Despite many of his generation taking time between films, Paul Schrader is a filmmaker who has kept working quite prolifically over the decades. Since 2002, he’s directed no fewer than 11 features.
09.05.2024 - 15:01 / variety.com
Paul Schrader absentmindedly builds installation art out of seven prescription bottles, two inhalers and an empty martini glass, as we sit in a restaurant for seniors in a Manhattan high-rise. Outside, lights twinkle on the Hudson. In 1975, Schrader went to bed with a pistol under his pillow while writing “Taxi Driver.” “Having the option to end things is the only way I could sleep,” Schrader says.
The specter of death is less dramatic but still remains a central focus for the 77-year-old Schrader. Not coincidentally, it’s the subject of his new film, “Oh, Canada,” starring Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi and Uma Thurman. Schrader’s breathing is now shallow and raspy.
The voice he once used to argue with Marty Scorsese, direct Willem Dafoe and seduce Nastassja Kinski is now a broken-glass growl. He raises it the best he can to get another drink. “Can we get some service, please.” This startles our young waiter.
The average age in the lounge of Coterie Hudson Yards, a posh senior-living center in midtown, is north of 80. It’s late and quiet here; the clientele usually only shout when they want their grandchildren to speak into their good ear. In any case, we get a refill.
Schrader takes a sip, and his walrus face brightens and shoulders sag with relief. He is exhausted, which is understandable since he is in the middle of shooting an entire 91-minute film in a month. His health hasn’t been great.
He’s been hospitalized twice for COVID-related bronchial pneumonia and once for an adverse Ozempic reaction. A night of honor in Saudi Arabia ended with Schrader feeling woozy and being taken offstage in a wheelchair. “I was lucky,” he says, chewing on an olive.
Despite many of his generation taking time between films, Paul Schrader is a filmmaker who has kept working quite prolifically over the decades. Since 2002, he’s directed no fewer than 11 features.
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Paul Schrader had a special job on the set of his latest film, “Oh, Canada”: drawing on the jockstrap that Jacob Elordi wears in one of the Vietnam War drama’s pivotal scenes. There’s a choice at the heart of “Oh, Canada,” when the fictional filmmaker Leonard Fife (played as a young man by Elordi, and older man as Richard Gere) dodges the Vietnam draft and escapes to Canada. The script leaves breadcrumbs as to what exactly happens until very late in the film, but finally Elordi is seen reporting for an Army physical.
Paul Schrader shed tears as his new film “Oh, Canada” earned a four-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Friday night. Jacob Elordi was notably absent from the premiere, possibly because he is filming Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” in which he stars as The Monster. After the ovation finished, Schrader addressed Elordi not being there, saying: “I’m very happy with Richard, Uma, Jake — not here with us –and it all worked out.
Richard Gere poses for a family photo while attending the 2024 Cannes Film Festival premiere of his upcoming film Oh, Canada held at Palais des Festivals on Friday (May 17) in Cannes, France.
Hard to believe it has been 44 years since Paul Schrader and star Richard Gere last worked together on 1980’s seminal American Gigolo, a film that became not just a keystone in Gere’s celebrated career but also one for one Schrader’s as one of his earliest directorial credits. Of course he has written some of the great screenplays, particularly in his collaborations with Martin Scorsese on Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Taxi Driver. But it is what interests him now a half century later as a writer-director that continues to fascinate.
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Straying from the hotheaded “Taxi Driver” style that has dominated much of his career, Paul Schrader pays ruminative and respectful tribute to his late friend, novelist Russell Banks, who gave the writer-director the raw material for one of his best films, “Affliction” — and now, for one of his best films in years. Adapted from Banks’ “Foregone” (and given the title the author told Schrader he wanted for the book), “Oh, Canada” presents a dying artist’s final testimony as a multifaceted film-within-a-film, honoring Banks while also revealing so many of Schrader’s own thoughts on mortality.
Angelique Jackson Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi star in Paul Schrader‘s latest, highly anticipated film ‘Oh Canada,’ which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday. Based on the late Russell Banks’ 2021 novel “Foregone,” the film centers on Gere’s Leonard Fife, an acclaimed filmmaker and “one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam, shares all his secrets to de-mythologize his mythologized life.” Elordi plays the younger version of Leonard. In this first-look clip, Gere’s Leonard speeds up to someone’s home, gets out of a car and walks toward the gate.
Uma Thurman has been to Cannes more times than she can remember, either to pledge support for the glamorous annual charity event amfAR or with films as diverse as the genteel Merchant-Ivory period film The Golden Bowl (2000) and Quentin Tarantino’s ultraviolent Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), in which she reprised her badass role as The Bride. The film that propelled her to stardom, Pulp Fiction, won the Palme d’Or there, and Thurman hasn’t forgotten what it did for her. This year, she’s back with Paul Schrader‘s Oh, Canada, the kind of smart, character-based indie on which she earned her spurs.
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