If there’s one thing he has in common with these characters, it’s a pseudo-religious devotion to what he believes in-and a willingness to risk life and limb for it.ĭo you think it becomes harder as you get older to hit the “bullseye of the zeitgeist”? For almost 50 years, with films like Taxi Driver (the first of several collaborations with Martin Scorsese), Blue Collar, American Gigolo, Hardcore, and Affliction, Schrader has brought to the screen an intimate and brutalizing vision of American men living out on the margins. Schrader moved here a few months ago to be close to his wife, actor Mary Beth Hurt, who is being treated for Alzheimer’s. A sickly, AI-generated image of Richard Gere, sans his signature salt-and-pepper locks, stares back at me, and after a moment we both burst out laughing. He stabs at the phone with a single finger, waits a moment, and hands it to me. “Do you want to see what happens when I plug in the words ‘bald,’ ‘sick,’ ‘ Richard Gere’?” He squints at me from across our table in the building’s 13th-floor restaurant and asks, “Do you use AI?” When I say no, Paul Schrader begins urgently swiping through his phone. One of the greatest living filmmakers now lives in an assisted living facility in midtown Manhattan.
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