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Schrader Upacks Some Serious Emotional Baggage in First Reformed

The unsettling low-budget character study about a troubled pastor ties together the director's longtime fascinations with spirituality and loneliness.
By Todd Jorgenson |
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For almost a half-century, acclaimed filmmaker Paul Schrader had an idea that kept haunting his subconscious.

He thought about it ever since the 1970s, when his first book, Transcendental Style in Film, discussed theological aesthetics in cinema and his breakthrough screenplay, Taxi Driver, explored the link between isolation and outbursts of violence.

He incorporates that same transcendental style with a renewed sense of contemplation about faith and loneliness in First Reformed, a low-budget character study about a troubled pastor that’s both bleak and provocative.

“This sort of completes the circle,” Schrader said during the South by Southwest Film Festival. “It takes these two diverse threads and ties them together.”

The drama chronicles Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke), a preacher at a rural New York church dealing with a dwindling congregation and financial crunch as it approaches its 250th anniversary. These days, it’s little more than a tourist attraction because of its abolitionist history. However, when a parishioner (Amanda Seyfried) requests a favor with potentially tragic consequences, it sends Toller into a downward spiral of isolation and doubt.

“I never thought I would do a spiritual film,” Schrader said. “I was just too intoxicated with the sex and violence and action of cinema.”

The 71-year-old filmmaker, who graduated from a Michigan seminary in the late 1960s, became inspired after a dinner conversation with Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida) a few years ago about those deep recurring themes.

“It was time to write that script that I promised for years never to write,” he said. “I’ve been living in the shadow of this film for longer than I knew.

Schrader (American Gigolo) sent his screenplay to Hawke, who responded within 24 hours agreeing to star.

“The script was clearly the work of somebody who had a lot to say,” Hawke said. “When you can act in material that’s substantive and meaningful, that’s my greatest joy.”

Schrader didn’t realize how extensively he was revisiting Taxi Driver, with its dark internal strife and existential meditation, until a conversation with his editor during post-production.

“You get inside a loner’s mind and you see the world as they do. You hear their voice. Then they start to veer off, and they’re no longer the person you thought they were. They become unreliable. They often become evil, but you are still identifying with them. When you get a viewer to identify with someone they don’t regard as worthy of their identification, some strange things are going to happen inside their head.”

Since completing First Reformed, Schrader was prompted to write a new introduction to his 1971 book, which analyzes the work of influential directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer. The text is being reissued this spring by its original publisher, the University of California Press.

“For thousands of years, philosophers have been asking questions. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Now those questions don’t seem quite so hypothetical,” he said. “It lent a certain urgency to that discussion.”

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