Schrader, Paul

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    A ‘Taxi Driver’ Remake: Why Arthur Jafa Recast the Scorsese Ending

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    The artist has gone back to his filmmaking roots, re-examining what he sees as racial undertones in Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 movie.Call it a return to his roots. The artist Arthur Jafa began his career as a cinematographer, working with his then-wife, Julie Dash, on the acclaimed “Daughters of the Dust” (1991) and with Spike Lee on “Crooklyn” (1994), before garnering art world fame, including a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, for “Love is the Message, The Message is Death,” a snapshot of Black life in the United States created from collaged video footage. Jafa’s practice has embraced film and video, sculpture, installation, and even painting.His newest film, which goes on view Thursday at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, has a provocative conceit: Jafa has remade the shockingly violent climax of a classic of American cinema — Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) — in which the main character Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, storms into a seedy Times Square brothel and kills everyone in sight in order to save Iris, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, then 12 years old.In the original movie — what Jafa calls the “redacted version” — these characters, including Iris’s pimp Sport (played by Harvey Keitel), were white. That never felt right to Jafa. When he discovered that the film’s celebrated screenwriter, Paul Schrader, had intended Sport to be African American, he decided to “restore” the movie by introducing Black actors, except for De Niro and Foster. In the 73-minute-long film, titled “******” — or as the artist pronounces it, “Redacted” — we see this recut version of the bloody climax over and over, each time slightly but crucially different. The result is extraordinary — both technically and conceptually — and brings to the surface the racist animus long accepted as underpinning Bickle’s barely contained rage. (Quentin Tarantino also criticized the decision to change the character to white in his 2022 book, “Cinema Speculation.”)Arthur Jafa cast a replacement actor, right, as the pimp in “Taxi Driver,” originally played by Harvey Keitel, then skillfully wove in the new footage and rerecorded the voices. via Arthur Jafa and Gladstone GallerySchrader, who is still making movies at 77, said in a recent telephone conversation that the change to his original vision was the right call. “Someone at Columbia Pictures said to Marty, ‘we’re going to have a riot in the theater if we cast Sport as Black,’ and I realized they were completely right.”“I think it would have been a much more vile and revolting film if his hatred was directed completely at people of color,” he added. “You can’t make something that is so off the meter that it can’t be seen or that people simply can’t bear watching.” (Martin Scorsese did not return several calls seeking his comment.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and Joel Edgerton on Paul Schrader Films

