“That’s the secret of creativity. You have to steal around. If you keep going back to that same 7-Eleven, they’re going to catch you. So you go over to the floral shop, the gas station that nobody ever goes to, and you steal all this shit, and you put it together and people say, ‘Wow.’ They think it’s yours.” – Paul Schrader on First Reformed
* * *
It’s been eight years since the release of First Reformed (2017), Paul Schrader’s metaphysical drama about a priest undergoing a crisis of faith after one of his congregants commits suicide. The film was highly regarded by critics, grossed around $4 million worldwide, and earned Schrader his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. It has since appeared on many best-of-the-decade lists and has come to be regarded as one of Schrader’s best works.
What many viewers may not realize is that First Reformed is actually a very carefully crafted homage to a series of other films and texts, perhaps the most important of which is Schrader’s own previous work.
Schrader was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His family practiced Calvinism, one of the most austere sects of Protestantism. Although he no longer calls himself a Calvinist, he is still a churchgoer. “I’m Presbyterian at the moment,” he told NPR in 2018. “I started out as a Calvinist – a Christian reformed. And then went over to the Episcopalians for a while, and now I ended up with the Presbyterians.”
Drawing on this religious background, in 1972, Schrader wrote a book called Transcendental Style in Film about the filmmakers Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, in which he theorized that, across cultures, filmmakers tended to use a slower, more meditative style to address spiritual themes in their work, diverging from the flashier, more indulgent Hollywood style of filmmaking. This thesis proved highly influential, and the book came to be considered a classic of film theory, setting the terms for discussions of religion and spirituality in film and being widely cited by many film scholars.
“I never thought I would make a spiritual film or a quiet film,” Schrader told RogerEbert.com in 2016.
I was too much enamored with psychological realism and action, both of which are anathema to a quiet film. Then a few years ago, I had dinner with Pawel Pawlikowski. I was a big fan of his film Ida, and he told me that if I kept a project at two million dollars, I’d be able to make the exact film I wanted. As I walked back to my place in New York, I realized that since the budgets of films have come down, I could actually make the spiritual film that I had always been afraid to make because I couldn’t get it financed. So I started writing the script First Reformed.
Ida seems to have had a significant influence on the visual/cinematic style of First Reformed; aspect ratio, static camerawork, and so on. Schrader has even said he originally wanted to shoot First Reformed in black-and-white. The casting of Ethan Hawke also feels like a somewhat indirect nod to Pawlikowski, as Hawke had previously starred in that director’s The Woman in the Fifth (2011).
The script for First Reformed draws on two main sources; Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963) and Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), both of which follow priests grappling with issues of faith and doubt in small, sparsely attended congregations.
The first extended dialogue scene in First Reformed more or less paraphrases a scene from Winter Light in which a depressed man and his pregnant wife seek counsel with a priest, who attempts to console them but is ultimately unsuccessful. In both films, the depressed man later commits suicide. In Winter Light, the man is concerned about nuclear war, while in First Reformed, he is concerned about climate change. In both films, the priest has an ex-wife who expresses concern for his well-being.
Diary of a Country Priest
First Reformed borrows several plot elements from Diary of a Country Priest as well; the main character’s terminal illness, recording his thoughts in a diary, bicycling, and so on. Diary of a Country Priest was based on the eponymous novel by the French author Georges Bernanos, and First Reformed contains several indirect nods to this text too, primarily in its voice-over narration:
I have decided to keep a journal. Not in a word program or a digital file, but in longhand, writing every word out so that every inflection of penmanship is recorded, every word chosen, scratched out, revised to set down all my thoughts and the simple events of my day factually and without hiding anything. When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy. Who are you hiding from? God? I will keep this diary for one year, twelve months and at the end of that time it will be destroyed. Shredded, then burnt. The experiment will be over.
These thoughts and recollections are not so different from those I confide to God every morning. – First Reformed
From Diary of a Country Priest:
This morning I decided to prolong my experiment beyond the coming twelve months. On the 25th of November I’ll stuff these pages in the fire and try to forget them. This resolution, which I made after mass, did not set my mind at rest for long.
It isn’t exactly a question of scruple; I don’t think I am doing wrong in jotting down, day by day, without hiding anything, the very simple trivial secrets of a very ordinary kind of life. What I am about to record would not reveal much to the only friend with whom I still manage to speak openly, and besides I know I could never bring myself to put on paper the things which almost every morning I confide to God without any shame. No, it is hardly a scruple, but rather a sort of unreasoning fear, a kind of instinctive warning. When I first sat down before this child’s copy-book, I tried to concentrate, to withdraw myself as though I were examining my conscience before confession. And yet my real conscience was not revealed by that inner light – usually so dispassionate and penetrating, passing over details, showing up the whole. It seemed to skim the surface of another consciousness, previously unknown to me, a cloudy mirror in which I feared that a face might suddenly appear. Whose face? Mine, perhaps. A forgotten, rediscovered face . . .
