Director gives glimpse of Apocalypse soon
VENICE: Nobody is ever going to call Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” a feel- good movie, and the legendary screenwriter and director is fi ne with that.
“If you are hopeful about humanity and the planet you are not paying attention,” Schrader said on Thursday as he presented his latest writing and directing project at the Venice fi lm festival.
The fi lm turns around the uncheery theme of impending environmental apocalypse and the question of whether Christians could or should have done more to prevent it.
“I don’t see humanity outliving the century,” Schrader told reporters after the drama, which stars Ethan Hawke, as an unexpectedly middle- aged troubled pastor, and Amanda Seyfried, was unveiled.
The dark tale is being tipped as an outside shot for the Golden Lion, the top prize at the world’s oldest cinema festival.
Outlining the thinking that lay behind his script, Schrader added: “I have to be honest. I have lived in the magic cone of history, the baby boomer years.”
“A life of affluence, a life of leisure, a life of little pestilence, little war. And for that my generation has pretty well screwed the planet for our kids.”
Such themes are being increasingly reflected by fi lmmakers: planetary destruction driven by climate warming was a prominent theme in Venice’s opening fi lm “Downsizing”.
But Schrader says his tale of a former army chaplain undergoing a spiritual crisis as he grapples simultaneously with the grief of losing a son and possibly fatal illness is rooted in more than the contemporary, gloomy zeitgeist.
Whisky secrets
Having had a famously restrictive Calvinist upbringing, the 71-year- old said he had nurtured the idea of making a fi lm about spiritual issues since the early 1970s, when he was breaking into the big time as the writer of Martin Scorsese’s groundbreaking “Taxi Driver.”
“I was just too excited by the violence, the intimacy, the sexuality of cinema to work with that more austere toolkit,” Schrader said. “But a couple of years ago I realised it was time to come back to it.” — AFP