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      Joel Edgerton, Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke explain how they worked with the writer-director, known for solitary characters grappling with sin and redemption.The writer-director Paul Schrader has a metaphor he likes to use with his leading men.In his view, actors tend to think of themselves as trees in the wind fighting to stay upright when they perform. But Schrader tells his stars, “Get that image out of your head and replace it with the image of a cliff on a seacoast. And you’re there and the waves are pounding against you. They are going to come and they are going to hit you and then they are going to go away.” In this metaphor the waves can be day players sharing a scene or plot points in a narrative. But no matter what crashes against them, these men must remain stoic, hardened against the world.Joel Edgerton heard a version of this from Schrader in their first conversation about “Master Gardener,” which opened Friday. The drama is the final installment in Schrader’s recent and lauded “Man in a Room” trilogy, which began in 2017 with “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke, and includes “The Card Counter” (2021), starring Oscar Isaac.“I think I probably got the same speech that Ethan got and the same speech that Oscar got,” Edgerton said, explaining, “It wasn’t the place for an actor to explore their bag of tricks and create flourish within character but rather reduce themselves to sort of a conduit of stillness to everything moving and swirling around them.”And, indeed, Isaac and Hawke both have their own descriptions of similar dialogues with Schrader. In interviews, the actors who played these proverbial men in rooms explained what it was like to inhabit tortured but oddly serene personas in works that grapple with typical Shrader questions of sin and redemption.“Master Gardener” casts Edgerton as Narvel Roth, a horticulturist who harbors a disturbing secret: He’s a former white nationalist in witness protection. Underneath his turtleneck and overalls, his body is covered in racist tattoos. In “The Card Counter,” Isaac is William Tell, a proficient gambler who was once an Abu Ghraib torturer. And in “First Reformed,” Hawke is the Rev. Ernst Toller, a holy man filled with despair over climate change.Oscar Isaac in “The Card Counter.” Though Schrader specializes in bleak tales, “he’s not a nihilist,” the actor said. Courtesy Of Focus Features/Focus Features, via Associated PressAll three write in journals, and their entries, offering windows into their preoccupations, are delivered in voice-over narration. These beats are part of the language of a Schrader movie. “It’s like his version of a sonnet,” Isaac said. “He has his forms that he likes to use to explore different things.”In these films Schrader echoes both the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, with deliberate references to “Pickpocket” and “Diary of a Country Priest,” and himself. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) scribbled in one of these notebooks in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976), which Schrader wrote. So did Willem Dafoe’s drug dealer in “Light Sleeper” (1992), which Schrader wrote and directed.“Even when you’re shooting it, you’re aware there’s a meta thing happening where you realize like, right, this is like Travis Bickle, this is like Willem,” Hawke said. “You feel like, right, I’m part of this lineage of this human being’s work.”It’s work that Hawke is happy Schrader, now 76, is continuing. “I had the feeling that when we finished ‘First Reformed’ — he never said this to me, it was just a feeling — that he might not make another movie,” Hawke said.When Hawke saw “The Card Counter,” he said, he was proud of Schrader for “going back to war.”Schrader didn’t set out to write a trilogy, and only after someone suggested it as such did he acknowledge that’s what he was doing. All three movies concern troubled men reaching for forgiveness and transcendence, and all three trade in metaphors. “‘First Reformed’ really is not about global warming and ‘Card Counter’ is not about gambling and this one really isn’t about racism or gardening,” he said over coffee at the senior-living apartment complex in Hudson Yards where he now lives. “It’s about evolution of the soul of these people who are locked off in their rooms and can’t reach out and touch anyone.”These dramas not only ask their stars to wrestle with the misdeeds and troubles of their characters, but also require them to operate within Schrader’s precise style. He said he cast performers both on instinct and on a sense of whether they can “hold the mystery.”“There were several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding, a willingness to ask the audience to work with us, to not tap dance and try to entertain them, to not reveal too much, to invite mystery,” Hawke said, explaining that there is a freedom in that direction.Ethan Hawke as a troubled pastor in “First Reformed.” The actor said he and Schrader had “several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding.”A24At the same time, there is difficulty in achieving the stillness that Schrader asks. “In some ways it was like being asked to go to work with a straitjacket on,” Edgerton said. “But I didn’t feel like that was too daunting a proposition. My feeling always is that the director is captain, and if you go to work with someone, you put yourself in their capable hands.”Recognizing the internality Schrader was asking him to portray, Isaac recruited one of his teachers from Juilliard, Moni Yakim, and did mask work. “I was like, well, my face is going to literally be a mask, so how can I tell the story just through the body and through energy,” Isaac said.And then there’s the writing. Schrader asked each actor to copy out his character’s journal in his own hand. Isaac believed that William would write in cursive, so he took a penmanship course. For Edgerton the task was in line with his usual approach: “I always want my own handwriting to be my own handwriting” onscreen, he said, even before “Master Gardener.” All described the process as meditative, in a way.“You know in Acting 101 they tell you to write your character’s biography, try to write a journal in character,” Hawke said. “Those are very challenging exercises to do that help find the voice of the character and help integrate yourself with the person. For me it was literally delivered to me in a box with an assignment of what to do, so I loved it.”Isaac noted that Schrader, for all of his hard edges and tough themes, has a soft side as well. While “Master Gardener” ends in a different way, a number of Schrader’s films, including “The Card Counter” and “Light Sleeper,” conclude with the hero in prison reaching out to a woman he loves. “He believes in the truth and purity of what love is and what love can do,” Isaac said. “So no matter how dark and grueling things can get, he has that spark in him, too. He’s not a nihilist.”Edgerton has not yet had the opportunity to discuss his time in Schraderland with Hawke or Isaac, but the latter two have swapped stories. Schrader pulled out his phone to show me a photo he received of them alongside another one of his actors, Dafoe, huddled together with middle fingers raised. He suggested it should accompany this article.Hawke and Isaac worked together on a Marvel Cinematic Universe television show, “Moon Knight,” but Isaac, in conversation, thought of another potential franchise. “It’s an incredible badge of honor to be part of Paul Schrader’s extended universe, the PCU,” he said, laughing. “It’d be one hell of a convention of all those characters coming together. We could do a team movie. I’m going to pitch him on that.” More

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      Review: ‘There Are No Saints.’ Neither Are There New Plots.

