here on
Dog Eat Dog and we
started to do some stuff on Dog Eat Dog. And
I said, you know, that's what I should have been doung on Dying of the Lifgt. So
when the First Reformed came about, which is the
opposite film, a very quiet film, not heavily
involved in gonzo editing. I said to
Ben, you I'll edit First Reformed, but
on the side we will redo Dying of the Light and we'll
call it Dark, a new
film and we'll be editing two contra-posed
movie simultaneously, you
know, doing an
al-right film and an alt-left film at
the same time.
I just always
try to do something new and keep
awake and I
never thought I'd make a spiritual film.
Now I made one. I never thought
I'd make an experimental film.
But now all of a sufden that that's
where this film should have gone.
That's why I just came to realize this film
here is the film I should have been making.
[Scene from Dark]
Five years ago, I was directing a film with
Nic Cage and Anton Yelchin, called Dying of the
Light. I'd
gotten involved with people,
who basically not make movies
and don't like movies and were working
on an economic formula.
And they took the film away from me.
It's about a
man in the CIA who had dementia.
I realized that the film, rather than
have a linear kind of
visual structure, should follow
the arc of his disintegration
and it finally ends up being a Stan Brackhage
film.
Nic Cage stars in a Stan Brackhage movie.
And so I was playing with more and more
experimental elements in the cut.
But I don't know, I still didn't have it.
I'm not complaining. We're not ... we gotta
go further, gotta go further.
I think that's why they took it away from me
because they wanted to go the other
direction.
[Scene from Dark.
Nic Cage: "Everything up here. Rotting. Bit by
bit, it slips away."
[Anton Yelchin] "You've known this?"
[Nic Cage] "I suspected. About a year ago,
something in my head just fell.
By the time you start showing symptoms, the
atrophy has done its damage.
You know, I want to know something.
Were they asking about me?"
"Not to me directly. You're angry?"
"Well, actually, maybe at them.
But this whole damn thing.
Why me?
Why the fuck me? I didn't do anything wrong.
It wasn't like I was butt-fucking chimpanzee
asshole in the Congo and I invented AIDS."
[Paul] Last year, I went to the producers and
offered to reedit it.
Score it. Mix it, all at my own
expense and give them
whatever profits I accrued.
They turned me down.
So
I'm rediting it without permission.
I mean, I don't have access to
the original materials.
I don't have access to the
high rez dailies.
I don't have access to unmixed
footage. All I have is a
three or four C.D.'s of the various
cuts I was working on, which meant that I
had to go more experimental
because all I had
was essentially degraded
materials.
"There is a problem with the toilet."
But if I had the original materials,
I think I would have
been tempted to make a higher quality
film than we are now making.
We're now making a film essentially
for folk.
You know, when this goes
up on screen just really, you know, it's gonna
look like crap.
But fortunately, the story
is being told through the mind of someone
who, whose life
is starting to look like crap.
[Alex] What part of this were you doing now with
this obvious additional documentary
that you're ...?
What this here?
Are you pulling images from this?
Yeah, we're pulling images from this documentary
about the CIA and to
meld them into that
collage of, well, what
happens when an entire lifetime
gets scrambled in front of your eyes.
Now, you're probably going to ask, why would I do
this? Since I have no rights to it, and it can
never be shown. What I'm doing is not illegal.
Well, you can make a match up of one of my films
and I can make a match up of Stanley Kubrick's
film.
That's not illegal.
Soderbergh made the half hour version of Heaven's
Gate. So this is just something that I
could do.
But then on the other hand, I have archives
so I can send this to my archives
and then anyone who
has a reason to see it can write the archive and
see it and I
will have effectively made the hardest film to
see ever.
Also, I have added things that
even though this isn't being made for an audience. You
know, young people are now visually rewired
to actually watch something like this.
Just because of the way that they've grown up
with images every corner of their lives?
Yeah and at such a fast pace and overlapping
images.
So Texi wanted to watch picture and picture.
Was losing control of this movie incredibly
emotionally frustrating
or is it just like ... ?
It changed my life. I've been so creative ever
since. I mean, these people tried to kill me.
I fell into
alcoholism, depression.
I thought, you know.
And
I thought that was it.
And
and then.
And I said to Nic Cage, you know, we
got to work together again and yet we have to
take this, this
thing off of me.
And in that Nietszchean way, because
it didn't kill me. Maybe it's
strong enough to make Dog Eat Dog.
And then I made First Reformed and make this and make things
I'm thinking of.
I also it freed me from
that dreadful group think of commercial
entertainment.
"But that's not what Jesus teaches.
That's not what Jesus lived. There's no dollar
sign on this pulpit. There's
no American flag.
I think, Cynthia, what your
father is experiencing ...".
"Christians shouldn't succeed.
He means Christianity is
for losers."
"Jake. Jake, I just get tired of turn the
other cheek. Jesus didn't turn the other cheek,
why stand for anything?"
You know, it's part of the editorial process that
at some point you have a bad screening and
you learn so much more from your bad screenings
than you learn from the good screenings.
But I've never had a bad screening on this one.
Like with Dog Eat Dog. I
showed it up at Columbia and I had a bad
screening.
