‘I Love Making Independent Films’

Some 40 years after making the cult classic American Gigolo together, legendary writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, Paul Schrader and Hollywood legend Richard Gere are once again reunited for Oh Canada. Based on Russell Banks’ novel “Foregone”, Oh Canada tells the story of a dying artist’s during his final hours, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), as he finally tries to reveal the truth about his life to his wife, Emma, played by Uma Thurman.

Russel Banks died in 2023 of cancer. During our interview, Schrader, who was a close friend to the prolific author, said, “He did say to me ‘I hope to write again, and if I do, I will never write another novel about an artist dying of cancer and seeking redemption.’”

In Oh Canada, Gere’s character, who was a famous documentary filmmaker, accepts to be filmed by some of his former students, as he makes some shocking revelations about his life. Gere is simply magnetic and gives a profoundly stirring and heartbreaking performance.

During our interview, Gere told me that his emotional hook and first entry into Fife’s mind was his father, who passed away a few months before they started shooting. He said, “I am interested in how my father would respond to the film. I used my experience of being with him these last years, he was failing but he was so present. He remembered everyone’s stories, and how he was emotionally attached to them.”

He added: “But there were times he was disoriented and he felt like he was in a dream and out of control. Things weren’t in the contextual reality that he remembered. And his brain had to put pieces together in a different way, and I think the moment in the film where I become disoriented is one of the best parts.”

On the contrary, as a writer and filmmaker, Schrader feels like he needs to put some distance between his characters and his personal life and he even declared that he didn’t feel comfortable writing autobiographical movies. He said, “I made one sort of about my father, one about my mother, and they’re two of the weakest films I did. The strongest films I did have a metaphorical distance between myself and the character, you know, I’m not a taxi driver, I’m not a gardener. That metaphorical distance helped me understand myself.”

For his vision to be as complete as possible, Schrader has become used to writing outlines. These outlines, as the ones he did for Raging Bull or The Mosquito Coast can be easily found online. He said, “In Oh Canada, it was a mosaic,” He added: “Taxi Driver was never an outline, the first one that was actually an outline was American Gigolo. Taxi Driver, it was just notes to myself.”

For Gere, Schrader’s outlines are also a testimony of the director”s vision and precision. He said, “Paul is not experimental, he wrote it a certain way, and cast it a certain way. He had clarity in his mind of what he wanted. That is how he makes film now, he likes them to a certain page count, he writes them with a certain budget in mind.”

Making an independent movie is very hard right now, especially in terms of budget and a five-star cast and director is no guarantee that the budget will get any bigger. Gere even mentioned the possibility to give his salary back, in case the budget was too tight.

Gere’s offer is a true statement to his dedication and love for the art form. He said, “None of us made any money, I mean being paid for this movie didn’t change my life. Not being paid for this movie wouldn’t change my life so, it was irrelevant. But if you’re making independent films, if you need another shooting day, or a location that maybe is more expensive, of course you do what you can to help out the production. It’s more important to make a better film than the little amount of money we are talking about.”

He added: “I love making small independent films. The last probably 10 films I have made have been probably in this area of $4 to $6 million, as low as you can go basically. I love making them, I would like them to be seen, that’s the problem now, finding ways for these unusual, quirky, unexpected, in some ways, movies that take chances to be seen. And that’s the world we’re in now, that’s very very difficult as you said for independent films, financing them and getting them seen.”

As Fife recalls his past life and his marriage with his first pregnant wife, played by Kristine Frøseth, his younger version, played by Jacob Elordi is sometimes replaced by Gere. In a scene where Frøseth and Elordi are both together chatting in bed, Elordi leaves the room and is replaced by Gere in this scene of the past.

I asked the actor how this switch of places informed him in his portrayal of Fife. He said, “I looked at how Jacob did it, and I think I just incorporated the young man energy into that. I think it was one of the most successful things that we did, it’s one of the brilliant ideas that Paul had. I was more alive going into the memory, not as Jacob but as myself.”

Fife is doing a profound work of introspection and lays himself bare in front of the camera. He opens up to his wife, Emma, even though most of his memories are confused. To draw a large comparison, I asked Gere how his career, his different roles and seeing himself on the big screen helped him understand himself better. He said, “It goes both ways, playing a character expands you on possibilities, it gives you the freedom to experience another world. The brain part of the mind and there is another part, a larger part, but this one responds to habits. So in playing another character there’s an imprint that is put into the brain and your body.”

He added: “The other way around, a character is fueled by the actor’s emotions. It has to be grounded in something that can be real, that literally happened to an actor, or something that is imagined, like a dream.”

Oh Canada is now out in US theaters.