Can Paul Schrader Cheat Death? The Director on Taking ‘Oh, Canada’ to Cannes, Scorsese’s Dog Biting His Finger Off and Defending Kevin Spacey
Paul Schrader absentmindedly builds installation art out of seven prescription bottles, two inhalers and an empty martini glass, as we sit in a restaurant for seniors in a Manhattan high-rise. Outside, lights twinkle on the Hudson. In 1975, Schrader went to bed with a pistol under his pillow while writing “Taxi Driver.” “Having the option to end things is the only way I could sleep,” Schrader says.
The specter of death is less dramatic but still remains a central focus for the 77-year-old Schrader. Not coincidentally, it’s the subject of his new film, “Oh, Canada,” starring Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi and Uma Thurman. Schrader’s breathing is now shallow and raspy. The voice he once used to argue with Marty Scorsese, direct Willem Dafoe and seduce Nastassja Kinski is now a broken-glass growl. He raises it the best he can to get another drink.
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“Can we get some service, please.”
This startles our young waiter. The average age in the lounge of Coterie Hudson Yards, a posh senior-living center in midtown, is north of 80. It’s late and quiet here; the clientele usually only shout when they want their grandchildren to speak into their good ear. In any case, we get a refill. Schrader takes a sip, and his walrus face brightens and shoulders sag with relief.
He is exhausted, which is understandable since he is in the middle of shooting an entire 91-minute film in a month. His health hasn’t been great. He’s been hospitalized twice for COVID-related bronchial pneumonia and once for an adverse Ozempic reaction. A night of honor in Saudi Arabia ended with Schrader feeling woozy and being taken offstage in a wheelchair.
“I was lucky,” he says, chewing on an olive. “The event was held in a building connected to a medical station.”
Schrader has been a player in American cinema since the gun-under-the-pillow days. He began as a film-critic disciple of The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael and collaborated with his brother, Leonard, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, on critically acclaimed projects before becoming Scorsese’s favorite screenwriter, penning “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Bringing Out the Dead.” On his own, Schrader has directed 24 films, many of them centering on solitary men at war with the world and themselves.
We have just come from a rough-cut screening of “Oh, Canada,” Schrader’s adaptation of his late friend Russell Banks’ novel “Foregone,” which premieres at Cannes this month. When the screening ended, someone suggested the film could use 30 seconds of voiceover to orient the viewer in a couple of places. Schrader waved him off, saying, “People don’t come into films cold anymore; they read a story that tells them what they’re going to see. They’ve been situated already.” He looked my way. “That’s why we have journalists.”
The questioner isn’t alone. Gere, ecstatic about the film, chuckles when I ask him whether Schrader was amenable to suggestions. “Some were listened to; some were not,” he says.
After the screening, we raced crosstown in a cab to pick up his prescriptions at his Duane Reade, arriving just before closing. We were slow getting out of the taxi because Schrader was showing me a message from Kevin Spacey: They had talked today for the first time in years. Last July, Spacey was cleared of sexually assaulting four men. Schrader thought it was time to bring him in from the cold. “Cancel culture won’t let him go,” Schrader said. “He’s reading a book on how Charlie Chaplin was canceled.”
According to Schrader, the two talked about a potential film about late-period Frank Sinatra that Schrader says could star Spacey. Schrader collects politically incorrect opinions like an 8-year-old acquires Pokémon cards — so much so that he’s been asked by production companies to stop posting to Facebook in the weeks leading up to his films’ releases. He makes what he thinks is a crucial point: “I would not use Kevin if he had been convicted. But he was not convicted.”
Back at Coterie, Schrader searches “Banks” on his phone. “I’ve got some emails from Russell before he died that I want to show you,” he says.
Banks and Schrader had been close friends since 1997, when Schrader adapted Banks’ “Affliction” into a film that starred Nick Nolte and won James Coburn an Oscar. The two were dyspeptics, sharing an affinity for creating emotionally destroyed men. Every summer, Schrader and his wife, the actress Mary Beth Hurt, made the trip to see Banks and his wife, Chase, at their Keene Valley, N.Y., home.