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      A B-movie that took a decade to get to the screen follows a well-worn trail of cross-border revenge.“There Are No Saints” is an odd case. Directed by Alfonso Pineda Ulloa, from a screenplay by Paul Schrader, the movie entered preproduction in the fall of 2012, under the title “The Jesuit” and finished shooting the following year. It’s been gathering dust on a studio shelf ever since. The delay has lent the project an air of mystery amplified by the involvement of Schrader, who has been enjoying one of the most fertile periods of his career.Nearly a decade later, the final product is here, and it is neither a colossal train wreck nor a misunderstood masterpiece. Rather it’s a bland, unoriginal action thriller about an entirely predictable quest for revenge. When a local drug kingpin, Vincent (Neal McDonough), kidnaps the son of a reformed hitman known as the Jesuit (José María Yazpik), the father must steal across the border into Mexico in pursuit. On the way he lays gruesome waste to hordes of gun-toting cartel heavies in various neon-lit bars and strip clubs.It can be difficult to take genre movies that are this clichéd seriously, and doubly so when they insist on regurgitating tropes in a humorless register. The director, Ulloa, tries to mask the derivative story by embellishing the violence, cutting to closeups of flesh wounds and bullet holes as a distraction from the routine plot and hardboiled dialogue — he seems to be aiming for stark and gritty, but his tough-talking assassins, crime lords and arms dealers bring the whole thing closer to unintentional camp.But I more often found myself thinking of “Detective Crashmore,” the uproarious action-film spoof on Tim Robinson’s “I Think You Should Leave.” Winkingly described as “a cosmic gumbo” that combines “the action of the 90s … with the exploitation films of the 70s, but with modern touches,” it’s a dead-on (if completely accidental) imitation of “There Are No Saints.” But frankly, “Crashmore” was a lot more fun.There Are No SaintsRated R for language, sexuality and extreme graphic violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      In Paul Schrader’s ‘Blue Collar,’ the Factory Floor Is Brutal

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      His 1978 debut, which features quick-witted performances by Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel, now has a short run at Film Forum.The robber baron Jay Gould supposedly bragged that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. That quote, likely apocryphal, is the essence of Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar,” a harshly garish morality play in which — squeezed between the Scylla of a factory’s exploitative management and the Charybdis of their corrupt union — three autoworkers go rogue.“Blue Collar” has been revived for a week at Film Forum in a 35-millimeter print. It was timely in 1978 and, in its expression of rust-belt alienation, prescient as well.Perhaps because it was Schrader’s first movie as a director, “Blue Collar” communicates the thrill of breaking new ground, albeit showing the influence of Martin Scorsese (for whom, a few years earlier, Schrader wrote “Taxi Driver”). It echoes both the prole-drama “Car Wash” (1976) and the mode’s classic example, “On the Waterfront” (1954).The most daringly uncommercial move in Schrader’s screenplay, co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader, was constituting his larcenous trio as the so-called “Oreo Gang” — two Black workers, played by Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto, and one white, Harvey Keitel. (The reverse would have been conventional Hollywood wisdom.) Schrader’s boldest strategy was to allow each then-hungry actor to believe himself the star. Call it a form of “method” direction. In his history of ’70s film, Peter Biskind describes the set as a “powder keg.”Thus, while Keitel and Kotto smolder with suppressed rage, Pryor (who, like Marlon Brando, rarely gave the same line-reading twice) is incandescent as a quick-minded trickster with a jittery strut and an answer for everything. In his mixed review, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that, for the first time, Pryor had a role utilizing “the wit and fury that distinguishes his straight comedy routines.”Pryor’s improvisations heighten the movie’s dialectic of oppressive reality and imaginary escape. While the factory scenes, shot at a Checker cab plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., have a documentary quality, fantasy is furnished by the Norman Lear TV sitcoms that punctuate the domestic scenes. The movie’s resident realist is the wily president of the union local. Nicknamed Eddie Knuckles, he’s embodied by Harry Bellaver, a veteran (and genuine) working-class actor who, no less than Pryor, gives the impression of conjuring his dialogue on the spot.“Blue Collar” has a few weak bits, notably one where, interrupting Pryor’s critique of “The Jeffersons,” an I.R.S. examiner pays an unexpected house call. And just as the Oreo Gang fail to think through their robbery, the movie glosses over a worse crime that could not have been committed without management collusion. Still, this portrait of frustration is powerfully framed. The opening credits — an assembly-line montage scored to the pounding first chords of the blues song “I’m a Man,” sung with new lyrics by Captain Beefheart — provide a brutal annunciation. And, following a gripping finale, Schrader redeems the cliché of ending on a freeze frame by returning the struggle to the factory floor.Interviewed by the leftist film journal Cineaste, Schrader asserted his apolitical intentions while congratulating himself as having come to “a very specific Marxist conclusion.” Be that as it may, “Blue Collar” is less Marxist than it is Hobbesian, as expressed by Kotto’s indictment of the powers that be: “They’ll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the Black against the white — everybody — to keep us in our place.”Collective action is futile.Blue CollarJuly 9-15 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More