The director Paul Schrader, one of the most singular and obsessive auteurs America has ever produced, did not grow up loving cinema. Raised in a severe Calvinist household, the young Schrader did not even watch a single film until his late teens.
After considering a career as a minister while studying at Calvin College, Schrader pivoted to a graduate program in film studies at UCLA, which helped him get his start in film journalism under the tutelage of the celebrated critic Pauline Kael.
Paul Schrader movies take his ideas and stress test them inside his characters’ bodies, and the consistency of this approach never bores. This article assembles a list of the best of Schrader’s output, starting with his directed work and finishing with his screenplays. Fans should hope this catalog may still get an addition or two in the coming years.
1. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
The life story of the troubled Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, a postwar playwright and novelist who committed ritualized suicide after a bizarre failed coup attempt in 1970, caught the attention of Paul Schrader’s brother, Leonard, who wrote a screenplay with his wife Chieko that his director brother went on to helm. Paul Schrader still considers it his best work.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, tells the story of Mishima’s life interspersed with dramatizations of his literary output. The resulting film feels fresh and experimental even today. Its lead character, Mishima, has so many contradictions—ultranationalist but deemed unfit for military service during the Second World War, a married upholder of traditional values but secretly gay, a natural skeptic nevertheless careening toward an absurd end—that the movie ends up supercharged by the unstable force of nature at its center.
“I had written Taxi Driver, which was a film about the pathology of suicidal glory. And I like this theme. I thought I’d write about it again,” Schrader said at a 2020 screening of the film. “…the pathology is universal, this idea that we can, through our own suffering, merit our transcendence.”
2. American Gigolo (1980)
Schrader made one of his best thrillers with American Gigolo, which stars Richard Gere as Julian, an upscale male prostitute who slinks around LA in a red convertible on his way to servicing wealthy older women. As one can detect right from its opening, where Julian drives along the Pacific Coast Highway as Blondie’s Call Me plays over the credits, American Gigolo has style to burn.
The film’s grip on the viewer’s attention may slip somewhat in the second half as the generic police procedural plot plays out, but it remains highly watchable nonetheless. It also gets credited with advancing the female gaze in Hollywood—or at least turning the male gaze inward—as a full-frontal scene with Gere broke barriers for a mainstream film.
When asked by the writer Bret Easton Ellis about the thinly veiled gay themes in American Gigolo, Schrader replied, “It’s not as gay as it should have been…I considered the film as operating in the gay universe. Now, I look back on it as kind of cowardly…But at the time, we thought we were being brave.”
3. Blue Collar (1978)
For his directorial debut, Paul Schrader set his film Blue Collar in the Detroit of the 1970s, where union auto workers find themselves with myriad foes ranged against them, including their union bosses. The chummy vibe at the film’s start morphs into something more sinister by the credits, with a disturbing and unforgettable ending.
Of the actors in the movie—which stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto—Schrader has said, “I hired three bulls and asked them to come into a china shop. It became a real ego struggle about who would win the day.”
On another occasion, Schrader said that while he did not set out to make a critique of capitalism with Blue Collar, by the time he finished the script, “[he] realized that it had come to a very specific Marxist conclusion.”
4. Auto Focus (2002)
The actor Bob Crane, straight-laced star of the 1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes, led a double life wherein he and his videographer friend John Henry Carpenter would cruise the late-night lounges of Los Angeles, seducing women and bringing them back to Carpenter’s bachelor pad to secretly film whatever happened next. The promiscuous behavior contrasted with Crane’s public image as a loyal husband and family man. First, gradually, then all of a sudden, the antics led to the unraveling of Crane’s world.
In Auto Focus, which stars Greg Kinnear as Crane and Willem Dafoe as Carpenter, Paul Schrader took on the subject of sexual addiction, power dynamics in Hollywood, and what lay beneath the surface of America’s artificially pristine postwar decades.