But those days were behind them by the fall of 2022. Banks was battling cancer, and Schrader’s health was failing. By 2022, too, Hurt had dementia, and the couple were forced to move out of their beloved home in Putnam County and into Coterie.
Hurt is not far away tonight. She lives a few floors below, in the memory care wing of the building. Schrader takes the elevator ride down when he can. “All the clichés about madness, well, they’re not clichés,” he says. “They’re all there on the sixth floor. It’s the crazy floor: screaming, scratching, trying to climb up walls.” Schrader’s eyes well up with tears. “I’m not sure she recognizes me anymore — just Glenn.” (Glenn Close and Hurt have been friends for half a century.)
Then there are the bills. Schrader received a discount in 2023 for cooperating with a New York magazine story about his move into Coterie. (“I’m a senior influencer,” he says with a sad chuckle.) But that discount has expired, and the filmmaker estimates that he’s paying $380,000 a year for Hurt’s care, including additional overnight nursing care.
He eventually finds Banks’ emails.
Banks published “Foregone” in 2021. It’s the story of Leonard Fife, an acclaimed filmmaker who is dying of cancer in Montreal. He agrees to do a final interview for some old students of his who are making a documentary about his life. The documentarians have a list of questions, but Fife instead launches into a monologue directed at his wife, who stands behind the camera. He confesses that his entire persona is self-mythology, entire marriages have been erased, and a stand against the Vietnam War is a fabrication.
“Russell told me that this was his ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich,’” Schrader says, referencing Tolstoy’s novella about a Russian bureaucrat howling about his impending demise. “My health hasn’t been good. I thought if I wanted to make my death film, it had to be now.”
Much of Schrader and Banks’ exchanges are about plot and character, but it’s clear from the text chain that Schrader is working up to dropping the hammer on his friend. He believes that Fife — an arrogant man confessing his sins to a wife who begs him to stop — is not bad enough.
“Here’s the big question,” Schrader texts Banks. “Leonard Fife is revealed to be a narcissistic, selfish, lying, unfeeling SOB. What’s the big deal — aren’t we all? I’d like to ratchet up Leo’s culpability. He hasn’t crossed the line beyond forgiveness.”
Schrader suggests that Leonard’s son, whom he abandoned as a toddler, make a pilgrimage to see his father receive an award. When he gets there, the father denies he ever had a son.
Banks writes back after some time. “Up to you if you think Leo needs darkening.”
I’ve known Schrader for more than a decade and mention to him that only in his world was abandoning families not evil enough. He shrugs. “I’ve abandoned families,” he says. “Russell abandoned families. He has to do something bad at a biblical level. When that happens, people will realize he’s truly a bad guy.”
Schrader then mumbles something about how he himself betrayed someone in an unforgivable way, but I can’t make it out over a table of seniors shouting about their vacation. Was it Mary Beth? He waves me off. He’s done with the subject — for now.
I ask Schrader if sleeping with the gun under his pillow was just a one-night thing or if it went on for a while.
“How many nights like that were there actually?” he says. “I know there were a few. And I know there were a few because I was very cognizant of the few. I had nights where I had a gun, and I was in a suicidal function. But could I have lived like that for any period of time? Probably not.”
He thinks about it for a minute and adds, “Things like that become part of your own self-mythology. And so you start wrapping yourself in it, and it becomes part of how you package yourself.” He poses a rhetorical question. “At what point are you playing a role, and at what point are you becoming the role?”
Schrader wouldn’t connect the dots, but this is the question at the heart of “Oh, Canada.” Separating the legend from the actual man is particularly challenging with someone like Schrader, although it’s always entertaining. For instance, a few months ago, I was having coffee at the Brooklyn apartment of Andrew Wonder, the film’s cinematographer and a longtime Schrader associate who started as his assistant. I told him that I liked his bomber jacket.
“That’s the jacket Paul wore while writing ‘Taxi Driver,’” Wonder said. “I used to sell books and clothes for Paul on eBay, and he wanted me to sell the jacket for 40 bucks, so I bought it.”
He then told me the provenance of the garment. Back in the mid-’70s, Schrader was visiting his agent, and the jacket was slung across a chair. The agent excused himself for another meeting. Schrader grabbed the jacket and left. A couple weeks later, the agent ran into Schrader.
