Schrader's script about an obsessed New York City taxi driver became Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He also wrote an early draft of Rolling Thunder (1977), which the film's producers had reworked without his participation. Schrader wrote an early draft of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but Spielberg disliked the script, calling it "terribly guilt-ridden," and opted for something lighter. In 1975, he wrote the script for Obsession for Brian De Palma. Robert Towne, best known for Chinatown, also received a credit for his rewrite.Īlthough The Yakuza failed commercially, it brought Schrader to the attention of the new generation of Hollywood directors. The film was directed by Sydney Pollack and starred Robert Mitchum. The script became the subject of a bidding war, eventually selling for $325,000. In 1974, Schrader and his brother Leonard co-wrote The Yakuza, a film set in the Japanese crime world. Renoir's The Rules of the Game he called the "quintessential movie" which represents "all of the cinema". Other film-makers who made a lasting impression on Schrader are John Ford, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Alfred Hitchcock, and Sam Peckinpah.
His book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, which examines the similarities between Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, was published in 1972.
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Schrader first became a film critic, writing for the Los Angeles Free Press and later for Cinema magazine. in film studies at the UCLA Film School upon the recommendation of Pauline Kael.
in philosophy with a minor in theology from Calvin College. Schrader attributes his intellectual rather than emotional approach towards movies and movie-making to his having no adolescent movie memories. In his own words, he was "very unimpressed" by it, while Wild in the Country, which he saw some time later, had quite some effect on him. In an interview he stated that The Absent-Minded Professor was the first film he saw. He did not see a film until he was seventeen years old, when he was able to sneak away from home. His early life was based upon the religion's strict principles and parental education. Schrader's mother was of Dutch descent, the daughter of emigrants from Friesland, while Schrader's paternal grandfather was from a German family that had come to the U.S. Schrader's family attended the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church. Schrader was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the son of Joan ( née Fisher) and Charles A.