Paul Schrader is in the midst of one of the most illustrious careers in Hollywood history, but much of it seems to have occurred under the radar. He wrote “Taxi Driver” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” and co-wrote “Raging Bull”; he’s directed dozens of films, including “Blue Collar” and “American Gigolo” (which launched Richard Gere as a star), “Mishima” (one of the most ambitious and visionary ever produced by a studio) and “Affliction” (which won James Coburn an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). Hollywood has a short memory: for his 2013 film “The Canyons” (starring Lindsay Lohan), he turned to Kickstarter for financing. Raised in a strict Calvinist family in Michigan, Schrader has kept the self-sacrificing, self-tormenting passion of rigorous Christianity at the center of even his most secular work—in the righteous fury of the working man, the boxer, the sex worker, the parent, and, of course, the artist. With “First Reformed” (2017), which he wrote and directed—the story of a minister (Ethan Hawke) in spiritual and moral agony—he instantly broke through a generational barrier. That film transformed his status: from a hardscrabble survivor of New Hollywood’s golden days, he became—like his longtime associate Martin Scorsese—an iconic embodiment of the cinema itself. (The movie also got him his first Oscar nomination, for his screenplay.)
Schrader’s identification with the art goes back beyond his career as a filmmaker: he started as a critic (launched on that path by Pauline Kael herself, whom he’d met in 1967) and, in 1972, published a book, “Transcendental Style in Film,” about three directors who remain among his prime influences (Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Yasujiro Ozu). It’s still a touchstone of cinema studies. Schrader’s critical insights are embodied in his movies, whether with ingenious transformations of genre conventions or with direct references to films he loves. (For instance, the ending of “American Gigolo” is a reinterpretation of the ending of Bresson’s “Pickpocket.”) But, in recent years, he has sustained his critical discourse occasionally (often in the pages of Film Comment) and casually, as in a recent Facebook post in which he discussed the state of filmmaking in the age of streaming. That post caught my eye for what Schrader had to say about the dwindling significance of the feature film. I spoke to him about why the format still matters and what the ongoing changes in the industry mean for the art of movies—and his own art.
I saw your Facebook post on Saturday, and it got me thinking. You call it an observation about film economics, but it’s as much of an observation about film aesthetics. I’m interested in the fact that you have the sense that the feature film is coming to an end because of the rise of streaming series, whether fictional series, documentary series.
Well, it’s in remission. And strangely enough, even for me, I find myself watching more documentaries and episodics now. The two-hour format which was so ideally suited to theatrical, we’ve now trained young people for fifteen months not to see that as a primary way to have audiovisual entertainment. Now, how they come back or if they come back . . . they’re certainly not going to come back in the way they once were.
I see four venues for theatrical, and one is extreme spectacle, which is like 4DX—or like that van Gogh immersive experience that’s coming. That you have to go out of the house for. That’s a reason to go out of the house. Children’s movies, of course, because you want to see your kids laugh with other kids. That’s really for the parents more than for the kids. And then you have date-night movies, which is horror and a certain kind of teen comedy, and there’ll still be a place for that. And then you’ll have what we now call club cinema, which is where you have a membership. This is like the Burns or the Metropol or the [Film] Forum, Angelika, where Martini is the new popcorn. And if you go to . . . is it the Metropol or the Metropolitan?
Metrograph.
Metrograph, I mean. They’re event-based. And I think those places will come back. But the normal mall cinema or multi-cinema, I think that’s a real struggle. They say that fifty per cent of the restaurants in New York won’t reopen. Well, I think that’s certainly true also of the movie theatres. And so we are rethinking that whole concept, and it’s a rethinking going across the board, because it’s also happening to the Oscars. What do the Oscars mean anymore? Does anybody care anymore? Will the festivals have the strength that they used to have? And this idea of the two-hour serious movie, which evolved in many ways as a reaction to television, where the film companies all had agents in New York looking for the new serious book—“ ‘From Here to Eternity,’ we’re going to do that.” And that’s gone now. Nobody’s looking for the new serious book. And to make a movie today, a quality movie, let’s say a movie like “Hud” or “The Hustler,” that movie’s just not being made. Now, there is quality long-form, but I think the serious two-hour film . . . I have a film that’s opening [“The Card Counter”], which fits in that mold. And I’ve been thinking of writing a new script after that, and I just find myself wondering, Who will make such a film? And so I think that this shift, which is the third . . . what’s the word for it? Tectonic. The third tectonic shift. The first occurred after “The Birth of a Nation,” when you went into the big theatres, and they realized you could make a lot of money putting a lot of people in a dark room without air-conditioning. And, out of that, the movie palaces came and all of that. And then the second shift that occurred, when they had to deal with television—and ironically, this occurred right at the same time as the rise of the intelligent film, the serious film, which started here in this country with people like [John] Frankenheimer and [Arthur] Penn, but was primarily started in Europe with neorealism—and all of a sudden there was another way, another reason to go to movies. You can go to the movies to see a Bergman film. You couldn’t see them on television. You can go to the movies to see the serious new film by the artist.