“That’s my jacket!” the agent said.
Schrader shrugged. “Yeah, I stole it. I liked it.”
And on it goes. One night in December, I was meeting Schrader for dinner. He showed up with a massive, bloody bandage wrapped around his hand. Here’s a transcript:
S.R.: What the hell happened to your thumb?
P.S.: So on Tuesday night, I had dinner with Marty at his place. He has these dogs. They were very cute. Two of them were bichon frisé. They’re really beautiful. But then, he has a Scottie, which is a problematic dog. It was his daughter’s dog. He doesn’t like the dog, but they have to keep him and blah, blah, blah.
S.R.: Yeah.
P.S.: I tried to pet the Scottie.
S.R.: Oh, man.
P.S.: The Scottie not only took out part of my thumb, he ate it.
S.R.: Did you have to go to the ER? I mean, how bad is it?
P.S.: Marty has an in-house nurse.
Schrader delights in mythologizing his own wanton dereliction of self-care. He says that in his 30s he woke up next to a dumpster in L.A. at the end of a cocaine binge, and then had his assistant immediately ship his belongings back to New York. These days the closest he gets to that kind of bender is the three-martinis-two-glasses-of-wine evenings. None of this has impacted his creativity — he’s currently working on a halfdozen projects.
“The only time I don’t worry about his health is when he is writing and directing,” says Wonder. “He loses 20 years when shooting starts.”
This is true. Schrader’s 2021 film, “The Card Counter,” was shut down just short of completion because of COVID. Schrader loudly complained at the time about the pause in filming. He proclaimed on Facebook: “I would have shot through hellfire rain to complete the film. I’m old and asthmatic, what better way to die than on the job?”
Paul Schrader grew up in a strict Calvinist Dutch Reformed household in Grand Rapids, Mich. Once, he asked his mother what hell was like. She stabbed him in the hand with a sewing needle. “It’s like that but forever,” she said.
The ashes of eternal damnation are sprinkled all over his recent films, beginning with 2017’s “First Reformed.” The film stars Ethan Hawke as Ernst Toller, the minister of a failing Dutch Reformed church, grappling with the death of his soldier son. The movie was a critical success and earned Hawke a best male lead statue from the Independent Spirit Awards, and Schrader, an original screenplay Oscar nomination. He followed that up with “The Card Counter,” starring Oscar Isaac as a card-playing former Abu Ghraib torturer, and then last year’s “Master Gardener,” with Joel Edgerton as a horticulturist with a neo-Nazi past. The three films feature male leads suffering internally from existential threats, real and imagined.
“He writes singular men,” Gere says. “They’re not followers; they’re all a bit peculiar. All of them have subterranean issues that they deal with.”
Gere and Schrader have remained friendly since the “American Gigolo” shoot 45 years ago. “I remember Paul calling me about ‘Gigolo,’ and he said he needed an answer in an hour,” Gere says with a smile. “I said, ‘Paul, let me read it first. My process takes time.’”
Gere took the part. “‘Gigolo’ was a thing in the universe that caused a lot of attention for him and for me,” Gere says. “I think both of us have had to deal with that as a stamp on us. It’s kind of stuck to us as a new skin.”
According to Schrader, the two ran into each other at a New York City awards dinner for Hawke and “First Reformed.” Gere sidled up to Schrader and complimented the director on Hawke’s minimalist performance, his acting stripped to the studs.
Schrader occasionally reminds Gere of that conversation while shooting “Oh, Canada.” Gere and Schrader have spent months working on makeup and lighting that will inform how the audience will view the terminally ill Fife. Gere brought the experience of caring for his 101-year-old father, who lived with him until he died last year.
“There’s a technique of how you get someone out of a wheelchair,” Gere says. “And there’s a technique of how you’d sit someone down on a toilet and help them if they threw up.”
Schrader managed to shoot all the crucial dying scenes in two and a half days. Gere told me that on a larger-scale budget, that portion of the film would have stretched over weeks. “Paul is proud that every shot, every setup, was used in the film,” Gere says. “Nothing was wasted.”
