PAUL SCHRADER

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state.

The only economic paradigm that movies have ever known is capitalism. There were no church sponsors or state patronage. The idea was that if you'd pay to see it, we'll make it for you.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

I want to be happy; why do I do things that make me unhappy?

Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself.

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

As screenwriters, we struggle with our own success. We have wallpapered our world and now we can't get anyone to notice the picture we just hung.

People who act against their own best interests are interesting characters.

I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

I was raised as a Calvinist, which is doctrine-driven. And though there are many things wrong with Calvinism, you are at least encouraged to argue about things.

The secret of the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We're all in the dirty laundry business and we're being paid to take risks and look silly. Race car drivers get paid to risk their lives in a more concrete way; we get paid to risk our lives in an emotional way.

When you have people who are embarrassing themselves for a living, who are making themselves look foolish and vulnerable and emotional for a living, your day-to-day reality is going to be a high-wire act. People are going to get in fights. People are going to get upset. People are going to walk off set. People are going to call each other names. It happens on every film that has any emotional people.

I get bored very easily. I find most movies boring. I go to movies and ask, "How do they stay awake making this?"

Because many of the films I've made have had an intellectualedge, it's harder for me to lie. It's harder for me to go to peoplewith money and say I don't care about art, all I care about iscommerce; all I really want to do is make money.

There's no escape. I'm God's only man.

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

One of the things that I do like about filmmaking is that you find out how to solve new problems.

The best advice is essentially that thing in the back of your mind that you really aren't sure of, and when you start to hear other people bring up the same concerns, you say, "Okay, let's address that."

The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment.

There's something wrong - the performance, the weather, the set design, the lighting. Something is not working. And so you say, "Give me 10 minutes." When you're first directing, you're terrified. But when you've been in that situation enough times, you know that under pressure, it will come to you.

Don't ever let the viewer settle in and get ahead of you.

Now I see it clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see that now. There never has been any choice for me.

I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman, What he has left is a legacy greater than any other director.... I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value.

Words are a completely different form of expression. The word P-E-N-I-S is an entirely different form of communication than a photograph of the same thing. H