MEM: Now that the jaunt for First Reformed is over, how are you spending your time?

Schrader: Well, I’ve got to, now, go back on that road again because award season is coming. And so they have a few things planned for me. A24 [the distributors] is going to make a push for both Ethan and myself. And so it’s starting up again. But mostly I’ve been writing and done a number of scripts. But to be honest I’m not in any great hurry. There was something I was going to do in April that I wrote but that fell apart half an hour ago on the West Side Highway.

BB: Wow. What was that?

Schrader: The thing I was doing with Willem and Ethan. But maybe we could put it back together.

BB: So we want to look both kind of back and forward a little bit. You’ve had a very different career from a lot of your contemporaries: [Martin] Scorsese and [Steven] Spielberg and [George] Lucas and [Brian] DePalma and [Francis Ford] Coppola, and those people. What do you think your place is among that generation of filmmakers?

Schrader: Well, I never really was drawn to the big toys. And they all are on— the big toys is the big budgets, the long shooting schedules, all of that, which means that you have to really play in the systems. And because my interest in film began with European cinema in the ‘60s, if I could make films like those, that was enough. If I could do my [Ingmar] Bergman or my [Jean-Luc] Godard films, it was still hard, but I had no real desire to do a big-budget thing. And so for me to do First Reformed at three and a half million is just—I mean, Pickpocket is seventy-five minutes long.

MEM: Now that you’ve been a director for some time, what do you think about auteur theory, now in 2018?

Schrader: I think they’re valid. But they’re valid to the extent that the director in most films is the nozzle through which everything must move. And you’re making decisions very, very fast.