I arrive for the second week of filming in a Westchester County ablaze with autumn. Sometimes star and director squabble in a polite way. On the first day of shooting, at a school, Schrader thinks Gere is playing Fife too energetically. “He’s dying,” Schrader says. Gere counters that if Fife’s death’s-door confession drives the film, he needs the energy to deliver it with passion. They meet somewhere in the middle.
In another scene Fife is told he has cancer, and his wife asks him what kind.
“Not the good kind.”
At first, Gere tosses it off with the handsome-man charm that remains his essence, even at 74. Schrader thinks it’s too much Gere being Gere. “You’re not telling this to her. You’re telling it to yourself,” Schrader says.
Gere immediately understands. The next take reads much better: Fife is a master of the universe realizing the end is near.
Later on set, in front of an enormous bloodred wall, Fife, accompanied by his wife, Emma, played by Thurman, is approached by his abandoned son. Fife recoils from his own flesh: “Get away from me. I don’t have a son.”
Before the fourth or fifth take, Gere asks Schrader a question: “Do you want me to do a take where I just throw it away?”
Schrader thinks for a second. “No. You should take it more inside.”
This is Schrader-speak for bringing it down a notch. Gere looks slightly confused for a moment, then nods. On the next take, he says, “I don’t have a son,” a little colder, a little meaner.
“I think that’s it,” Schrader says.
Later, I mention the scene to Gere and he laughs. “I think it was the other way around; I think I got more in his face.” He makes the point with a serene look. “It’s not like we’re making this together. There are some directors where you truly feel ‘We are making a film together.’ That’s not Paul.”
After shooting the “Fife denies his son” scene, there is about an hour until the next setup is ready. I grab some lunch and wander into an empty classroom and hear a noise. Schrader is sprawled on a ratty couch, snoring.
When he wakes up, he tells me that some of his best ideas have come to him in dreams. If “Oh, Canada” is Schrader’s death film, 1992’s “Light Sleeper” was his midlife-crisis film, starring Willem Dafoe as a drug courier at a crossroads. Schrader says the whole film came to him in a dream — he just needed to spend a couple of days with his own drug dealer to flesh it out.
“I might wake up at 3 a.m. with an idea,” he says, “then I go back to sleep. If I wake up at 7 a.m. and the idea is still there, I know I have something.”
Schrader tells me about a dream idea he had during preproduction for “Oh, Canada.” “I woke up with a concept for a movie called ‘Humanity,’ about a future society in which everything works,” says Schrader. “They’re not necessarily people anymore, but they have emotions. They have orgasms, they have possessions, but they live equally.” Schrader rubs his goatee, and his face opens into a smile. “It’s not my typical thing.”
I believe that Paul Schrader fears the death of his career more than actual death. In the decade after penning “Taxi Driver,” Schrader wrote “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” directed “American Gigolo” and the notorious “Cat People,” had an affair with 21-year-old Nastassja Kinski and then masterminded “Mishima,” a complex examination of Yukio Mishima, the fascist Japanese writer.
Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was burnout, but Schrader hit a fallow period in his 40s, leading Peter Biskind, in his 1998 book, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” to declare, “After ‘Mishima,’ Schrader was rarely heard from again.” (Biskind must have ended the book early because in 1997 Schrader adapted and directed “Affliction,” a career highlight.)
A Schrader decline is inevitably followed by a Schrader renaissance. I first met him in 2012 during a low period. He was trying and failing to make a Bollywood-Hollywood film with Leonardo DiCaprio. The next year, I chronicled Schrader’s making of “The Canyons,” a Bret Easton Ellis-scripted film noir starring Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen. My story featured Schrader stripping naked to convince Lohan to film a nude scene, and Lohan scaling a fence so she could go get drunk in Malibu on a lunch break. Schrader didn’t respond when I asked him what he thought of the story. Instead, he forwarded me an email without comment from an academic who called my story a cheap slandering of a film genius.
It took me years to figure out why Schrader was so angry. Turns out, it was that I explicitly wrote that his career was DOA. A decade later, Schrader agrees things looked dark. After “The Canyons” was panned, he directed Nicolas Cage in the thriller “Dying of the Light” in 2014. The producers hated his cut and took the film away from him.