“[Bob Crane] is a character that’s right in my wheelhouse,” Schrader explained in an interview. “I love these people who live contradictory lives…Usually, my characters at some point get it. This guy never did get it…You hear him trying to explain himself, and it doesn’t jibe with what you’re seeing.”
5. Cat People (1982)
The most allegorical of all Paul Schrader movies, Cat People, a remake of a film of the same name from 1942, begins with a scene set in a mythological cat world before shifting to modern times. The audience never gets a clear explanation of how this world came about or its links to ours, but we don’t need one: the movie works just fine without an excessive backstory.
Malcolm McDowell plays a cat man who has come to live in New Orleans, and Nastassja Kinski plays opposite him as a cat woman confused about her origins. The idea of whether to tame one’s animal nature lurks in the film more meaningfully than, say, a comparable setup in a werewolf movie, since Cat People takes sexual desire (a commonplace) rather than random violence (a rarity) as its theme.
“I took this project as a change of pace for me,” Schrader said in an on-set interview during production. “To get away from street-level films, to get away from trying to find truth in any realistic way, and to get into the areas of fable and heightened reality.”
6. H-rdcore (1979)
Paul Schrader’s exploration of what it means for a parent to have failed to impart their religious ideology to a child, his film H-rdcore, has received mixed reviews from critics over the years, including from Schrader himself.
H-rdcore stars George C. Scott as Jake Van Dorn, an austerely Christian businessman from the Midwest whose daughter runs off to LA to make adult films. In his quest to find his daughter, Van Dorn must suppress his disgust and disguise himself so that he may move through the alien environs of the LA dirty movie scene.
The film, which Schrader has said owes a debt to John Ford’s The Searchers, covers some of the same themes as Taxi Driver—but this time from the point of view of someone nestled inside society rather than at its margins. While Schrader has repeatedly talked down the film since its release, expressing particular regret for its ending, H-rdcore continues to have many fans.
7. First Reformed (2017)
Ethan Hawke stars as a minister experiencing a crisis of faith in First Reformed, a late-career Schrader film that saw him pursue many of the same themes and setups that have obsessed him since the beginning. In the movie, Hawke tries to keep it together as a series of encounters with his community test his understanding of the world. Once again, on this outing, Schrader steers his ship using a principled character pushed to the breaking point.
Referring to his book Transcendental Style in Film and his screenplay for Taxi Driver, Schrader remarked to The Hollywood Reporter, “Fifty years later, those two seeds, which fell in that petri dish, came and wound up, and I made First Reformed.”
8. Affliction (1997)
Schrader’s wintry thriller set in a small New England town, Affliction, stars Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, Willem Dafoe, and James Coburn in as bleak a movie as this list contains. The film begins with a mysterious hunting accident in the snowy New Hampshire woods and veers straight into intergenerational trauma and abuse with a dash of conspiracy.
Schrader once told an interviewer, “I came from that part of the country with long cold winters, so I knew these people, and I knew their violence.” At the same time, he insisted that the father in the film, played by Coburn, only bore a passing resemblance to his own dad.
9. Light Sleeper (1992)
Set in the early 1990s in New York City and centered around a small drug-dealing operation employing Willem Dafoe, Paul Schrader’s Light Sleeper has the texture of a daydream and feels vaguely unreal in ways that help rather than hinder the film. With the aging Dafoe seeking a way out of his criminal circumstances, questions of whether people can change and how that change may undergo adequate verification loom large in the story.
“It’s the third installment of a character I’ve written before,” Schrader said at the time of the film’s release. “… He’s almost like a soul looking for a body. When he was 20, he was very angry and a taxi driver. When he got to be 30, he was very narcissistic and a gigolo. And now he’s 40, and he’s anxious and got a dead-end job as a drug delivery boy.”
10. The Comfort of Strangers (1990)
Based on a script by the playwright Harold Pinter and adapted from an Ian McEwan novel, The Comfort of Strangers follows a couple (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson) who get sucked into the orbit of another couple (Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren). The ensuing thriller plays out between the sheets and canals of Venice, where McEwan set the story.
