Paul Schrader has shared that he’s got not one, but two new features in the works, though fans shouldn’t expect to see them on the streamers anytime soon. The director told Screen while at the Sarajevo Film Festival that he is currently working on films “Non Compos Mentis” and “The Basics of Philosophy.” Schrader is serving as the president of the features jury at the festival.
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“Non Compos Mentis,” as Schrader previously teased , is “a noir [about] a kind of sexual obsession.” The title is Latin for “an unsound mind.” Schrader has begun casting for the feature, with production set to begin in November. The film centers on “two brothers, their demented mother, a younger girl they both fall in love with, and their wives.” The budget will be in the $5 to $6 million range, with Schrader saying the production is “one of the rare cases where I had the finance before I had the cast.” The actors will work to scale, with Schrader expecting a 20-day shoot.
In the meantime, while he is doing a “very quick rewrite” on the “Compos” script, Schrader already has “another bullet in the gun ready to go” with screenplay “The Basics of Philosophy.” That second feature will follow an “an intellectual university philosophy professor” and, according to Schrader, will be in the vein of his trilogy including “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” and “Master Gardener.”
To Screen, Schrader said, “What has happened is it’s very easy now to make a movie. You can make a movie for $15,000. [But] it’s almost impossible to make a living. In the old system, if you made a film you earned guild minimum. If you’re self-financing, you’re not getting guild minimums because everybody is working for free.”
And that extends to his lack of streaming love. As Schrader told Variety , his recent films “have all been turned down by Amazon, Netflix.”
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While he did not specify that both platforms passed on “Non Compos Mentis” and “The Basics of Philosophy,” he did call out how streamers emphasize select directors (“privileged babies”) who have clout in the mainstream system.
“Unless you’re one of the privileged babies — and we know who those [filmmakers] are, because they get all the attention — if you’re not one of the babies, you just fly into the Bermuda Triangle of streaming and the last thing you see is the vapor trails of your film,” Schrader said.
The “Taxi Driver” screenwriter pointed to the “morphing” state of the industry as to why he has independently financed his recent films. “The economic model keeps changing — how to monetize the ‘product,’ which is what it is,” he said. “I began in the studio system and made four or five films. That was already a different studio system, in the ’60s, ’70s. Then it became the independent system. And then it became, now, driven by the streamers. […] That’s the new way you dump films.”
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