“I was locked out of the editing room in Los Angeles, but they wouldn’t fire me,” he says. “If they fired me, they’d have to pay. So I was sitting in a hotel on Third Street drinking. I think they would have been perfectly happy to see me drink myself to death in that hotel room.”
Schrader knows his film history and can recite which icons’ careers ended in triumph and which ones’ ended in obscurity. “After ‘Dying of the Light,’ I was convinced that my career was going to end in disgrace like someone like Fritz Lang,” he says now. “I wanted my last film to be something great, like John Huston directing ‘The Dead.’” His gray eyes light up. “And he was actually dying! That’s what I want.”
Paul Schrader would never represent himself as a particularly scrupulous man, despite his Calvinist upbringing. In addition to pursuing Kinski while married, he has copped to, in his younger days, only sleeping with women who could do something for his career. And he readily admits he’ll do anything to get his films finished — appearing naked in Lohan’s dressing room on the set of “The Canyons” is just an extreme example. Attracting the millions to make an art film about a terminally ill documentary filmmaker is simply his latest adventure.
It’s another night back at Coterie, and Schrader is two days away from wrapping “Oh, Canada.” He’s giddy and understandably proud of the fact that he has another film in the can. I ask him what keeps him diving for coins and cajoling talent long after most have gone off to dictate their memoirs.
“You have to wake up in the morning and say, ‘OK, nobody thinks I can finagle this. I’m going to figure out this little problem.’ So I put these pieces and configurations where they will start to interact with each other.” He pauses for a moment. “You need topspin, something to make the ball jump.”
For “Oh, Canada,” that topspin started with Gere.
“Now, I haven’t worked with Richard in 40 years, but he is totally associated with ‘Gigolo’ and me,” Schrader says, knowing full well that the directors of “Days of Heaven,” “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Pretty Woman” would probably disagree. “In this film, he’s playing the desiccating version of ‘Gigolo’ — that’s topspin. People are saying to me, ‘All these other actors will do a very good job — Jonathan Pryce, Tommy Lee Jones.’” Schrader grins and rubs his hands together. “They’d act the hell out of it, but there’s no topspin.”
Schrader knew ultimate topspin could only be achieved if the actor playing Fife as a young man also had a hook. “Now, what more spin do we need? Well, it needs Richard’s equivalent as a young man. Back to ‘Gigolo’ — I asked around: ‘If you were casting it now, who would you cast?’ Jacob Elordi comes up.”
I ask Schrader if he knew who he was. “No,” he says.
Schrader was briefed about Elordi, his “Euphoria” role and the buzz about him in the then-upcoming films “Priscilla” and “Saltburn.” When he finally cast Elordi and told his friend Bret Easton Ellis, the author gasped and said, “I just came in my pants.”
Schrader takes another sip from a martini and smiles. “You’re always thinking of cui bono — who benefits? And if they don’t benefit, you don’t go to them. When you go to an actor, you have to say, ‘This is your lucky day. I just called you.’”
A talent manager recently asked Schrader how he got a top-drawer actor like Oscar Isaac to work for him when he paid him nothing. “I did pay him,” Schrader told the manager, pulling out his phone and showing him a photo of Isaac on the cover of the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. “He can take that straight to the bank.”
Schrader got exactly what he wanted with Elordi, but topspin sometimes leads to logistical problems. Elordi is nearly a foot taller than Gere, so a shot of the two walking together — the older Fife morphing into the younger Fife — had to be scrapped. Still, Schrader was right about catching Elordi as he approached Gere-1980 levels of hotness. An evening shoot in a shop on a street in Harrison, N.Y., begins with Elordi talking outside between takes with a few teenage boys about girls and weightlifting. That turns into a crowd of 500 in less than an hour.
Indeed, Elordi will host “Saturday Night Live” and have a run-in with a radio producer in Australia who will keep asking him if he has any of his bathwater from his infamous “Saltburn” scene, but that’s months away. Tonight, Elordi signs autographs and then hits his mark without a loss of focus.