“People expect it to be a thriller,” Schrader told an interviewer from Criterion. “And they expect the plot to make thriller sense. But it only makes character sense. It has long scenes which are seemingly supposed to go somewhere, but they don’t go anywhere, because they’re character scenes, and they’re Pinter scenes.”
The director went on to explain that the movie, a true collaboration between himself, McEwan, and Pinter, makes the best sense when viewed as the work of a trio.
11. Master Gardener (2022)
Paul Schrader scored a late-career critical hit with Master Gardener, a crime thriller about a gardener with a white supremacist past who gets involved with his wealthy employer’s grand-niece, a young Black woman. Filmed in and around a large estate in Louisiana, Master Gardener inverts the Southern plantation dynamic of a couple centuries previous and explores themes of overcoming one’s past and redemption.
“[Gardening] is probably the oldest metaphor in history,” explained Schrader in an interview. “Whether it’s the Garden of Eden or some other place… It’s an interesting way to think about life as the potential of seeds to grow. Or, the other way—of purifying, which is kind of an evil way. So, it’s a rich metaphor.”
12. The Card Counter (2021)
Oscar Isaac stars in Schrader’s The Card Counter as an Iraq War veteran who worked in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, where evidence of torture notoriously came to light in 2004 during the American occupation of that country.
Isaac’s character, William Tillich, served time in prison for his role in events at Abu Ghraib, and at the time of the film, he makes a living counting cards at the Las Vegas poker tables. In The Card Counter, Schrader dives into what it means to feel culpable for terrible crimes and the limited options available for transcendence.
Schrader summed up Tillich’s predicament in an interview: “He’s living a kind of limbo life, waiting to make a connection, because he probably doesn’t have the courage to kill himself, but he probably doesn’t have the courage to start a real life. So he just waits. And then something happens.”
13. The Canyons (2013)
A little over a decade ago, the novelist Bret Easton Ellis teamed up with Paul Schrader for The Canyons, an independent film that raised funds on Kickstarter. The resulting neo-noir thriller, starring adult film star James Deen opposite Lindsay Lohan, does not often get listed among the best of Schrader’s films. It needs mention here because the remainder of this list will focus on films written rather than directed by Schrader.
However, The Canyons does have its strong points. These include the meta-narrative surrounding Lindsay Lohan—back then recently arrived on the downslope of her celebrity and barely able to complete the movie due to erratic behavior—and the introduction of Deen, acting for the first time in a film with his clothes on. The collaboration between Ellis and Schrader, both experts in a certain kind of LA nihilism, also yielded a strikingly evocative atmosphere for the micro-budget indie.
“Good-looking people doing bad things in nice rooms,” Schrader remembers telling Ellis back then. “You write something. I’ll direct it. We’ll pay for it. We don’t have to deal with censorship, permissions, or anything like this. We just make it.”
14. Taxi Driver (1976)
While working as a film critic in the 1970s, Paul Schrader found himself interviewing the director Brian DePalma. Over a game of chess, the young journalist mentioned he had written a script—a comment DePalma at first tried to politely ignore—but in the end, he passed it along to his friend, the director Martin Scorcese.
That script, Taxi Driver, the story of a loner operating on the edge of society and his own sanity, established Shrader’s career. The film also laid out the themes Schrader would wrestle with for decades.
“I found myself in a dark place, and I realized I had to turn to fiction to get out of this place,” said Schrader in an interview with TIFF Originals. “I had to create this character, or else I was going to become him. And that character was Travis Bickle.”
15. The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Paul Schrader worked with the travel writer Paul Theroux to adapt his novel The Mosquito Coast into a screenplay then directed by Peter Weir. The movie, which stars Harrison Ford as a brilliant engineer who takes his family to a jungle in South America to escape consumerism in North America, takes a preternaturally stubborn man and throws a million obstacles at him: classic Schrader fare.
