“I Had This Dream About a Dog Being Eaten by a Crocodile”
In a winding conversation with Paul Schrader, the legendary writer-director chats about Taylor Swift, his new movie, ‘Oh, Canada,’ and blogging under the influence of chardonnay“I Had This Dream About a Dog Being Eaten by a Crocodile”
In a winding conversation with Paul Schrader, the legendary writer-director chats about Taylor Swift, his new movie, ‘Oh, Canada,’ and blogging under the influence of chardonnay
Over the past 15 years, Paul Schrader has populated his Facebook page with incisive movie criticism, pithy political commentary, and vivid memories of dreams. He has denigrated Elon Musk’s seizure of Twitter and exalted Taylor Swift’s paradigm-shifting influence. He has bemoaned AI’s increasingly blurred ethical and artistic lines and wondered why full-body tattoos are attractive. Within the past year, he deemed Glen Powell a movie star (“Now he needs to make his Hud”), questioned Ti West’s fascination with horror (“Why does he remain in the slasher subgenre?”), and barely survived a 3D IMAX screening of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (“bruised but unbowed”).
Though the 78-year-old’s musings range from perceptive and insightful to “old man yelling at the clouds,” they have become their own cottage industry—frequent fodder for film blogs and a rare window into the mind of one of the greatest living filmmakers, still eager to engage, challenge, and provoke his growing online fandom.
Last month, however, Schrader added a new subcategory to his social media arsenal: emergency reporter. Several hours before we met for an interview inside the 13th-floor restaurant of his senior living facility—where he moved at the beginning of 2023 to care for his wife, Mary Beth Hurt—flames engulfed one of its air-conditioning towers, sending plumes of black smoke over the midtown Manhattan luxury high-rise. “My building. Please evacuate,” he captioned a photo of several fire trucks around the block. The danger didn’t last long. “It was only uncertain for about 20 minutes,” he tells me that afternoon, sipping coffee and fiddling with his gold watch. Still, Facebook commenters worried about the potential implications of losing the cinematic legend: “Glad you’re OK,” one wrote. “We need some more movies from you …”
They needn’t worry. Despite some recent illnesses, Schrader is still churning out work at a prolific rate. Since introducing audiences to Travis Bickle in 1976 with Taxi Driver (the first of several Martin Scorsese collaborations), he has spent his career fascinated with ostracized, often violent men grappling with their place in the world. Look no further than his recent (though unofficially titled) “Man in a Room” trilogy—First Reformed, The Card Counter, Master Gardener—which forms the basis of his resurgence as an independent filmmaker over the past decade. Each of them centers on a polarizing protagonist quietly devoted to a routine-oriented profession, all simmering with guilt, on the verge of an existential crisis, and eager to repent for their sins.
His latest movie, Oh, Canada, pulls on a similar thread. Adapted from Russell Banks’s novel Foregone, it follows Leo Fife (Richard Gere), an acclaimed and dying documentarian who allows his former students (Michael Imperioli and Victoria Hill) inside his home to record a series of interviews about his career in front of his wife (Uma Thurman). Throughout the process, Leo attempts to set the record straight about his life, providing clarity on his home-wrecking defection to Canada as a young man, which Schrader captures in a variety of layered flashbacks (featuring Jacob Elordi) that play with time and memory through the confused jumble of Leo’s decaying mind.
In essence, Oh, Canada functions as a confessional, another peek into Schrader’s compulsion to exorcise guilt and reflect on his life, but without the harshness of his previous work. The subject matter might seem like a logical end point for his filmmaking career if not for his relentless creative ambition (Schrader plans to start shooting a new movie in the spring and is already writing another project). As he posted on Facebook earlier this year: “Everytime [sic] I think I’m ready to die I come up with a new script idea.”
After the election, you posted, “If I were younger I would resettle outside the United States.” I immediately thought, “This is some really genius marketing for Oh, Canada.”
