Paul Schrader names the movie that is “as close to perfect as there can be”
The concept of a movie being perfect is completely unattainable, but everyone has at least one film they believe to be pretty close. For Paul Schrader, it was an influential classic that made such an impression on the writer and filmmaker that he used it as the launch pad for his own career.
Getting his start in the industry by penning Sydney Pollack’s 1974 noir drama Yakuza, his second screenplay brought him vastly increased attention when he partnered with Martin Scorsese for the first time on Taxi Driver, a fruitful working relationship that also saw Schrader script Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing Out the Dead.
Schrader was also responsible for one of Quentin Tarantino’s all-time favourites after writing Rolling Thunder, while his additional credits include American Gigolo, Cat People, and Patty Hearst, among others. However, none of them would have happened were it not for Robert Bresson and Pickpocket, which monumentally impacted the filmmaker from the very first time he saw it.
“I adore Pickpocket and can watch it endlessly. To me it’s as close to perfect as there can be,” he said to The Telegraph. “It’s a rather short piece about a moral investigator in the form of a policeman and a young man who thinks he is somehow above the law. Well, he isn’t. But there is a girl, and she is an element of grace which comes into his life.”
Beyond being a mere inspiration, Schrader liberally cribbed from Pickpocket when hammering out his own stories. “I copied that ending in American Gigolo, which was sort of perverse because American Gigolo is a very superficial film,” he continued. “But I stuck it on just because I liked it. When I came to do Light Sleeper, I realised, ‘No, this is where I should have used it.’ So I used it again!”
Although he offered that he wasn’t “rigorous enough to even attempt what he did,” Bresson still taught Schrader how to “make films about unlikeable people.” That applies to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, so it’s no surprise that Pickpocket was integral to that narrative, too.
“Pickpocket gave me the courage to write Taxi Driver, and from that point on I have never had a problem with characters that appear beyond empathy,” Schrader confirmed. “I’ve made films about a wannabe assassin, a gigolo, a drug dealer and a guy who’s totally into home porn.” He certainly has, and none of it would have been possible without Bresson’s phenomenal feature.
There’s barely a filmmaker in the business who hasn’t been influenced by one of their peers or predecessors, but there may not be too many who built the best parts of their entire filmography from a single movie.
