Paul Schrader Doesn’t Need Your Permission

Paul Schrader is back in the room.

The screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and the director of American Gigolo, First Reformed and The Card Counter, turned 80 in July. He’s never been busier.

The Basics of Philosophy, Schrader’s latest film as writer-director, premieres out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. He says he has “three more films in the pipeline, all written on spec.” And if you’ve been following his Facebook feed — or his pronouncements on AI girlfriends, cancel culture and the latest releases — it’s clear he has long since stopped giving a damn what anyone thinks of him.

Which is all good news for Schrader fans, many of whom were concerned his previous film, Oh, Canada (2023), would be his swan song. That tale of a dying filmmaker, played by a gray and wrinkled Richard Gere, premiered in Cannes amid reports of Schrader’s failing health. It felt, at the time, like a melancholic goodbye from one of Hollywood’s greatest provocateurs.

With The Basics of Philosophy, Schrader returns, and not with a whimper. The film, starring Jack Huston, Sofia Boutella, Daniel Zovatto and Bill Pullman, continues Schrader’s obsession with the “Man in the Room” — the trope, first manifested in Travis Bickle, cinema’s original incel, in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, that he has been repeating and refining ever since.

“He’s the loner who keeps his own company, keeps a diary and wears a mask, which is his profession,” says Schrader of his archetype character. “He began his journey as a taxi driver, then was an escort [in American Gigolo], a drug delivery boy [Light Sleeper], a police officer [in Affliction], a minister [First Reformed], a poker player [The Card Counter] and a gardener [Master Gardener]. Now he’s a professor of philosophy.”

In Basics of Philosophy, professor John Jorrisen, played by Huston, is hiding a dark secret from his past — darker even than William Tell in The Card Counter, an ex-soldier who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, or former white supremacist Narvel Roth in Master Gardener. When his victim suddenly returns to his life, it pushes the professor into a crisis with existential implications. Can the guilt of an unforgivable act ever be expunged? Can a sinner ever truly change?

We’re back in Schrader country. The land of sin and guilt, of violence and transgression, that he has claimed as his cinematic territory.

“You can’t outrun your childhood, no matter how fast or far you run,” says Schrader, who traces his artistic obsessions back to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was born in 1946, and the tenets of his strict Calvinist upbringing. “If you know anything about Calvinism, the way I was raised, it’s that the bedrock is total depravity. We are all born in sin. You can do nothing to expiate your depraved condition. You can only accept grace. There is no earning it.”

Looking back, that puritanical message was never suited for mainstream success in the movie business. It was what set Schrader apart from his peers, the generation that disrupted and rebuilt the studio system through the 1970s and ’80s. His New Hollywood friends and contemporaries — Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Brian De Palma — were raised on the genre cinema of the drive-in and the Saturday matinee. Schrader, forbidden from watching movies at all until he was 17, found his film education in a porn theater near his college campus, where the owner figured he could make a few extra bucks running an Ingmar Bergman retrospective. Bergman and porn, ideas of the sublime and of the obscene, the collision of God and transcendence on one side, and sex and violence on the other, have been the engine of Schrader’s cinema ever since.

He came to Hollywood via film criticism. Pauline Kael, whom Schrader met by chance through a joint acquaintance, helped him get into film school at UCLA. Schrader’s first major work was the now-classic Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. The book argues that by stripping away conventional cinematic pleasures — melodrama, psychological explanation, spectacle and emotional manipulation — “transcendental” filmmakers like Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer create a space in which viewers of their films can confront mystery and spiritual experience. Schrader would spend the next five decades trying to smuggle those transcendental elements into commercial American filmmaking.

But he started with a gangster movie.

The Yakuza, Schrader’s first script, co-written with his brother, Leonard, was a crime thriller set in Japan. It sparked a bidding war and sold, in 1974, for a phenomenal $325,000. Directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Mitchum, the film flopped, but it put Schrader on the radar of the emerging generation of American filmmakers.

He was on track to become a hotshot hired gun for studio scripts and rewrites. In 1975, he wrote Obsession for De Palma. His original version, a Vertigo-inspired psychological thriller with a strong incest subtext, was heavily rewritten before release. Schrader did an early draft of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Spielberg ditched the script, calling it “terribly guilt-ridden.”

But before his time a working screenwriter, Schrader had an existential crisis that brought his darker vision to the surface. After a period where he lost his job, his marriage and his apartment, and was spending nights trawling through New York’s porn shops and theaters, sleeping in his car with a loaded gun, Schrader sat down and wrote Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle, the first Paul Schrader Man in the Room, was born.

The film won the Palme d’Or, made Robert De Niro a star and locked Schrader into the role he has played, with variations, ever since: the man who supplies Hollywood’s most respected directors with their darkest, most theologically freighted material — Scorsese’s Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast — while fighting to get his own, even stranger visions in front of an audience.