[Laughs.] Richard Gere has a house in Connecticut. He has a girlfriend who’s from Spain. They sold the house in Connecticut and are moving to the Madrid area. He was of two minds, and then this happened. Let’s stay with her people. The reason I’m here is because my wife is on the sixth floor. And so, I cannot leave.
But if you were younger ...
If I were younger, I would have loved to leave. I’d do what Willem [Dafoe] did—Willem lives in Italy now.
Unlike your last few films, Oh, Canada doesn’t have any diary sessions, but it is very much a confessional movie. What appeals to you about writing those kinds of stories?
Well, I picked it up from [Robert] Bresson—not from film noir. Bresson’s narration is very low-key, inconsequential, unemphasized. Not even plot driven. “I went to the gas station. Gas was $4.55. It was $4.05 two weeks ago. I picked up a sandwich. My brother called. Apparently, our mom is sick. They were out of turkey, so I got ham.” That’s the kind of narration I like. I think of it as intravenous feeding. You’re giving nourishment to the viewer, but he can’t taste it. And so then he begins not to really think of it as anything but a kind of background. And then often you slip in something.
I’ve been raised to feel guilty. And why shouldn’t I be? Or why shouldn’t we all be?Paul Schrader
There’s a scene in Pickpocket where—with Bresson, you saw him write it. Then you heard him read what you are reading. So the character writes, “I went into the lobby of a large bank and sat down.” And the narrator says that. And you have a shot—he goes into the lobby of a large bank. Now, what’s going on here? Bresson’s fucking with you. He’s fucking with time, really. He was fucking with your concept of what movies are about. That’s why I like narration. The movie I’m doing now has a real challenge: I wanted to get away from the journal narration. My main character is a professor of philosophy, and he’s writing a book on [Baruch] Spinoza. So the narration is excerpts from his book on Spinoza. I’m trying to find, between his observations of Spinoza and Spinoza’s own comments, some middle place where that narrative can kind of work without hitting you on the head with the journal format.
A lot of your previous films, especially recently, have a kind of guilt attached to them, too.
Well, I mean, that’s how I was raised. The computer gets programmed fairly early. You know, once they load in that software, they’re going to run it the rest of their life. And my software was loaded with guilt. Calvinistic guilt. The unforgivable sin, predestination, total depravity. That’s just hammered into you. So I will always circle around that because I’ve been raised to feel guilty. And why shouldn’t I be? Or why shouldn’t we all be?
Do you find that writing is a cathartic practice?
Does it change my life or my behavior? No. Not that kind of catharsis. But it’s a way of working through things. Also, it has to do with age. So as I age, the characters do. Which is harder for me because movies are so economically driven by the younger profile. It’s easier when the characters are young, like Travis Bickle. But as you age, you get different problems in your life. Light Sleeper—which was 35 years ago—I turned 40 and was thinking about midlife crises. I need to make a midlife movie. And I kept looking for a midlife metaphor. I couldn’t find one—all the clichés. And then I had a dream about this drug dealer I knew. I realized: That’s my guy! I’m a middle-aged drug delivery boy whose boss is quitting, going into cosmetics, and [he] has no skills. That’s a midlife crisis!
I noticed you talk a lot about your dreams. When you have a dream, do you write it down immediately when you wake up?
Never have.
And you still remember them?
I remember them quite well, yeah. What happens more often is I have sequential dreams. So I’ll have the same dream over a period of hours, and they’ll pick up where they left off. And now, part of the new dream will be re-remembering the old dream. As I just posted the other day, I had this dream about a dog being eaten by a crocodile. And the dream was very, very elaborate. And I woke up and I thought, What in the hell did that mean? Where the hell did that come from? And then in the next dream, I was telling my friend about it, and he said, “I know what that dream means.” He told me—and he was right—that in order to save my dog, I had to extract it from the crocodile. I had to cut the crocodile into shreds and peel it off my dog. And then after the dog was saved, other people were accusing me of cruelty to animals. And it reflected a situation in my private life that I don’t want to go into where somebody I’d helped a lot betrayed me. And he said, “You thought you were doing a good thing, and now he says you weren’t.”