When writing of oneself one should show no mercy.
Elsewhere in the Bernanos novel, the priest character says “I rather wish I hadn’t used the word ‘pride,’ but I cannot cross it out” and “literally I can scarcely stand up this morning,” which are quoted almost verbatim by Reverend Toller in First Reformed.
In at least one instance, Toller seems to paraphrase the Bible in his dialogue. He admonishes his ex-wife, Esther, telling her, “your concerns are petty, you are a stumbling block,” which is reminiscent of Christ’s rebuke, “get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns” (Matthew, 16:23). The naming of the pregnant character, Mary, also carries Biblical overtones.
In a 2018 interview with Slate, Schrader mentioned Ordet (1955) and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) as having had an influence on the ending of the film:
The first script had the Diary of a Country Priest [ending] in it, which is where the dying priest falls out of the frame and you’re left with the image of the crucifix and his diary. But then I showed that script to [film critic] Kent Jones, who said, “I thought you were going to go for the Ordet ending?” Now Ordet is a 1955 film by Carl Dreyer, where there’s a miracle. A man’s wife is raised from the dead from her coffin, and his response is not to say, “Oh my God, it’s a miracle. Thank you, Jesus.” No, his immediate impulse is totally common: “I have her back, I have her back. I can hold her. I can kiss her. She’s alive again.” And that idea of a Carl response to a miraculous event had the great seeds of ambiguity and fascination. As soon as Kent said that, I knew that was the ending.
And then, there was another possible ending, which is the Zabriskie Point ending. The Antonioni film. A huge house in the desert completely explodes and the last three or four minutes are just slow-motion shots of debris. I thought, he could blow up the church and we could have a four-minute montage of body parts and pews flying about. But I thought that that would not have the right affect.
Elsewhere in this interview, Schrader mentions Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood as having informed the decision to have Toller wrap himself in barbed wire (something that also occurs in O’Connor’s novel).
In a 2018 interview with A24, Schrader mentioned that the sequence in which Toller and Mary levitate was inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), and the choice of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” sung by Esther, was inspired by its use in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).
Additionally, Toller at one point quotes the Søren Kierkegaard, using the famous phrase “sickness unto death” to describe an affliction of the soul. Also referenced in the film is the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, one of whose books is shown in a pile on Toller’s nightstand. Merton is explicitly cited later in dialogue, when Pastor Jeffers mentions him as someone Toller is fond of (“Who’s that priest you like so much? Thomas Merton?”). In addition to exploring various themes from Merton’s writing (spirituality, justice), the film was actually shot at Zion Episcopal Church in Douglaston, New York, where Merton’s family were once members. Merton even references this church in his book The Seven Storey Mountain.
As mentioned, Schader’s own previous work serves as an important influence on the film. In addition to his theoretical writings, Taxi Driver (1976) and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), both of which Schrader wrote, cast a long shadow over the film. Each follows a solitary protagonist with a tendency toward martyrdom narrating their own story in voice-over and moving toward a bloody, self-destructive conclusion.
Toller says at one point in the film, “I have found a new form of prayer,” which Schrader explained in his A24 interview was inspired by a similar line in Mishima, where the narrator said, “I have found a new form of expression.” Schrader has also suggested that Toller is sort of an evolution of Travis Bickle. In a 2018 Q&A, he told the Associated Press, “when I was in the editing room, the editor said to me: ‘You know there’s a lot of ‘Taxi Driver’ in this movie.’ And I said to him, ‘Yeah, I knew there was some. I didn’t realize how much until we started cutting this film together.”
The recursive interweaving of these sources, borrowing narrative details and recycling plot points from other films and books, gives First Reformed an almost intertextual style. It is a secondary work, with these texts serving as a foundation. Schrader, for his part, has made no attempt to hide the sources of his inspiration. In the Slate interview, he explained, “that’s the secret of creativity. You have to steal around. If you keep going back to that same 7-Eleven, they’re going to catch you. So you go over to the floral shop, the gas station that nobody ever goes to, and you steal all this shit, and you put it together and people say, ‘Wow.’ They think it’s yours.”
* * *
Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the films discussed.