It takes the narrow intensity of a Schrader script and pairs it with the expansive worldliness of a writer like Theroux and a director like Weir to great effect. Ford has referred to The Mosquito Coast as his favorite role.
16. Raging Bull (1980)
Martin Scorcese’s biographical drama about the life of middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull, frequently lands near the top of lists of the greatest films. Robert De Niro won the Best Actor at the Oscars for portraying the boxer.
Paul Schrader’s contribution to the script—initially penned by frequent Scorcese collaborator Mardik Martin—came in the form of a rewrite, which introduced the character of LaMotta’s brother Joey, played by Joe Pesci. The script then got reworked again by both De Niro and Scorcese, who stripped down some of the mafia elements, which do not dominate the story in the film as we know it.
17. Rolling Thunder (1977)
One of the best 1970s films few people have seen, Rolling Thunder, gets recommended by Quentin Tarantino nearly every time he goes on a podcast.
Directed by John Flynn, the film stars William Devane as a Vietnam vet who goes on a righteous rampage after a nightmarish run-in with the worst kind of people. Schrader wrote the script after finishing Taxi Driver and before he wrote Yakuza, with the three films constituting an informal trilogy.
“[Schrader] fashioned the script to be his first film as a director,” according to Tarantino in his book Cinema Speculation. “And you can believe that, because especially in the first half of the screenplay, it’s pretty much directed on the page, and directed well, I might add. If I filmed it, I would shoot the first exactly the way Schrader dictates it in the screenplay.”
18. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
A 1955 novel by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis provided the source material for Martin Scorcese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which stars Willem Dafoe in the titular role. Among the films depicting the life of Jesus, most would place Scorsese’s on the more subversive end of the spectrum, though the film feels very much in earnest.
Schrader wrote the script and hoped for years he might direct it if Scorcese dropped out of the project. He once told a journalist that he wrote to his pal Marty, “I hear that your enthusiasm is waning, and there are some people in Egypt and France that might have some money. If you ever slacken I will walk over your back to get this movie done.”
Scorcese later informed the journalist of his reply: “I didn’t appreciate or like it in 1985 when he kept asking if I would give it up, and I kept writing these letters —’From the grave I’ll come back to direct it!’”
19. Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
Perhaps the most underappreciated movie directed by Martin Scorcese, the drama Bringing Out the Dead, stars Nicolas Cage as an overworked New York City paramedic who begins having hallucinations. The film did not do well at the box office but has gained reputational steam over the years.
Paul Schrader wrote the script for Bringing Out the Dead based on a book by the writer Joe Connelly, who worked as a paramedic while getting started as a novelist. The familiar Schrader structure of an idealistic character coming up against his limits will appear apparent from the start. While Bringing Out the Dead leans into a morbid sense of humor that won’t suit everybody, any Schrader completist owes it a watch.
20. The Yakuza (1974)
During the Vietnam War, Leonard Schrader, Paul’s brother, moved to Japan to teach English and avoid the draft. Often finding himself drinking in gangster bars, Leonard related his tales to his then-film critic brother, who ended up collaborating with him on the script for The Yakuza.
Taking a month, the two brothers wrote the script, setting off a bidding war. Later, the screenplay got a rewrite from legendary Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne. Sydney Pollack directed the eventual film, which cast Robert Mitchum in the lead role as an American detective in Japan trying to find a missing girl.
For his part, Towne may have understood the Schrader style even before its author. In his revision, he helped to make The Yakuza more like its siblings in the coming Schrader filmography. Towne once explained:
“Trying to imagine someone reaching the point where he’ll kill 25 people, trying to make it credible that this American would go to Japan to recover a kidnapped girl, kill his best friend and 25 other people, and mutilate himself—in reading the original script, I didn’t feel he was provoked in the right way to do all that. I tried to make it more plausible.”
