The director, Paul Schrader, one of the most singular and obsessive auteurs America has ever produced, did not grow up loving cinema. Raised in a severe Calvinist household, the young Schrader did not even watch a single film until his late teens.
After considering a career as a minister while studying at Calvin College, Schrader pivoted to a graduate program in film studies at UCLA, which helped him get his start in film journalism under the tutelage of the celebrated critic Pauline Kael. Paul Schrader movies take his ideas and stress test them inside his characters' bodies, and the consistency of this approach never bores.
This article assembles a list of the best of Schrader's output, starting with his directed work and finishing with his screenplays. Fans should hope this catalog may still get an addition or two in the coming years. The life story of the troubled Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, a postwar playwright and novelist who committed ritualized suicide after a bizarre failed coup attempt in , caught the attention of Paul Schrader's brother, Leonard, who wrote a screenplay with his wife Chieko that his director brother went on to helm.
Paul Schrader still considers it his best work. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters , tells the story of Mishima's life interspersed with dramatizations of his literary output. The resulting film feels fresh and experimental even today. Its lead character, Mishima, has so many contradictions — ultranationalist but deemed unfit for military service during the Second World War, a married upholder of traditional values but secretly gay, a natural skeptic nevertheless careening toward an absurd end — that the movie ends up supercharged by the unstable force of nature at its center.
And I like this theme. Schrader made one of his best thrillers with American Gigolo , which stars Richard Gere as Julian, an upscale male prostitute who slinks around LA in a red convertible on his way to servicing wealthy older women.
