“I got into screenwriting for the best of all reasons: I got into it for self-therapy.”
Writer/Director Paul Schrader (Raging Bull, Affliction)
It’s doubtful that there will ever be another filmmaker like Paul Schrader that will come out of America. The screenwriter best known for writing Taxi Driver is the confluence of people and events that has flowed through his life that has given him a unique voice in American film.
Schrader was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan in a Dutch Reformed Community. It was a world where he remembers his grandparents still speaking Dutch, and one that was shape by daily Bible reading rather than TV or movies.
“Those Bible stories are such potent stories, and, yes, they continue to leave a mark on the things I write…Apart from the Bible, the most influential book of my adolescence was an illustrated edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, the Slough of Despond, the Golden City and all that.”
Paul Schrader
In fact, he didn’t see his first film until he was 17-years-old. Years before he turned to a career in film he first desired to be a minister and then a lawyer. It was while attending Calvin College in the ’60s that he began to be exposed in a film club to transcendental films like Ordet, Marienbad and Nazarin.
Films that meshed well on an intellectual level with the philosophical and theological training he was getting. How many filmmakers can you name who are as well versed with Bergman, Dreyer, and Bresson as they are with John Calvin, John Henry Newman and Martin Buber?
How many filmmakers have never read or seen any of the works of the men just mentioned—or even heard of them? And that’s just Schrader’s foundation from his undergraduate experiences. It’s safe to say that his film aesthetics were shaped by European filmmakers more than those in the United States, though he was fond of John Ford’s films. He may not be the most accesable working filmmaker, but (for what it’s worth) I doubt you’ll find a handful of people in Hollywood with Schrader’s intellectual gravitas.
While in school he also spent a summer at Columbia in New York City and began a mentor relationship with the great critic Pauline Kael which put him on another level of critical study. After graduating from Calvin he went to grad school at UCLA and Kael hooked him up with a gig as a film critic with the L.A. Free Press. He would later publish the book Transcendental Film Style that was based on his graduate thesis.
After graduating from UCLA he spent time at AFI and did a variety of jobs including being a taxi driver which would come in handy a few years later. He first produced screenplay was The Yahuza in 1974 followed by Taxi Driver. Since then his career that has now spanned four decades.
He’ll be speaking tonight in Cedar Rapids at Coe College. Schrader has had connections to Iowa in the past. That first screenplay, The Yahuza, was co-written with his brother Leonard who was educated at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Schrader’s first wife, Jeannie Oppewall (also a Calvin College grad) was the production designer on The Bridges of Madison Country and Peacock, both of which were filmed in Iowa.
Related post: Screenwriting from Cedar Rapids (A post on when I gave a screenwriting seminar at Schrader’s old stomping grounds at Calvin)
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[…] “I got into screenwriting for the best of all reasons: I got into it for self-therapy.” Writer/Director Paul Schrader (Raging Bull, Affliction) It’s doubtful that there will ever be another filmmaker like Paul Schrader that will come out of America. The screenwriter best known for writing Taxi Driver is the confluence of people and events […] Original Source… […]