In Oh, Canada, Leo has these memories—sometimes as his current version and sometimes as a younger man. And sometimes, even in the same memory, he remembers both versions of himself. When you have your memories and you look back on your life, do you envision yourself as a younger person or as your current age? How do you see yourself in your own memories?
I have no idea. I think that we create memories, and then we believe them. When I was at AFI, Howard Hawks was there, and he was telling a story that he’d told many times before. It had been disproven by all the other people’s stories, but it was a good story. And he was telling it again. “Mr. Hawks, you know, so-and-so and so-and-so say this never happened …” And he said, “I was there, and it happened!” Well, he was wrong, but he’d only remembered his story. I had a story I told about Blue Collar and Richard Pryor. I’d been telling it for years. The story kept getting better as I told it. And then I was introducing Blue Collar in Santa Monica, and at the end, a guy came up to me and said, “Hello, do you remember me?” I said, “No.” He said, “I'm Rashon [Khan], I was Richard’s bodyguard.” I said, “Oh, Rashon, really? You know, I’ve been telling this story now for probably 20 years. I don’t know if it’s true anymore. You heard me tell it …” He said, “Yeah, it’s true.” I said, “Oh, thank God.”
Humility would be one word for it. Another word is intelligence.Schrader
Did I read correctly that every shot and every setup was used in Oh, Canada?
Until a couple months ago. There was an epilogue of three setups. And at the very last minute, I cut the epilogue. People had been saying, “You don’t need it. You don’t need it.” I had added it. It wasn’t in the book. I kept hanging on to it. Finally, I had a screening and somebody said to me, “You know, this [moment] is your last chance to probably have a cry.” And I went back and said, “Damn. Damn. He’s right.” And so it ends now when he crosses over into Canada. I felt that it needed to be wrapped up, but I think I was wrong.
That takes some humility to cut something like that, right?
Humility would be one word for it. Another word is intelligence.
You frequently post on Facebook, and I was wondering if that platform is like a diary for you.
No, I use it because I started out as a film critic, and I had to stop doing that because there’s no way you could do that and make films at the same time, because you can’t risk offending people you potentially want to hire. But you still have the itch. And one of the first things I really liked about criticism was Pauline Kael’s book Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which was all her Berkeley rep notes. They were printed on a flyer and handed out. And so that’s how I sort of think of doing [Facebook reviews]. But not judgmentally—only if I have a kind of interesting insight. It’s not really a question of whether I like the film or I don’t like the film. The question is “Has anybody thought of this aspect of it?” and sometimes you’re able to start interesting conversations.
I would imagine you’re aware that your posts are catnip for the film blog industry. They love to parse your every word. Does it make you second-guess sometimes what you want to put out there?
You know, blogging and chardonnay do not go together at all. You have to resist the temptation to do something that you would regret the next day. You think, “Well, I’m going to bed. If I still think this is interesting tomorrow, I’ll post it.” But if I post it now and I get up tomorrow, I’ll say, “Why did you post that?” So, yeah, you do think about that. And also, if you like words, you’re always trying to find a precise way to catch the center of something.
In a way that if you were a critic, you’d say, “I came up with that line!” Or “I nailed that description of that film.” Or “What’s at the heart of it?” Or “What’s the deep-seated contradiction inside the structure of the film? I spotted it. No one else has spotted it.”
There was an obvious one in Anora. I was surprised nobody spotted it. It was such an obvious expositional boo-boo. So I wrote about it. This tough as nails girl who resists everything, has a billionaire ex-husband, and she sells it for 10 grand. You know, anybody with half a brain and one call to a lawyer is going to get 20 times that. In that case, you just put it out there and say, “Why didn't anybody catch this error earlier on?”
How often are you able to get to the theater? Where do you like to go in New York?