And this became clear to me a couple of years ago when I was talking to my relatives in western Michigan and I asked them, “What movies do you see?” And my cousin said to me, “We see Netflix.” And I realized the genius of . . . what’s his name?
Reed Hastings?
Yeah, Reed. Because movies had begun as a place to go. And there was a phrase that was used in the olden times called “This is where we came in,” meaning we just walked in [without regard to showtimes], and now we sat through it [as it began again], and, “O.K., this is where we came in.” And then after the war and with the rise of television, it started to become not “Let’s go see a movie” but “Let’s go see a specific movie. Let’s go see this movie we’ve been hearing about.” And therefore there was also the rise of film criticism, because how do people know which movie they want to see unless they’re reading some criticism? So “Let’s see that new movie with so-and-so or from that book so-and-so, or about that . . . let’s go see “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” Movies that were about something: “An Unmarried Woman.” And that saved cinema in a way, because TV wouldn’t touch that stuff. And now TV deals in it extensively. I just watched “Mare of Easttown.” I mean, that’s as dark and as grim as anything in American cinema from the sixties. And what Reed Hastings realized was that you could reverse the formula. You could make it a pool of entertainment so large that people didn’t need to go anywhere else. If you just turned on Netflix, what were you feeling like? You want a crime show? You want a documentary? You want a World War Two documentary? You want a sex documentary? You want an exposé? You want a melodrama? You want a classic? If you just go through our menu, and we will use our algorithms to cultivate that menu, you will find something. You don’t have to read reviews, and you don’t have to check the newspaper. You just go to Netflix and within ten minutes you will find something you want to see. And so Reed reversed the strategy from a specific movie to just going to Netflix. And so when my cousin said, “We watch Netflix,” what she meant was “If we want to watch something, we’ll turn on Netflix, and sure enough, we’ll find something we want to watch. We don’t need to plan ahead.”
And it’s free. Once you’ve paid your subscription price, it’s free. The differential cost makes it good enough. Good enough for free.
Yeah. Then of course COVID exacerbated that, so the few people who were still on the fence about staying home didn’t have a choice. And once you get into that mind-set, you sit down and you turn on Netflix and you go right to documentaries and start scrolling through the documentaries, because they’re very aggressively doing documentaries. They’re cost-efficient. They’re like reality TV for intellectuals.
How does Netflix favor the series rather than the feature film? I mean, after all, Netflix is producing some really good features that nobody else is making.
Yeah. And they’re making money on some of them. They just made money on this revenge film. But the comfort aspect of the series is that you don’t even need to scroll through anything. You’ve watched two episodes of something—“Pretty Young Things,” “Pretty Little Things,” whatever—and you like it and say, “I’ll watch the next one.” So you don’t even have to decide. You don’t have to watch a trailer. There’s so many out there that you can sample them like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. And if you like the first episodes, you’re on easy street for a couple of weeks.
What’s the difference for you in the art? You wrote on Facebook that the transition from the feature to streaming is “stripping story telling of its ability to compose concise stories which land like a punch in the face.” What for you is the difference artistically between feature filmmaking and series?
Well, a feature film . . . hopefully, if you’re an artist, each time out you have a problem, a subject matter, and you need to create a style that really works. With episodic, you create a template, and then directors just follow that template. So if you’re doing “The Crown,” you’re doing a lot of soft focus, backlighting. They all look the same. And that’s a kind of a comfort, too, because every time you watch “The Crown,” you know exactly how it’s going to look. The challenge of independent film is creating something that feels new, and that is going less and less in favor. And I think you can just look at film criticism to see that, because I remember when people would read film criticism and say, “What’s new? What do I need to see? What’s this film that Oliver Stone did about Vietnam? I think we should see that.” That seems to be less and less part of the conversation.
