Credit: Jay Dixit
Sat 22 August 2026 21:45, UK
Anyone who makes movies will surely remember the moment when they realised that they wanted to become a filmmaker. Something lights up inside of you, and the dream of bringing your ideas to life on the silver screen suddenly doesn’t seem that far-fetched.
Of course, it’s not easy to become a director, and it’s surely even harder if you spent the first almost two decades of your life without any cinematic experience. Rather unbelievably, Paul Schrader didn’t watch a movie until he was 17 years old due to his strict religious upbringing. How ironic, then, that this suppression would only inspire him to put religion – told through a rather thrilling, often controversial, lens – at the core of his art.
Schrader would soon develop an interest in cinema when he was no longer living at home, which led him to his early career endeavours within the world of film criticism. But then he saw a movie that would change everything, making him realise that he could do more than just write about films – he could make them, too.
It was a 1959 movie from Robert Bresson that sealed the deal for Schrader, and it came to have a significant impact over his screenplay for Taxi Driver. Pickpocket, starring Martin LaSalle, was the turning point for the young writer, whose interest in filmmaking was further spurred on by his close proximity to several friends who were working on a movie. Everything suddenly aligned and became clear to him; this was what he had to do.
“I was not a filmmaker, but I lived in a house with four guys who were filmmakers and were working on a Roger Corman film called Naked Angels. They dissed me for not making films. And I saw Pickpocket and thought, ‘I can make a film like that,’” he told Sight and Sound.
Pickpocket is a Dostoyevsky-inspired deliberation on morality and religious guilt, and these themes no doubt compelled the blossoming filmmaker. Schrader continued, “He sits in his house, writes a diary, goes out, commits some petty crimes, writes some more, the police visit him, he writes some more, runs into his neighbour, writes some more. I can do a film like that. That was in March 1969; two years later was Transcendental Style [in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer; Schrader’s first book] and three years later was Taxi Driver. Both came out of that 75 minutes.”
It’s amazing how much influence one movie can have on someone. If Schrader hadn’t seen Pickpocket, would Martin Scorsese have become such a prominent Hollywood figure at that perfect moment in time? After all, it was Taxi Driver, penned by Schrader, that won him the Palme d’Or and boosted his position in the industry.
Schrader would continue to work closely with Scorsese over the coming years, writing movies like Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ. The writer would make his directorial debut in 1978 with Blue Collar, although it wasn’t until 1980’s American Gigolo that Schrader would start to find more mainstream success as a director, which has continued over the decades with everything from Cat People to First Reformed.