“He’s a working actor, not a silly boy,” Gere says.
The night is hot and humid, and Schrader is breathing heavier than usual. Between takes, he peeks out the window at the mob that has assembled for Elordi. “He has no idea where this rocket is taking him,” Schrader says. “That’s probably a good thing.”
Schrader has a sense that the end is near, less for him and more for the life he has known. He gave the family house to his daughter, Molly, and fears he won’t have Hurt for much longer. “Maybe we’ve had our last Christmas, I don’t know,” he says in a quiet voice.
He is in the process of settling his own emotional accounts. Last Thanksgiving, Schrader returned with his son, Sam, to Michigan for a holiday meal with cousins he hadn’t seen in years. Always prepared, Schrader brought his own bottle of wine and corkscrew to a table of teetotalers.
“My cousin looks so much like my mother,” says Schrader.
His relationship with his family is fraught. He admitted to me years ago to filming 1979’s “Hardcore,” a tale of a father searching for his daughter in the porn industry, as a “fuck you” to his parents. (Schrader’s father never watched any of his films but did publicly protest “The Last Temptation of Christ.”)
In one of our last conversations, he returns unprompted to the idea of why he made Fife meaner. He says he understands what Leonard Fife did to his son because he did the same thing to his own brother. He begins by telling me how he stole credit from Leonard on some of their early joint projects. Leonard was a Japanophile, waiting out the Vietnam War in Tokyo, where he became fascinated with Japanese organized crime. The brothers collaborated on 1974’s “Yakuza,” but Paul wasn’t content to share credit.
“We wrote this script together,” says Schrader. “And I said, ‘I’m trying to build a career here. I want solo credit. We’d get a joint “story by” credit.’ It was nasty.”
He fiddles with his glasses for a moment and pushes up the sleeves of his shapeless sweater. “Then I used him on ‘Mishima.’ We got equal credit on that, but it was my show.”
It was Leonard who introduced Paul to the writings of Yukio Mishima, a critically acclaimed writer who died by suicide after a quixotic attempt to return Japan to its warrior culture. The brothers shared a screenwriting credit with Leonard’s wife, Chieko, but when Paul traveled to Japan to shoot “Mishima,” he froze his brother out. He created his own Japanese social set with the crew and actors. Leonard lived in the same building, but Schrader didn’t include him. Schrader’s hands begin to shake from emotion. “I saw Leonard at that time as something that would diminish my narrative, my magical story, that I was creating of ‘Mishima.’”
“Mishima” was accepted into Cannes, but Leonard didn’t want to go, even though he had another film in the competition: He had written the script for “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” “I said, ‘Nobody gets two films that they wrote in the competition,’” Schrader says. “‘This is your moment. You’ve got to go.’ But he won’t go because he knows that I’m going to make him a member of the support band. He can’t take it.”
Undeterred, Schrader convinced Chieko to make the trip, reasoning the film would benefit from what he describes as a “Japanese presence.” “Mishima” won acclaim while Leonard stewed back in Los Angeles.
The following Christmas, Schrader invited Leonard and Chieko to come visit Mary Beth and him and Molly, then an infant. “I had envisioned this as a rapprochement, where I could apologize for the way I had stolen Japan from him.” Leonard declined but sent presents for the entire family. Schrader returned them unopened.
“That was the knife,” he says, tears welling in his eyes.
Leonard made only one more film and died in 2006, isolated and alone.
“You can excuse all kinds of behavior as a husband and father,” Schrader says. “But some things you can’t. You know what the fuck you’re doing.”
Schrader’s regrets left me thinking of an observation that Leonard Fife makes in “Oh, Canada.” “Things disappear,” he says. “They get lost or left behind like people you once loved or loved you.”
I was moved by the sorrow Schrader felt about his brother. Then I did some research and realized that Schrader had told a version of the Leonard betrayal story to The New Yorker last year, and also to Biskind back in the 1990s. It leaves me wondering if Schrader told me the story less as confession and more as a narrative device. Perhaps he’s giving me the perfect ending to a piece on a Paul Schrader film that’s about a man whose whole life has been a deception.
Or perhaps it’s all topspin.
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