FIRST REFORMED
Paul Schrader on religious drama First Reformed, his best film for decades
In which Paul Schrader predicts the death of humanity by the end of the century. He’s available for children’s parties.
PAUL SCHRADER’S FIRST Reformed may well be his magnum opus. The story of Reverend Ernst Toller (a never better Ethan Hawke), a priest who undergoes a crisis after he meets a suicidal young man, Michael (Philip Etinger), who can’t bring a child into an ecologically fucked-up world, it is the culmination of the writerdirector’s obsessions and interests played out over the last 40 years. Touching base with his screenplay for Taxi Driver plus directorial efforts like American Gigolo and Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, it’s a slowburning portrait of a spiritually struggling man trying to keep faith in the face of the realities of modern life: the environment, American big business, church corruption. Here, Schrader unpicks his most compelling film for years and — of course — talks Taylor Swift. How would you characterise Father Toller’s malaise?
First and foremost, he has a sickness which [Danish philosopher Søren] Kierkegaard called ‘sickness unto death’, which is despair. He is trying to deal with despair in various ways: alcohol, his journal, the liturgy. And then he comes across this boy and he catches this boy’s virus. So is his real problem the environment? Or is his real problem despair? I think it’s despair. We now live in a world where despair is built in. I don’t think the human species will even survive this century.
Really? That’s pessimistic.
Anyone who is hopeful is not paying attention. There may have been a reason to be hopeful ten years ago, but we’ve played our hand now. We’ve made clear what our priorities are. Our priorities are our immediate comforts and not the existence of future generations.
Fingers crossed. Why did you think Ethan Hawke was right for Toller? These sacred men of the cloth, they have a certain type of look. Ethan had that look. Also he was getting to be the right age and his face was getting more interesting. His personality is naturally outgoing and a little bit goofy. I thought he’d be very interesting as an actor if he went the other way and gave a recessive performance.
How did you think about that long conversation where Toller meets Michael? It’s about 11 minutes long.
It sets the tone for the film and if that scene doesn’t work, the film doesn’t work. Most film conversations are relatively short — two or three minutes and they move on —
and that’s because there is not much depth in them. So, when you write a long one, it really has to be about something.
There’s a sequence where Toller and Michael’s wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) fly across an environmental wasteland fantasy.
I realised that at the end of the film you needed to jump out of material reality and I was thinking, how could I foreshadow that? How could I tell the viewer that something magical was going to happen? Then I thought quite literally: what would [Russian filmmaker Andrei] Tarkovsky do? And I said, “Well, Tarkovsky would have them levitate. He loved to have people levitate.” So that’s how the idea began. Then of course Toller’s mind is so poisoned he turns this idyllic levitation into a journey into ecological horror.
SPOILER ALERT! You mentioned the ending, where Toller passionately kisses Mary after his suicide attempt. It will provoke a lot of discussion.
It’s designed to be open-ended. Some people have said Taxi Driver ends in a kind of fantasy. It wasn’t intended that way but when people see it that way I say, ‘That’s a fair interpretation.’ So with this I wanted to build that interpretation right in there. On the one hand, perhaps he’s had this miraculous rescue and return to the world and it is actually happening. Or perhaps he is dying and this is an ecstatic vision.
People have compared First Reformed to Taxi Driver. Can you see that comparison?
Yes. I didn’t at first. I was editing the film and the editor said to me, “There’s a lot of Taxi Driver in this movie.” I came to realise it was quite diffused with the dynamic of Taxi Driver, that obsessive inner life.
Final thing: you were recently spotted at a Taylor Swift concert...
For years I’d admired how she had mounted this extraordinary career and how disciplined she was — it was just this thing this young girl was able to do. And I just wanted to go and see her at work. It was like a massive bit of entertainment machinery operating at high efficiency.
Like First Reformed?
[Laughs] Look, I started out to make a slow film. I was warning people saying, “Prepare yourselves, it’s a slow movie.” And afterwards they said, “That wasn’t a slow movie.” I tried to make a slow movie but I didn’t succeed.
FIRST REFORMED IS OUT ON DVD FROM 5 NOVEMBER