Hardcore

MUBI: You wrote a foundational text on the transcendental style in film (Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer). How do you feel about the current state of slow cinema, especially in relation to spirituality and transcendence? SCHRADER: Well, the current crop of slow cinema are my illegitimate children. I’m happy to take credit for them, but they’re not all legitimate. The true transcendental film is one that takes the narrative from melodrama, from violence, from sex, from all the normal hooks that pull you into a movie, and gradually transcends them and goes to a higher place. So a movie like First Reformed or Light Sleeper or Patty Hearst or Mishima or Hardcore starts with these traditional hooks, and then you gradually realize that there’s something else going on, and at the end of the film you’re not thinking about the sex or the violence or the melodrama, you’re thinking about something else.