First Reformed!

First Reformed!

Photo credit: Joy Asico

“This is going out to the audience: Questions for Paul,” MPAA CEO Ambassador Charles Rivkin asked the audience after the screening of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed at The National Archives. “Are you in despair?” “Uh, technically yes,” answered Schrader. If that seems like a strange question and even stranger answer, it is……unless you have seen the movie.  So, let’s back up a bit!

Paul Schrader

First Reformed is a 2017 American drama film written and directed by Paul Schrader starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried and Cedric Kyles.  The premise: Toller (played brilliantly by Hawke) is a former military chaplain struggling with the death of his son who he encouraged to enlist in the armed forces. He meets Mary (Amanda Seyfried), seeking counseling for her radical environmentalist husband which further challenges his beliefs.

Paul Joseph Schrader is an American screenwriter, film director, and film critic. Schrader wrote or co-wrote screenplays for four Martin Scorsese films: Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Schrader has also directed 18 feature films, including his directing debut crime drama, Blue Collar (co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader), the crime drama Hardcore (a loosely autobiographical film also written by Schrader), his 1982 remake of the horror classic Cat People, the crime drama American Gigolo (1980), the biographical drama Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), the true life biopic Patty Hearst (1988), the cult film Light Sleeper (1992), the drama Affliction (1997), the biographical film Auto Focus (2002), and the erotic dramatic thriller The Canyons (2013).  Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Ambassador Charles Rivkin

“I was struck by a quote from Albert Einstein, where he said, ‘Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.’ He was talking about the creative that inspires us to do positive things in life, but he could just as easily be talking about the movies,” Amb. Rivkin said as an opening introduction to the movie. “Creativity isn’t just important to our history, it’s in the heart of every single thing that we do everyday. Here at the MPAA, which we like to think of as Hollywood in DC, it is our daily mission to promote and preserve and protect that heartbeat of creativity so that our industry can continue to create the extraordinary films and television programs that reach audiences in every corner of the world. During that mission is fighting piracy, and those who know me I talk about this quite a bit but, working with policy makers to support creative endeavors. We do this to protect inspiring works like First Reformed but just importantly we do this to protect the artist, the artisans, the workers, the business people. These livelihoods are wrapped up in this magical industry of ours. We think of the MPAA as Hollywood’s Washington home base.”

“I want to go back to the beginning for this conversation. Paul, your parents were deeply and devoutly religious. And they forbade you, as I read, to see movies. And the first movie was when you’re 17 years old,” commented Rivkin. “Yeah. I was a product of the Christian Reformed Church, which is a Dutch Calvinist Church in West Michigan. And I’m a product of that school system, West Side Christian better known as Christian High, Calvin College, Calvin Seminary. And the reason there was a prohibition on theatrical attendance came up in 1926 when Hollywood was in one of it’s more licentious phases. And in fact, Hollywood developed the motion picture code just because churches like mine were cutting them off and forbidding attendance. So I didn’t see movies as a young person, and I didn’t miss it. I didn’t know anybody who saw movies so what was to miss?” Ironically, when he died, cleaning out his house he had all the VHSs that I had been involved in. He had collected them all. But they were all in their plastic wrappers. As if to say, ‘I’m very proud of my son. But I want you to know, I didn’t see a one of these.'”

After a slow start toward success, Schrader made it before hitting 30.  Some of his films, like First Reformed, have a theme: “Guy writes in journal, goes out, commits a crime, comes back, writes in journal. And I returned back to that character periodically as I aged. He was young and he was lonely. He was a taxi driver. Then he was a little older and he was narcissistic and he was a gigolo. A little older in Light Sleeper. And he was anxious and he was a drug dealer. A little older, he was a society whopper here in the city. And he was superficial. And now finally, he’s a reverend and he’s suffering from despair. So I put a kind of marker [on my films]. You can’t write that show every year of course. But, I mean, I have come back to it.”  First Reformed opens in theaters on May 24th.

Gallery photo credit: Janet Donovan

The Trailer:

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