Paul Schrader On First Reformed

Raised in Michigan by a Calvinist family, Paul Schrader has often written films in which a tormented central character descends into a personal hell. 

In his latest film, the religious thriller First Reformed, which many consider to be the writer-director's late-career masterpiece, Ethan Hawke's boozy, diary-writing priest, experiences a crisis of faith which threatens to have catastrophic consequences.

I met Schrader, whose back catalogue includes the Martin Scorsese collaborations Taxi Driver and Raging Bulling, at the Venice Film Festival in 2017.   

You have said something like this is a film you have been making for a lifetime.

"No, actually only a little more than two years. But it is the culmination of a lifetime. Before I became a screenwriter I was a critic, and I wrote a book on spirituality in films [Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer], which has just been reissued. So it was always the kind of film I was interested in. Never thought I would actually make one."

Why not?

"I was more interested in some of the aggressive qualities of film:  action, empathy, stuff like that. I just never thought I would make a film like I wrote about. And then a couple of years ago, I was having dinner with Pawel Pawlikowski, who had done Ida, and he was talking about that film. And then I left that dinner, I was walking, and I thought to myself, 'Time for you to write one of these movies.' Once I sort of acknowledged that, it became easy. 

"And also it had to do with the financial realities. It's now possible for me to make this film financially in a way it wasn't 10 years ago, just because the budgets have come down so much. So, you know, 20 years ago this film would have taken 40 days. Now it took just 20 days. That's a whole different financial reality. And it applies across the board to all films. So the upside is it's very to make a film now; the downside is it's almost impossible to get it seen."

It's funny you mention Pawlikowski because the film is reminiscent of The Woman in the Fifth, which also has Ethan Hawke in, where he's also a writer and he writes the story.  

"Yeah. No, the format is from Ida, which is the traditional 1:33. In fact I wanted to do it in 1:33 black and white, but the financier blocked that with delivery requirements for colour. So I made it in colour, but not colourful."

Can you talk more about the spirituality in this work and what it means in the state of America today, people hiding behind religion, etc?

"Well, ah, I mean I was raised in the Church. I still go to church. So you don't escape that kind of programming. But you have to be careful when you talk about The Church, because it's not a monolithic thing, and we tend to describe the bigoted and bombastic evangelicals as if they were The Church. They are not. They are a very vocal part of it, but there is a mainstream liberal humanistic Christianity as well. And so you have to be careful not to tar Catholicism or Protestantism, whatever, with a brush of the fanatics. Just like you have to be careful not to tar Islam with a brush of the fanatics."

Picking that up, First Reformed is about radicalisation, isn't it?

"In a way. I mean this guy has a sickness. A sickness Kierkegaard called 'the sickness unto death'. Lack of hope. Despair. Angst. And this sickness has manifestations. The cloth of the clergy is one manifestation. The diary is another. The alcohol is another. And finally the environment  [Environmentalism] is a manifestation of his soul's sickness. He grafts this cause onto himself, in fact picks it up like a virus from another person; but if it wasn't the environment it would be another thing."

Why did you choose the environment?

"Well,you know, theologians and philosophers have beeen having discussions for four or five thousand years and all those discussions are now in boldface because we are actually at the point in human history where there may be some end to those discussions. I mean you start talking about what is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of humanity? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have consciousness? You know, if you stand on your tippy-toes and look, you can start to see the end of that conversation. And therefore it's a very exciting time to be alive, and a frightening one as well. So the environment takes these classical religious and philosophical debates, and puts them in neon flashing at you."

Do you share any of the views of the character concerning the world? 

"Well I don't think we, as a species, will outlive this century. You know, the world is going to be fine; we're not."

So what do we do then?

"Oh no, we'll be evolved. There will be a post-human species. Which we already seem in bits and pieces already. Carbon-based intelligence is now giving way to silicon-based intelligence, and eventually carbon-based intelligence will be seen as a period of history on the Earth."

Will these films survive? Will your work survive?

"[Laughs] Well I tell ya, our antecedents, they're going to have one hell of a museum. A museum to humanity [laughs]. That'll be a great museum. And hopefully movies will have a room in there."

Speaking of conservation, this movie is extremely cinephilic. It's full of references to your passions. 

