Paul Schrader
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"Paul Joseph Schrader" is an American screenwriter, film director, and film critic. Schrader wrote or cowrote screenplays for the Martin Scorsese classics Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ (film)/The Last Temptation of Christ and has directed 18 feature films, including his 1982 remake of the horror classic Cat People (1982 film)/Cat People, and critically acclaimed dramas American Gigolo (1980), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Affliction (film)/Affliction (1997) and Auto Focus (2002), as well as The Canyons (film)/The Canyons (2013).

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I want to be happy; why do I do things that make me unhappy?

I don't know if he was stupid.

I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films.

The problem with The Exorcist was that I wasn't holding any cards. They paid me for the movie, so they own the movie. It's like if you made this chair and I buy it from you. You want me to sit on the chair, and I want to put it in my fireplace. What are you gonna do? Time to go off and make another chair.

I don't believe that anymore but you certainly know that world. But I wasn't Catholic. It was slightly different. The metaphorical strength of that stuff, of those stories, whether it's stories from the Bible or stories from contemporary mythology like The Exorcist have enormous metaphorical weight.

It's great when somebody comes at you and says, 'We have a big serious movie and we want to hire you because you're a serious person'. Particularly in today's world, when you spend so much of your time pretending that you're not.

It's an old-fashioned romance of the highest order, a real melodrama, which I wrote and directed and financed. Nobody paid me to do this film. If a studio had made it, everyone would be saying that I had whored out, but in fact I had to fight to raise the financing, so if I did whore out, I whored out to my own melodramatic side.

His gifts are now more social than sexual. He's this society walker who has his lady friends, and a boyfriend on the side.