Paul Schrader on First Reformed: “This is a troubling film about a troubled person”

Paul Schrader’s unsettling, gut-punching First Reformed has been heralded as one of the year’s finest films by critics (including me). It’s the story of a minister, played by Ethan Hawke, whose upstate New York church is preserved more as a museum than an active congregation and sits in the shadow of a much bigger and well-funded church nearby. Meanwhile, Hawke’s character, Reverend Toller, is growing both physically and spiritually sick.

It’s an unusual sort of movie to see from an American filmmaker: slow and meditative, owing more to European directors like Bresson and Tarkovsky and Bergman than to the more fast-paced styles of filmmaking often employed by Hollywood directors.

It’s an especially surprising movie to see from Schrader. Despite writing the book on the “transcendental style” of filmmaking in his 20s, Schrader hasn’t made a film with those techniques. He’s known instead for penning screenplays for movies like Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and directing movies like American Gigolo. (Schrader’s book has recently been updated and reissued, with a terrific new chapter on “slow cinema.”)

But First Reformed is an undoubtedly “spiritual” film, one that both takes faith seriously in its subject matter and provokes a spiritual (and sometimes uncomfortable) experience in the audience. It’s about as far away from today’s current crop of “faith-based” films as you could get — and its style is a big reason why.

I talked to Schrader by phone about a few light matters: the faith-based movie industry and its unwillingness to take religion seriously, the difficulties pastors face in 21st century American Christianity, the politics of First Reformed, and the apocalypse.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

On why the faith-based film industry keeps making conventional Hollywood melodramas

Alissa Wilkinson

I wanted to talk about how a movie like this, which deals with faith and doubt, relates to the “faith-based” movie industry. What is it about a film like First Reformed that brings us into a particularly spiritual experience?

Paul Schrader

The so-called faith-based film is not any different from an ordinary Hollywood melodrama. So it uses all the same techniques of action, empathy, and emotional exploitation. Just because you put Jesus Christ into a Hollywood melodrama doesn’t mean that it’s a spiritual film.

Alissa Wilkinson

So why do people keep using that format?

Paul Schrader

Because it works. It works. It’s the heart and soul of commercial cinema. It’s why we love movies. So why not? I could make a movie that said Hitler is Satan, and I could make another movie that said he is God, and I would use the same techniques in both movies. So when you use those techniques, you essentially are employing the passive viewer’s enjoyment of being told how to feel.

Alissa Wilkinson

It’s interesting to me that there really aren’t films with that same aim — to appeal specifically to a faith-based audience — that use the techniques of “slow cinema”: the long shots that don’t move, the quietness, the “boredom.” Some of the reason might be tied to what you’re saying about certainty. How much of the conventional Hollywood-style filmmaking in faith-based films, do you think, is tied to the audience’s expectations about what a movie about faith should do?

Paul Schrader

Well, let me digress just a second. There’s two types of churches these days. There’s the traditional church of devotion and meditation, and then there’s the arena-based, entertainment-based church. Without saying which one is better than the other — because I’m sure there are Christians in both — my preference is clearly for the devotional.

When you do go to the arena-based church, you are getting the same emotional hit as you would at a Taylor Swift concert or at a football game: that emotional bump you get from being in a crowd, all believing the same thing and saying and doing the same things.

That’s a much different experience from the one you get from sitting alone with your own thoughts. I don’t think the holy resides in mild psychology. I think it resides in the quiet place.

Alissa Wilkinson

So in a sense you’re saying that a style of church that a lot of these films are aimed at has an audience that’s already been formed to want a certain kind of experience.

Paul Schrader

Yes. It’s the same technique at a political rally or a rock concert or a football game.

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Alissa Wilkinson

So I guess that helps us understand why these filmmakers aren’t already in tune to the slower cinema techniques.

Paul Schrader

I don’t think there’s such a thing as fast meditation. You have to slow down in order to let a relationship with the nonmaterial world develop. I suppose there are some kinds of drugs that would also take you there, but if you’re going there on your own, I think you have to slow down. Good things happen when you wait.