It was never easy. Critical and commercial success have rarely come together. American Gigolo was a hit. Cat People and Affliction were well received. But Schrader’s fight has included some brutal stretches.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Schrader’s stylized portrait of the Japanese novelist and nationalist who died by ritual suicide — considered by many his best film — needed Coppola and Lucas to lean on Warner Bros. just to get financed, and even then it was banned from release in Japan (until 2025) and remains barely seen in the U.S. Light Sleeper (1992) was turned down by 29 studios and distributors before Schrader put up $350,000 of his own money to get it made. Dying of the Light (2014) was recut against his will by its producers, an experience so scarring that Schrader has said it convinced him the only way forward was to keep budgets small enough that nobody could take a film away from him ever again.

It is that decision — to shrink the budgets rather than compromise the vision — that has produced the most sustained run of acclaimed work in his half-century career. First Reformed (2017), The Card Counter (2021) and Master Gardener (2022), all of which premiered in Venice, are perhaps the purest versions of the Schrader Man in the Room film. First Reformed brought Schrader his first Oscar nomination, for original screenplay, at 71.

“In the beginning of my career, I used to kill a lot of people, I had a lot of blood shots, a lot of gunshots. There was always an action element, a violent element, which was partly to make them more commercial,” says Schrader “These new films don’t really have any action, any violence. Publicists always want to call every single film a thriller. But to me, a thriller has violence in it. So these are not really thrillers; they’re character studies.”

The key to his late-career run, says Schrader, is less inspiration than arithmetic. Digital production has brought costs down, and tax incentives and international presales make up the rest.

“I realized I can now make a film about this subject matter,” he says. “I can get it financed, because I can now say to a financier: I will give you three things if you finance my movie. One, I will give you a movie that is talked about at dinner parties. Two, I will put you on a red carpet in Venice, Cannes or Berlin. And three, I will make you whole. I won’t make you money, but I’ll make you whole.”

The Basics of Philosophy got a boost ahead of Venice, with Scorsese coming on board as an executive producer, and Noora Films, which sold Oh, Canada worldwide, taking on international sales. CAA Media Finance is handling U.S. sales.

Schrader rattles off the math behind The Basics of Philosophy the way another director might describe a shot list: a million and a half in equity, plus $750,000 in tax incentives out of Missouri and Kansas City, for a total budget of roughly $2.3 million. “I’m going to get that million and a half equity back,” he says. “I’m going to make these people whole, and I’m going to put them on a red carpet, and they’re going to be able to say at a dinner party, ‘I produced The Basics of Philosophy,’ and people are going to say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the one — that was an interesting film.’ That’s the sort of deal I was able to make in the digital era.”

It is a strikingly unromantic account of how a Paul Schrader movie gets made. But that’s rather the point. Schrader has spent the past decade building a model that requires no leap at all — just a spreadsheet that adds up.

“When I was coming up, everybody wanted a studio deal,” he says. “Now they realize you can write a script, you can package it, you can find some equity money, you can get some incentives, and you can get it made. You don’t need an all-embracing studio, and you don’t need permission. You can just do it.”

The next step in Schrader’s war against permission is artificial intelligence. He has become a vocal, sometimes gleeful evangelist for AI in filmmaking — fielding backlash for a Facebook post declaring himself “STUNNED” after ChatGPT generated a screenplay pitch “for a Paul Schrader film” that he found disquietingly plausible, and later remarking that he’d “come to realize AI is smarter than I am.” 

Schrader has been less enthusiastic about AI’s emotional intelligence. In May he posted that he “procured an online AI girlfriend,” but when he tried to “probe her programming,” the program “terminated” the relationship.

When it comes to using AI in filmmaking, however, Schrader is all in. “I’m doing one film now which is all AI, and another which is probably 15 minutes of AI,” he says. “One is a noir about three brothers — a corrupt cop, a drug dealer, a serial killer — built around AI-generated human prototypes rather than name actors.”

Schrader seems unconcerned that using technology in this way will mean a loss of jobs in the industry. “Those jobs are gone, babe. You can scream ‘Stop AI’ all you want, but you can’t stop it.”

Whether this counts as prophecy or provocation depends on who in Hollywood you ask, and Schrader seems to enjoy not knowing the answer himself. He has become one of the industry’s most compulsively online figures — a daily poster who holds forth on Facebook with unfiltered opinions on new releases (he’s a fan of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, dismissive of Disclosure Day), attacks what he’s called the “infectious” spread of cancel culture, and periodically makes headlines for comments that have nothing to do with movies. In 2016, his post, calling for armed resistance to the incoming Trump administration, drew a visit from the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit. He deleted it, later expressing regret for the rhetoric, if not the politics behind it.

A more serious reckoning came in 2025. A former assistant sued the director, accusing him of sexual misconduct. Schrader has denied the most serious allegations: He’s acknowledged two kisses during nights of drinking at film festivals, but disputes the rest of his accuser’s account.

The lawsuit complicates rather than resolves the argument that Schrader has been having since Taxi Driver: that a man is not just his worst act, that transgression and grace can occupy the same frame. It’s the core question asked by The Basics of Philosophy: Can a sinner be forgiven, and can anyone truly change?

At 80, Schrader continues to build a career on refusing to wait for permission — from studios, from critics, from the industry at large. Now, on at least one front, permission isn’t his to claim. Whether that undercuts his legacy or simply becomes part of it is, like so much of Schrader’s work, an unresolved matter of judgment. A judgment, in the end, that’s not his to make.

As a good Calvinist, Schrader would probably agree.