Paul Schrader has spent half a century writing men who sit alone in rooms, filling notebooks with confessions no one asked for. On Friday in Venice, the 79-year-old writer-director offered a simple explanation for why he has never been able to put the subject down: he was programmed early, and the program still runs.
“I was raised a Dutch Calvinist, and, you know, Freud said you’re programmed by the time you’re five or six, maybe it’s even as late as eight or nine,” Schrader said at the press conference for The Basics of Philosophy, which has its world premiere Friday out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. “But anyway, once they pour that programming into you, you just run that program for the rest of your life, and no matter how far you run and how fast you run, you don’t outrun your childhood. My childhood was one of predestination, of guilt, of total depravity and all that, and, you know, Christian schools all the way through divinity school. So I don’t know how I do not write about guilt and redemption.”
The Basics of Philosophy stars Jack Huston as John Jorissen, a philosophy professor whose controlled, meticulously ordered life conceals a long-buried transgression. When the person he wronged unexpectedly reappears, Jorissen is thrown into a reckoning of guilt, desire and self-justification — familiar terrain for a filmmaker whose gallery of isolated, self-documenting men has included a taxi driver, a gigolo, a minister and a gardener before arriving, now, at a tenured academic.
Sofia Boutella plays Becca, Jorissen’s partner and colleague in the department, with Daniel Zovatto, Bill Pullman and Dana Delany also starring, alongside Shiloh Fernandez, Karl Glusman and Elizabeth Petruso. Martin Scorsese serves as executive producer, his second time in that role for Schrader after 2021’s The Card Counter, extending a collaboration that stretches back to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ.
Huston, who appears opposite Pullman as his character’s father, said what drew him to Jorissen was the absence of anything monstrous on the surface.
“It’s not a portrait of the boogeyman, the man coming at you with a knife held high. It’s the person living in plain sight. It’s the everyman,” the actor said. “I thought it was a really interesting portrait of somebody who is actually struggling with a terrible part of his past, and trying to recompense this idea of: am I a monster?”
Asked about a sequence in which Jorissen finds himself walking alongside a long-dead philosopher, debating whether human beings are capable of change, Huston said he had considered who he would want beside him on that walk.
“If I was to take a walk with somebody, it would be possibly with my grandfather,” he said, referring to the Oscar-winning actor and director John Huston. “I have a lot of questions in life and work and all sorts. He died when I was quite young, but I’ve luckily had wonderful family members who’ve been able to share about his life and thoughts and teachings, but I think that would be a fun conversation.”
Boutella, whose character is left to decide how much of her partner’s account she is willing to accept, said she deliberately withheld her own verdict on Becca. “As an actor, I hide my own answers for what she really believes,” she said.
Pullman, meanwhile, delivered the conference’s biggest laugh with an account of Schrader’s casting process, which the director apparently conducts with no diplomatic padding whatsoever.
“Paul’s very frank about casting. You know, usually by the time you get on the set, he’s told me several times about who they offered it to that didn’t do it,” Pullman said. “And I was glad that I was somewhere on the list, and that everybody that went before me just bowed out for various reasons.”
