It usually starts with a personal problem which is also reflective of a social malaise, and then I find an occupational metaphor. Going back to Taxi Driver, the personal problem was young male loneliness. And the metaphor of the taxicab occurred to me. The thing about these occupational metaphors is that you have to break the viewer’s identification. When Taxi Driver came out, taxi driver characters in movies were like your brother-in-law: a funny guy who would talk too much. I looked at him and I said, “No, this is the underground man. This is the heart and soul of Dostoevsky. This is a kid locked in a yellow coffin, floating through the open sewers of the city, who seems in the middle of a crowd to be absolutely alone.” That was a good metaphor. That became the template: to learn about the self by finding a metaphor that’s not at all like you – gigolo, drug dealer, minister, card player, gardener – and using him the same way that Robert Bresson used pickpockets. Pickpocket isn’t really about being a pickpocket.

With Taxi Driver, I went to the European model of the existential hero of Dostoevsky, Camus and Sartre, where you’re just inside that person. You get into his life and it’s interesting enough. But maybe 50 minutes in, it starts to aberrate a little bit. You think, “That’s odd.” And then it aberrates a little more. And by the time you’re an hour and 15 minutes in, he’s no longer a character you would identify with, but you already have. You think, “I’ve gotten to kind of like this guy, I sort of understand him, but now he’s behaving in a way that I don’t condone. What’s going to happen?” That’s the formula.

It has to do with the conundrum of the way I was raised, the inherent conundrum of Calvinism: man is incapable of good, but he must try. You won’t earn your way to heaven, but you have to try anyway. I’ve never really fully understood that combination of free will and predestination. How can you be predestined and have free will at the same time?

I remember that when I first saw Pulp Fiction [1994] at the New York Film Festival, I instantly recognised it. I turned to my wife during the screening and said, “Everything I have done is now outdated.” I realised that the ironic movement had surpassed the existential movement. ‘Existential’ now had quotes around it. It’s a very important film in film history. It would be interesting to see it again and see how well it holds up, now that it has become the subject of endless imitation. The Godfather is also the subject of endless imitation, but it holds up and the imitators don’t.

Paul Schrader, interviewed