On releasing First Reformed in the midst of heated culture wars

Alissa Wilkinson

So how does this work with marketing the film? I know that Martin Scorsese’s Silence, for instance, ran into some problems with marketing as far as I know because the studio was worried about generating a backlash of the sort that greeted Last Temptation of Christ decades earlier. Did you think about that at all while you were working?

Paul Schrader

Yes, I did. For that reason, I did a little three-city seminary tour showing the film, giving a lecture, and doing a symposium over the course of two days with the faculty. I did this at my alma mater Calvin College, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Yale Divinity. I just wanted to see how the film would land in the Protestant, humanistic tradition.

I also wanted to be ready. One of the problems with Last Temptation was that the people who oppose the film got in the first blow, and the film never quite recovered. I wanted to be in a position to land the first “blow” myself. It never happened. The Christian press has been extremely positive.

Alissa Wilkinson

That might feel surprising, if only because there are some pretty strong political statements in the film.

Paul Schrader

It’s surprising, because there are so many crazies in the Christian right at this moment who don’t need an excuse to say outrageous things that cause computer clicks.

Alissa Wilkinson

You did put those dogmatically right-wing characters in the film, especially with industrialist Ed Balq and the teenager in the youth group. But you don’t get the feeling that Reverend Jeffers, the pastor of the successful megachurch Abundant Life, is one of them.

Paul Schrader

He lives in the real world, as he says. He’s a CEO of a Christian corporation that has running costs. If you’re going to run the New York City Ballet and you don’t take David Koch’s money, you’re not going to have a ballet theater. There’s a certain real-world reality to running a large organization.

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Alissa Wilkinson

So much of American Christianity is very personality-driven. A pastor is judged on his or her job performance by how many people show up to church.

Paul Schrader

Yeah, yeah.

Alissa Wilkinson

Toller clearly is failing in that measure.

Paul Schrader

There’s something inherently contradictory in the notion of organized Christianity. It begins as this band of followers who call themselves Christians, and then 400 years later, it’s an empire with uniforms and rules and soldiers. How do you create an organization of believers without becoming an organization first and believers second?

Alissa Wilkinson

Right. When it becomes an industry, it’s like any other industry.

Paul Schrader

Like any other industry, its primary purpose is to protect itself.

On taking faith very seriously in First Reformed

Alissa Wilkinson

So is there a spiritual value for the person who orients themselves that way, who’s very comfortable with their faith and doesn’t like feeling challenged, to a film like First Reformed?

Paul Schrader

I wouldn’t think of it in that way. Obviously, this is a troubling film about a troubled person. All of this thinking and praying isn’t doing him a lot of good. It’s taking him to a darker place.

But the film takes matters of faith very seriously. Films often don’t. Even faith-based films don’t take faith really seriously.

Alissa Wilkinson

What do you mean?

Paul Schrader

For faith-based films, belief is just a product that has to be sold. Just like the image of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. How do I sell that image? How do I sell this image of faith? It starts to sound like a product rather than a true belief.

On the apocalypse, hope for the future, and the “pathology of suicidal glory”

Alissa Wilkinson

Do you think of First Reformed as an apocalyptic film?

Paul Schrader

It depends on what you call “the apocalypse.” I think we are seeing the last century of homo sapiens. I don’t see a scenario in which homo sapiens emerge from this century in our present form.

Now, that’s not the end of the world. That’s just the end of a species, which evolution has taken it to its dead end. All of its intelligence is not enabling it to survive. So, there will be some modification in the world. We may be on the cusp of a new evolutionary step.

But if you’re optimistic about the world as it now is, you’re just simply not paying attention.

Alissa Wilkinson

But every generation has always thought the world was about to end in some way, right? It’s human narcissism.

Paul Schrader

They thought it would end by design divine, rather than human merit, though.

Alissa Wilkinson

Ah, so there’s a narcissism built into our age thinking we’re also the last one, but it’s a different kind of narcissism, because this time we caused the end.

Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Paul Schrader

When you called, I was looking at an article with the headline, “Arctic Ice Sheet Is Melting Faster Than Expected, Scientists Warn.” None of these things are slowing down. They’re all going faster.

Alissa Wilkinson

That’s a really hard thing for people to grapple with when they’re just thinking about day-to-day things.

Paul Schrader

We live in a world of denial. Before, choosing hope was kind of an option. Now it’s almost a requirement.

