Schrader on Schrader is an essential set of dialogues with one of the most genuinely fascinating and uncompromising writer-directors in American film.
Raised as a Calvinist and hence forbidden to partake of 'worldly pleasures' such as movies, Paul Schrader nevertheless defied his upbringing to become first a leading film critic, then a star pupil among the US 'movie brat' generation of the 1970s: writing the coruscating screenplays for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directing such provocative pictures as Blue Collar, Hardcore and American Gigolo. Maturity has never sated his appetite for attacking 'difficult' material, from adapting Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation for Scorsese, to filming the singular lives of Mishima and Patty Hearst.
Schrader on Schrader is a tour through this formidable body of work, including some of Schrader's finest critical essays.
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1946, Paul Schrader was raised in a Calvinist household where movies were proscribed. He made up for lost time by becoming first a gifted critic, then the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, then the director of a string of cerebral and provocative films, including Blue Collar (1978), American Gigolo (1980), Mishima (1985), Patty Hearst (1988), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Affliction (1997), Autofocus (2002), Dominion (2005), The Walker (2007), and Adam Resurrected (2008)..
Kevin Jackson is a freelance writer on film, who is also the editor of Schrader on Schrader.