Paul Schrader has spent half a century writing men who sit alone in rooms, filling notebooks with confessions no one asked for. On Friday in Venice, the 79-year-old writer-director offered a simple explanation for why he has never been able to put the subject down: he was programmed early, and the program still runs.
“I was raised a Dutch Calvinist, and, you know, Freud said you’re programmed by the time you’re five or six, maybe it’s even as late as eight or nine,” Schrader said at the press conference for The Basics of Philosophy, which has its world premiere Friday out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. “But anyway, once they pour that programming into you, you just run that program for the rest of your life, and no matter how far you run and how fast you run, you don’t outrun your childhood. My childhood was one of predestination, of guilt, of total depravity and all that, and, you know, Christian schools all the way through divinity school. So I don’t know how I do not write about guilt and redemption.”
The Basics of Philosophy stars Jack Huston as John Jorissen, a philosophy professor whose controlled, meticulously ordered life conceals a long-buried transgression. When the person he wronged unexpectedly reappears, Jorissen is thrown into a reckoning of guilt, desire and self-justification — familiar terrain for a filmmaker whose gallery of isolated, self-documenting men has included a taxi driver, a gigolo, a minister and a gardener before arriving, now, at a tenured academic.