Interestingly, I think they’re two separate issues. For instance, what you were saying about the difference between the series and the feature, if I’m understanding correctly, it’s essentially the difference between a director’s medium and a writer’s medium.
Yes. And not only a writer’s medium, a writers’-room medium. You know the difference.
How would you describe the difference?
I mean, I’m a writer, but if I work for episodic I’m in a writers’ room. There’s five or six other people in there. Because with a few exceptions, usually these things are written by a writers’ room. And so you’re always compromising and coming up with ideas. And so the idea of a strong, singular voice, the idea of, say, Woody Allen . . . you can’t watch a Woody Allen film without realizing you’re watching a Woody Allen film, even the stinkers. But a lot of the shows, they have that committee imprint. And that also changes what you expect from a movie. So a film like “Nomadland,” which is a unique film, unique style, unique voice, how does that find its way into the cinemas anymore?
Would it be very different if you were watching “Nomadland” at home? In other words, is there a significant difference between “Nomadland” produced for a theatrical release and “Nomadland” produced for Netflix?
Yeah. Well, I watched it at home, and it was a big difference. I had no commitment to it. There was no decision. “Let’s go to the Burns and see ’Nomadland.’ ” It’s like going to church in a way. You don’t walk out of church because you’re bored. You went there to be bored. You went there to have that experience. And if you go to the Burns to see “Nomadland” you’re going to stick it out unless you really hate it. When you’re watching it at home, it’s not that same kind of commitment, and therefore you think differently of the film. I think “Nomadland” is a bit of fake poverty. I would feel that if I saw it in the theatre, too. But I know I would have a more focussed view of it. And it is so easy to just let something go at home.
But how is that different from the age of VHS or DVDs? Did you feel that there was a cinema apocalypse on the way when people started renting video cassettes rather than going to movie theatres?
No, no. I think that, to me, back in the day, was an adjunct. It was secondary. It was still . . . I would go to the movie theatres, and if there was something . . . and, of course, it didn’t show up on VHS for six months anyway. So if you wanted to see a film-noir classic or something you could get it at Blockbuster, but if you wanted to see a real movie you had to go to a movie theatre. And that’s another thing that’s collapsed.
So do you think that because filmmakers are likely not to have the same resources, the same amount of money, the same budget level to make feature films that they would have, say, twenty years ago, is there a certain freedom that comes with this?
Well, there’s a lot of freedom. The film that I took forty-two days to make when I started I now make in twenty. “First Reformed” was twenty. My new film, “The Card Counter,” is twenty. And the quality is the same. You just move much, much faster. Everything is cheaper. Everything is faster. So the upside is that movies that could not afford to be made are now being made. Anybody can make a movie. Anybody who has a phone can make a movie. The downside is, although anybody can make a movie, nobody can make a living. Because in the sixties, if you got to make a movie, you made a living. You got a salary. Today, you can make a movie without getting a salary, and you can make a five-million-dollar movie for fifty thousand and lose fifty thousand. And so, so many of these young filmmakers are . . . they’re making films they weren’t allowed to make before, but they’re not making a living, and they’re not getting the kind of distribution . . . I mean, you see it all the time, films that are just being thrown out the car window hoping somebody finds them and watches them.
Which gives films critics a role again, one hopes.
Yeah, if they can find somebody to pay them.
Have you ever entertained the possibility of working for a streaming service directly, whether a feature film or a series?
Yeah. Well, Scorsese and I are planning something, and it is . . . it would be a three-year series about the origins of Christianity.
Fiction? Drama?
No, no, no. It’s based on the Apostles and on the Apocrypha. It’s called “The Apostles and Apocrypha.” Because people sort of know the New Testament, but nobody knows the Apocrypha. And back in the first century, there was no New Testament, there’s just these stories. And some were true, and some weren’t, and some were forgeries.
But these will be dramatized like “The Last Temptation”?
Yeah.
This gives me something to look forward to. I will be subscribing.
Owing to a transcription error, a previous version of this post incorrectly identified one of the four venues that Schrader sees as the future of theatrical cinema.