And boy, that
made the film so much better, because
I had a screening with a bunch of film intellectuals. They
didn't get that it was a joke.
Afterwards, I went to the bar with the editor and
said, "we gotta go, we gotta go
GONZO, because, you know,
very clearly we're being too subtle and people
are trying to take this seriously.
Every year there are six to eight
independent films that get into the awards hunt.
I think we have a shot at being
one of those films this year just because of
political climate now.
You know that there's going to be
at least one or two very
downbeat, serious films about
the world we live in now.
And I hope we get to be
one of those, one or two.
This is an old dog, he is way
past his due date.
How old is he?
He's about eleven, twelve.
The due is about nine, nine
years for this dog, so I'm waiting for
him to not get up one morning.
We have you over the span of two years, basically
pointing at the outfield and calling your shot.
Is there anything about the last two years of
First Reformed that was a surprise?
The first time I screened it for
a handful of friends.
I said, now this is a slow movie.
This movie takes it's time. Don't pressure
it. Just let it be.
OK.
And then I screened it and afterword, it was minutes
longer than it is now, and someone
said to me, that's not a slow movie.
And I thought it was a slow movie.
And now I've seen it with audiences around
the world and no one says it's a slow movie.
And that was the Travis Bickle effect,
which is you have a slow style and
slow subject matter, but
the throbbing intensity
of an obsessive at the center, who is
Narrating This
film just keeps driving it and driving
it.
First Reformed would still be a good film,
even if people didn't like it.
You can never predict the degree to which
you hope people will come
around like a film like Canyons,
which is a smart little film,
you know, got caught up in a negative blast of
the zeitgeist with
Lindsay Lohan.
And as I said to Eric Kohn of Indiewire, I
said, "you really fucked up your review." He
said, "Well, how do I do that?" I said, "you made
a mistake that reviewers often make you reviewed
the phenomenon.
You didn't review the film." And that's one
of the dangers when you get into this or that,
you can make a film that gets reviewed for all
the wrong reasons.
And then, lo and behold, 10 years later,
people say, well, you know, we never gave the
film a fair shake.
[Montage of Headlines about Paul Schrader Set to Music].
[Alex] I mean, it made news Schrader is back
on facebook last month.
It does seem to be sort of at the moment
other than being the writer-director of First Reformed, the
thing you are most well known for ...
[Paul] I've been sent a script by the last days
of Sinatra.
It's a terrific script.
It after his fights with Martin and Sammy Davis
and his son, the last days, and
the script, said Kevin Spacey all over it.
It was just like a big fast ball coming right
down the center of the plate and Kevin just
standing right there. He's just going
to clock it.
And so I said to the financier,
they want me to direct it.
I said, I'll do it if you hire Kevin, and they
said, "we can't do that." And
so I posted that on at Facebook and A24 called me
within 15 minutes and said: "Get
off Facebook today.
And then said, no, don't get off Facebook today. Get off Facebook NOW or we're not
gonna be pushing your film" There is
just too many things that can go wrong when
you're on social media.
A24 said, you know, "we can't be supporting
your film when we don't have control
over so erratic thing that you may say
at 2 o'clock in the morning while you're
drinking. So get off." You know, so get off!
Is that mostly when you're on Facebook?
No. I mean, but, because
of what had happened right after I posted that
thing about Kevin, someone else picked it up and
said, "director wants to work
with pedophile."
My theory when you were posting about Taylor
Swift was that you were potentially trying to
cast her in something. Is that correct?
No, no, no, no, no.
I was just kind of mesmerized
by the well oiled machinery
of her life.
How you never hear anything bad.
Every picture is great.
Everything works like a machine.
And you're talking about a
corporation,
of probably 500 to 600 employees
in the Swift Nation.
How do they keep ... How do they keep
that machine running so efficiently without ever
having an embarrassing moment?
First Reformed is often, you were saying "if this
is my last film," now here we are ...
?
Well you know that was almost two years
ago and and
could very well have better
still be my last film.
And I'm very happy with it being
my last film.But that's over now
and I want to get back to work.
I had written a script about 20
years ago for Arnold Schwarzenegger
and it was a remake of a Bud Boetticher western
Seven Men From Now. In those
films, there was always a standup
guy, Sheriff Randolph Scott, and then
there is some weaselly, smarmy
antagonist who's always testing his morals.
No movie is a deconstructed thing.
You know, as I said to somebody, it's
like you took a B western from the 50s
and asked Terry Malick and David Lynch to
take a shit on it.
You know, what would you what would you have?
I mean, I remember when Marty was in
Taiwan for Silence he
was talking to me because he had to
shoot in nature out there
and how he had
to have somebody with him
when he went up and downhill, because
it would be too risky for him just to walk on his
own. And,
you know, you get to that point and,
William Wyler said, you know,
"once the wheels go, you gotta quit."
And so, at some point, it gets too
hard to get around.
I feel like
I've done what I came to do,
you know, Vince Gill has this song "Go rest
high on that mountain, son, your
work on earth is done." So, who
knows? There maybe a few,
you know, desserts, you know,
some fun yet to be had.
But I don't have that feeling that
I haven't finished my work.
[Montage of Paul Schrader's Facebook posts set to Vince Gill's song "Go Rest High On That Mountain"]
Oh, sweet.