"Well, I mean, for me it's kind of easy. I'm probably part of the most privileged generation in the history of the planet. The baby boom generation. We have lived in the cone of affluence and ease, leisure time. No one in the history of planet Earth had it easier than we have. And we responded by fucking it up. So the harder choice is for our children and the children after them, which is what this one character says. What do you say to your child when your child looks at you and says, 'You knew this was happening and you did nothing about it'? What do you say? You say, 'Well, too bad for you. We had a good time.' So yeah, it is kind of bleak in that way."

How did you choose the actors?

"Um, normally when you write a script you don't think about actors because it makes you a lazier writer. But I did start thinking about Ethan because when you have a man of the cloth in this way, you like to have a haunted actor - that way they don't have to play haunted. And Ethan has that haunted look. So it's easier to do it with Ethan than, say, to do it with Brendan Gleeson in Calvary, because Brendan had a very hard time looking haunted. But Ethan looks haunted the moment you see him. So it was an easier task and he was finally just about the right age. Three actors came to mind, one was Oscar Isaac and another was Jake Gyllenhaal, and they were both, like, 10 years too young. Ethan was just the right age."

Plus he reminded me, even physically, of Gunnar Bjornstrand, in Bergman's Winter Light.     

"Yeah, he is also reminiscent of Monty Cliff in I Confess."

Was Winter Light a big referential film, because I saw some nods to that?

"Well if you saw some nods you would probably be right. In fact there are quite a few nods in this film. I should do a 3D version where the footnotes come out at you boom, boom, boom, boom. This is from this. This is from this."

Is it difficult for you to visualise this inner turmoil? We see a lot of different ways of doing it in your work, in Taxi Driver talking to the mirror, here with the journal. How do you work around that to be effective in making the audience feel that turmoil?

"I've done a number of these films. I call them 'monocular films', because it's like looking at life this way. You don't see any other life but your character's life. There is no other life. And in fact if you saw another reality other than the taxi driver's, you would break the spell. So you lock into a kind of a person and the goal, hopefully, is to get the viewer to start to empathise, because we do this naturally. Just like we form constellations out of stars: the stars don't actually look like a dog or a lion, we do that. That's how our mind works. 

"So we form these empathetic relationships with performers. And once you do that, you end up identifying with someone who you realise isn't worthy of your identification. And that's a very interesting place to put a viewer because they're too far in to leave, and they're too invested not to care. But they no longer believe in the rightness of the character. So that's the kind of fascination."

A character in the film says the younger generation is more extreme and more polarised. Is that you talking and why do you think this has happened? 

"Despair. I mean we now have the first generation of people who no longer believe life will be better than it was for their parents. It was always a premise of humanity that things would get better. That if I work, sacrifice, I can improve my lot. Kids today know they're not going to improve their lot no matter how much they work. Well that's a bleak cloud to live under and leads to all kinds of extremism, whether it be drugs, or in behaviour, or in general apathy. I think that the opioid explosion in the West has to be, somehow, connected to the sense of hopelessness."

Does that make you depressed?

"Well I'm out of here. I'm in the First Class car. I'm going to be fine. My kids are fucked."

Some of the characters in your films have already been to where you say young people are now. They're often in despair. They're apocalyptic, in a way. Is the younger generation where they have been?

"Well some of them, yeah. There's a lot of denial going on. And denial festers. I don't know, if I were 20 years old again, 50 years ago, I'm not quite sure how I would react."

Martin Scorsese made Silence, which was a film dealing with more or less the same issues. Were you in touch with one another?

"No, no. I knew he was making it. And in fact I tried to steal that script from him about 20-30 years ago. But, you know, I think he had a very big problem with that film, because he set it in the past. Because the premise under which that film was written, that book was written, no longer applies. There was a premise that the missionary effort was inherently a positive one. We used to believe that, 50 years ago. No one believes it anymore. Now everyone thinks of missionaries as the spear-tip of colonialism. And so the book was predicated on the premise that the missionary effort was a positive one, and not even Marty believes that anymore. So he ends up making a film in which Kundun and Last Temptation of Christ have a debate, and no one wins [laughs]."

First Reformed opens in the UK and Ireland on July 13