I go to the AMC 34th Street—it’s walking distance. Forty-Second is also a little longer walk. And those theaters usually have one room dedicated to art house things. There’s 14 theaters on 34th Street, and one of them is now playing Bonhoeffer. So you don’t always have to go down to Metrograph or IFC. I try to go—I mean, I see a movie every day. Most people do, if you’re an art person. But I do try to go to the physical theater at least once a week. I just saw the Roman Catholic film Conclave, which I liked a lot. I’m glad I saw that in the theater. And I was going to go see Emilia Pérez, and all of a sudden, boom, it’s on Netflix last night. I don’t know. I mean, this is a movie I feel I should go to a theater for. But to go to a theater, I have to pay for two taxis, pay for a ticket. You know, when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be 40, 50 bucks. And on Netflix, I can just hit the button. And if I get tired of watching it, I can pause it and see it tomorrow. That’s regrettable in some ways. Fortunately, there are still enough movies that have a short run that you can catch them early on.
Did you end up seeing Emilia Pérez?
No, I didn't see it. Now the question is whether I’ll see it tonight. Because now it’s only playing at the IFC. Do I really want to take a cab down near the IFC? The theaters there are shitty in the first place.
Blogging and chardonnay do not go together at all.Schrader
Well, speaking of short stints, there’s Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 …
Yeah, that’s a mystery, though. Everything I’ve heard about it is that somebody at Warner Bros. fucked up. Because everybody who’s seen it thinks that it had a shot. And I can’t help but think that ageism played some role in that. Do we really want to support this 94-year-old director? Or do we just want to distract him? Because everybody who’s seen it has said, “It’s not his best, but it’s among his best.” And Warner Bros. are treating it like they’ve finally got Clint off the lot.
As someone who is a contemporary of his in some ways, is it hard to see the way that studios are approaching this?
Clint’s situation is unique because he’s had a deal at Warner for decades. But nobody has a studio deal anymore. That’s probably why they’re happy to dump him. Studios don’t like those deals—housekeeping deals, development deals.
Warners had a falling-out with Chris Nolan, too.
Yeah, I mean, a housekeeping deal is a lot of money. And you have to green-light development of certain scripts that are never going to come to anything. It is still very much a young person’s game in terms of not only the endurance factor and physicality of making a film, but also the ground zero point-of-view age of the audience. It’s always going to be a younger audience. And in the older system, once you were in your 60s, 70s, you’d start to get farmed out. They eased out Billy Wilder—Billy Wilder is making Fedora at the same time somebody else is making Easy Rider. It’s pretty clear where the studio wants to be on that side of the question. So Clint is really a miraculous exception. Twenty years ago, he would have been farmed out already. Even when those guys were still capable, studios didn’t want to support them because they weren’t plugged into the audience. But my generation is not a studio generation; we’re part of the spec generation, where you hustle yourself a movie. An older director knew his career was over when the phone didn’t ring. Now, your career is over when no one takes your calls. As long as you can still get people on the phone, you still have hope.
If you can still put a package together at a very reasonable price point—16 days, 18 days, 20 days—Oh, Canada was 17 days—you can make a film that you can be fairly certain will make investors whole. You’re not going to make them rich, but you can make them whole. And when I used to say to people, “I’ll make you rich,” I was lying. I don’t say that anymore. I say, “I’ll make you whole.” And I’m not lying. My investors in the last films have become whole. They got their money back. And so I essentially say to them, “I’ll make you a film that you can mention at a dinner party and people will be impressed.” I’ll put you on a carpet at Venice, Berlin, and Cannes, and I’ll make you whole. You’ve made a lot of money in your life selling dishwashers and diapers. Wouldn’t you rather try this for once? And those guys love to wear the tuxedos and go to the red carpet because there’s no other experience in their life that will give them that.
Do you talk to Martin Scorsese about this stuff at all? Do you feel like he is getting near the end of filmmaking career?
Well, I’ve been trying to reach him. He owes me. We get together about twice a year—we were supposed to get together, and I got sick. I had to cancel. Or he got sick, and he had to cancel. Whatever. At our age—I was just talking to De Niro, and the first thing you say now is “How are you doing, Bob?” It’s not a superficial question. It’s really “How are you doing?” Because, you know, you’re all just a phone call away. The doctor calls you up and says, “Could you stop by?” Nothing good happens when you “stop by.”
