Sometimes overshadowed in his collaborations with Martin Scorcese, writer-director Paul Schrader was a singular voice of the New Hollywood generation who managed to define a style all his own and maintain an auteurist commitment to and repetition of themes spiritual, intellectual, and macabre within the context of the commercial film to present day.
Raised in a fundamentalist Calvinist community in Grand Rapids, Michigan, film was forbidden throughout his childhood, and he relays his first film going experience at 17 as being a hallucinatory episode wrought with guilt and fear. But it didn’t take long before this forbidden pleasure asserted itself in his life and leaving behind plans to become a minister he began studying film and writing criticism, eventually attending UCLA where many of the New Hollywood generation were getting their starts, and writing Transcendental Style in Film, a study of the films of Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer that posited a shared film structure Schrader wo