Paul Schrader is best known for his work as the screenwriter of the American cinematic classics Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, films that, in the hands of director Martin Scorsese, serve as studies of the dark, violent corners of masculinity pulled out by alienation and ego. Unfortunately, without a more discerning eye involved, Schrader’s late career has been more bad impulses than warnings about them. Look than further than his relationship with AI.
Schrader has a new film coming out, The Basics of Philosophy, which means he’s on the press circuit and he has a lot to say. In an interview with The Playlist, the writer and director said he has another film in the queue that will be made with AI actors. That alone would be controversial enough, but Schrader’s reason for going with AI over real performers does not exactly inspire confidence in the quality of the project.
Speaking of the film Three Guns At Dawn, Schrader told the publication, “I had originally written it about three Black brothers, all of whom are bad guys: a corrupt cop, a drug dealer, and a sexual criminal… We sent it out to actors, and no Black actors wanted to play in a movie where there are no good Black people.”
That seems… unlikely. Look, if the Daily Wire can find people to play the extremely stereotypical types of characters they like to cast in their excuses for a film, it’s a bit difficult to believe that no actor looking for work would touch a script penned by Schrader and allegedly produced by Antoine Fuqua. But let’s assume that’s the case.
Schrader said the hurdle left the project basically on death’s door. “But then AI came along, and I didn’t need Black actors,” he told The Playlist. Yeesh, man.
Schrader told the publication that the film will be AI-generated, which, if you’ve been following Schrader’s latest arc, probably isn’t a surprise. The guy has become an AI evangelist, going so far as to say that “AI is smarter than I am” after he asked ChatGPT to generate “an idea for a Paul Schrader film” and found the output to be believably him—which maybe says more about his own creative process at this stage of his career than he’d care to admit.
Schrader, who was recently accused of sexual harassment by an assistant, also had an AI romance earlier this year, which he did “out of a desire to understand male/female interaction in our matrix.” It didn’t go too far before the AI girlfriend ultimately dumped him.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem Schrader has taken the hint to set AI aside and is instead leaning into it. He’d better hope AI can buy theater tickets soon, because it’s not clear how much of a human audience there is for the path he’s taking.
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