The last time I saw Marty, I ended up in the hospital. Did you see that post? His dog took a big chunk out of me. Marty said, “Don’t touch that dog. It’s a Scottie, it’s a terrible dog, it’s my daughter’s. Don’t touch him!” Well, he takes a chunk out of me. And I look at him, and he’s chewing it going [pretends to gnaw]. I see my thumb skin in his mouth; I’m bleeding all over the place. Fortunately, Marty has a 24/7 nurse for his wife, so the nurse took care of me and everything. I’m bleeding on the wallpaper, the carpets, everything. Marty’s saying, “God, this is like one of my movies.” [Laughs.]
So, do you have an idea for what his last movie could be or should be? Does he want to declare one?
I think he wants to. He knows he can’t do Killers of the Flower Moon again. He can’t spend the better part of a year in Oklahoma. Even when I visited him in Taiwan, he was saying he had to have people help him up the hill, but in Taiwan, he said, “I just can’t go up the hill alone anymore.” I’m sure he wants to do something. I don’t know what it is. He’s still very much in this producing game. [Schrader pulls out a photo of them together from 50 years ago.] I’m taller than him then. You know why? Platform shoes. I was wearing platform shoes.
Marty’s daughter loves putting him on TikToks, getting him into internet culture a bit. Do you follow the internet zeitgeist at all? Do you know any trends or influencers right now?
Not really. It’s a lot of work. I do Facebook. At times, I wish I had just stopped doing Facebook. To then do Instagram and TikTok on top of that, it starts to be like a full-time job.
So if I mentioned “Hawk Tuah Girl” or “the Rizzler,” would you know what I’m talking about?
No.
I was curious if being on the internet helps inspire your next stories, or if influencers or young actors with large followings help you consider casting certain kinds of people.
Well, that’s what casting people do. They start bringing up, like, Jacob Elordi. [A casting director] said, “Have you thought about Jacob Elordi?” I said, “Who’s Jacob Elordi?” He said, “Have you watched Euphoria?” I said, “No, I’ve never watched it.” So then we sat down and watched Euphoria. I said, “Oh, I see.”
Now that you’ve worked with him, do you have a better appreciation of Jacob and why he’s become a star for his generation?
Well, I mean, I think Jacob has not really been tested yet. I think the test will probably be [playing] Heathcliff [in Wuthering Heights], and whether he can cut the screen on fire with Heathcliff. Here he’s playing a young Richard Gere. Other things, he’s been in an ensemble, playing Elvis, but that’s really Priscilla’s movie. [Wuthering Heights] is Heathcliff’s movie. It’s one of the great fictional characters. And the only person who’s ever tried it on film is [Laurence] Olivier. We’ll see whether he is Leo or if he’s something more.
Uma Thurman mentioned she was nervous about working with you until she found out through your Facebook that you loved Taylor Swift.
Well, yeah. It was a good one-liner.
But you do appreciate Taylor’s apparatus and her ability to transcend generations, culture …
Oh, obviously. She’s a phenomenal artist. In the history of music, you know, there’s Elvis, there’s Frank, and there’s Taylor. I mean, people who have transcended their field and become phenomena and brands in an unending way. Like the Elvis and the Sinatra brands are still very much alive. Who knows how long it took for them to stay alive?
You’ve mentioned in a post that her life story would make a good movie. Would you ever consider her for one of your movies? Would that ever interest you?
It could be very distracting. It would have to be cast right out of the gate. There was a film I wanted to do a few years ago with Joe Alwyn when he was going out with her. And I thought they would be good together. And Joe wanted to do it. And then something happened. I had a little trouble with the financing, and then he broke up with Taylor. So, that was the end of that.
That’s show business.
Yeah. If Taylor wants to do it. … She could read the first 10 pages of the phone book—someone would finance it.
This interview has been edited for clarity.