Paul Schrader is making two films and he's making them fast

Paul Schrader has been up to a lot more than listening to Taylor Swift and writing TV reviews on Ambien recently. In a conversation with Screen at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where he’s currently presiding over the feature competition jury, the First Reformed director and Taxi Driver screenwriter revealed that he has not one, but two new films in the works.

The first is called Non Compos Mentis (Latin for “an unsound mind”), which, as previously teased, will be “a noir [about] a kind of sexual obsession.” The filmmaker told Screen that he had already begun casting for the film’s ensemble, which will include “two brothers, their demented mother, a younger girl they both fall in love with, and their wives.” While he didn’t reveal any names, the actors paying the two brothers are apparently “well-known to the international industry.” Hmm. Whoever they are, they’ll have to be ready for a quick shoot. “This is one of the rare cases where I had the finance before I had the cast,” Schrader continued. “I can make a film in 20 days, $5m to $6m. I can get $2.5m in equity and the rest in pre-sales. Then I can make a film! With final cut and everything. Everybody works to scale.”

While Schrader still has to “do a very quick rewrite” on Compos, it’s not the only film he has in the hopper right now. “I’m hoping before November to write the new one and have another bullet in the gun ready to go,” he said of his other film, The Basics Of Philosophy, for which he reportedly already has an outline going. In line with its title, the new draft will follow “an intellectual university philosophy professor,” and be in the style of his recent trilogy, which included First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener, the director said. 

It’s not like the director was resting on his laurels before this. He also just premiered his latest film, Oh, Canada, starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, and Jacob Elordi, at Cannes in May. Don’t expect any of these projects to land on streaming any time soon, however. Schrader’s recent films “have all been turned down by Amazon, Netflix,” he recently told Variety. “Unless you’re one of the privileged babies—and we know who those [filmmakers] are, because they get all the attention—if you’re not one of the babies, you just fly into the Bermuda Triangle of streaming and the last thing you see is the vapor trails of your film.” If you want to catch Oh, Canada before that happens, its distributor is reportedly planning a December theatrical run.