Alissa Wilkinson

How do you think people grapple with the end in the face of faith? Can you have faith and hope and the certainty that something is going down in the near future?

Paul Schrader

I don’t know. I’m 72, so honestly, it’s not really my problem. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be 22.

Alissa Wilkinson

A lot of this film does feel like it’s trying to see if faith can position itself at all in our world.

Paul Schrader

That question that the boy asks — why should we bring life into this world? — is not a question people were asking 50 years ago.

Alissa Wilkinson

Do you think Toller is right in his conclusions?

Paul Schrader

I’m not sure if Toller is an environmental radicalist. He’s a man in despair giving himself a year to work this stuff out. He’s on essentially a death trip. It’s a very selfish one.

St. Augustine taught us that suicide is a sin, but the death of Samson [a Biblical figure who brought down a building to kill a group of wicked people as well as himself] is not a sin. That’s a martyrdom.

So after this boy kills himself, what Toller finds is the cloak of martyrdom that he can wrap around himself and turn its sinfulness into redemptiveness. That’s the virus he catches. It’s a pathology very well known in Christianity: the pathology of suicidal glory. The pathology that I can effect my own salvation through my own suffering.

So whether he’s an environmentalist or a jihadist is not clear.

On the origin of the name of Ethan Hawke’s character

Alissa Wilkinson

I’m wondering if you named Toller’s character for the real Ernst Toller?

Paul Schrader

The playwright?

Alissa Wilkinson

Yes.

Paul Schrader

Yup. I did. I came across the name years ago in a poem by W.H. Auden, but there were two things about the name I liked. One was the “tolling” of the bells. The other was the playwright who escaped Nazi Germany to come to America and then committed suicide.

Alissa Wilkinson

He was disillusioned with what had happened to his home country?

Paul Schrader

Hard to know. It was 1942. He just didn’t see any future.

Alissa Wilkinson

Was he in your head when you were creating the character?

Paul Schrader

At some point, you start thinking about interesting names and you’re toying around. And I remembered that name.

On the film’s purposely enigmatic ending

Please note: the discussion below includes spoilers for the film’s end. Beware!

Alissa Wilkinson

I think a lot of people are left very unsettled by the ending, whether they’ve come to identify with Toller or not.

Paul Schrader

Before the film came out, and I was taking it to festivals, I would often ask the audience to raise their hands afterwards. I’d say, who thinks he’s dead? It would be about half. I kind of like that. About half thought he was dead and about half thought he was alive at the end.

Part of me says it’s a miracle. He is saved by a miracle. The other part of me says he’s on all fours. Like Jesus, he stood there in Gethsemane and said, “Please take this cup away.” But he drank the cup of Draino, and now he’s there dying. And God comes — this is the God that hasn’t spoken to him for the whole movie — and as he’s on all fours dying, God walks over to him and says, “Reverend Toller, would you like to see what heaven looks like? I’m going to show it to you right now. I’m going to open the doors and this is what it looks like. It looks like one, long, slow kiss. And he’s in heaven.

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Alissa Wilkinson

That’s pretty radical. It suggests a surprising kind of grace or forgiveness for a person who’s lost his way.

Paul Schrader

Yes. It’s a little spooky. One of the spookiest lines in the film for me is when Toller says that Michael was on holy ground when he died. He’s just said [that] a man who committed suicide was on holy ground. He’s pretty much gone around the bend.

Alissa Wilkinson

I think a lot of people aren’t willing to imagine that a filmmaker could purposely want to leave an ending open-ended. Some people might think it’s a “mistake.” But it’s not, right?

Paul Schrader

No. When I was screening the film, if too many people thought the ending was one way, I’d change it a little. At one point you heard Mary’s footsteps walking into the room. That led people to believe that she actually was there. So I took her footsteps out. Now, she just appears.

Alissa Wilkinson

It’s an unexpected moment that leaves you thinking, whoa, what did I just watch? I think that a lot of people are looking for filmmakers to give them the “key” to unlock the whole thing. When you don’t do that, then you make the audience invest themselves into the film and throw them off their balance.

Paul Schrader

That’s a great thing for an artist to accomplish: cleave a crevice in the viewer’s skull that they have to somehow close.

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