{"id":672614,"date":"2026-09-04T17:41:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/672614\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T17:41:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:41:20","slug":"paul-schrader-on-bringing-the-basics-of-philosophy-to-venice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/672614\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Schrader on Bringing The Basics of Philosophy to Venice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPaul Schrader<\/a> has spent half a century writing men who sit alone in rooms<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was raised a Dutch Calvinist, and, you know, Freud said you\u2019re programmed by the time you\u2019re five or six, maybe it\u2019s even as late as eight or nine,\u201d Schrader said at the press conference for The Basics of Philosophy<\/a>, which has its world premiere Friday out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. \u201cBut 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\u2019t 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\u2019t know how I do not write about guilt and redemption.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Basics of Philosophy stars Jack Huston<\/a> 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tSofia Boutella plays Becca, Jorissen\u2019s partner and colleague in the department, with Daniel Zovatto, Bill Pullman and Dana Delany also starring, alongside Shiloh Fernandez, Karl Glusman and Elizabeth Petruso. Martin Scorsese serves as executive producer, his second time in that role for Schrader after 2021\u2019s The Card Counter, extending a collaboration that stretches back to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018The Basics of Philosophy\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenice Film Festival<\/p>\n

\n\tHuston, who appears opposite Pullman as his character\u2019s father, said what drew him to Jorissen was the absence of anything monstrous on the surface.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s not a portrait of the boogeyman, the man coming at you with a knife held high. It\u2019s the person living in plain sight. It\u2019s the everyman,\u201d the actor said. \u201cI thought it was a really interesting portrait of somebody who is actually struggling with a terrible part of his past, and trying to recompense this idea of: am I a monster?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAsked about a sequence in which Jorissen finds himself walking alongside a long-dead philosopher, debating whether human beings are capable of change, Huston said he had considered who he would want beside him on that walk.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf I was to take a walk with somebody, it would be possibly with my grandfather,\u201d he said, referring to the Oscar-winning actor and director John Huston. \u201cI have a lot of questions in life and work and all sorts. He died when I was quite young, but I\u2019ve luckily had wonderful family members who\u2019ve been able to share about his life and thoughts and teachings, but I think that would be a fun conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBoutella, whose character is left to decide how much of her partner\u2019s account she is willing to accept, said she deliberately withheld her own verdict on Becca. \u201cAs an actor, I hide my own answers for what she really believes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\n\tPullman, meanwhile, delivered the conference\u2019s biggest laugh with an account of Schrader\u2019s casting process, which the director apparently conducts with no diplomatic padding whatsoever.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPaul\u2019s very frank about casting. You know, usually by the time you get on the set, he\u2019s told me several times about who they offered it to that didn\u2019t do it,\u201d Pullman said. \u201cAnd I was glad that I was somewhere on the list, and that everybody that went before me just bowed out for various reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul Schrader has spent half a century writing men who sit alone in rooms, filling notebooks with confessions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[268],"tags":[434,18,117,19,1452,17,142975,84623,284363,271363],"class_list":["post-672614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-international","tag-ireland","tag-jack-huston","tag-paul-schrader","tag-the-basics-of-philosophy","tag-venice-2026"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117214006421078759","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}