The Canyons has “an ugliness and deadness to it.”
“To paraphrase Schrader, if you put Penn and Antonioni in bed together, put a gun to their heads and told them to fuck while Bresson watched through the keyhole, you got Taxi Driver.” Fair enough.
Cinematic Panic: Looking Back on the Tortured Minds Behind ‘Taxi Driver’
The clip feels more like the set up to a weird porno that would make you sick to your stomach and in need of a hot shower and/or tetanus shot just from watching, rather than just a melodramatic soap opera of sorts—which was what I had expected.
Watch the Rough First Clip from Paul Schrader’s ‘The Canyons’
Paul Schrader is a fucked up dude. The first time he saw a film in theaters (as a teenager) he hallucinated and ran out screaming. When he was little, his mother used to poke him in the hand with a needle if he was bad and tell him that this is what hell would be like for an eternity. He used to sleep with a loaded .38 in his mouth. Once, while writing a film, he couldn’t quite get into the guilty headspace of the character so he drove out to Vegas and tried to lose all his money. Not feeling that he quite nailed it on the way home, he ditched his car. Also, for a while there in the ’70s, his kitchen counter cutting board was always adorned with a brass crown of thorns and loaded gun at all times. His strict Calvinist upbringing left an obvious impact on him and his work, and he embraces cinema as a way to expose his darkest desires and impulses. His characters are always morally torn and struggling between what is forbidden and what one must do. He puts his sins on paper as a way to relieve himself of them. And naturally, he’s always been a cinematic hero of mine.
So I guess we’re both fucked, huh? Least you get to go to heaven. I don’t get shit.
