Why Create?

Paul Schrader, the Bible, rejection. It's a Tuesday.

I write to figure out what I think. This was something I thought, possibly wrote, as a teenager… and thought was my own notion, before realising it had already been said by Joan Didion. Google tells me this was in her essay Why I Write, which I will read once I finish writing this.

Anyway, this is on my mind this morning because Variety has written that Paul Schrader is “sounding off in support of using ChatGPT to come up with ideas for films”, after reading a recent facebook post by the renowned filmmaker and former critic.

This has caused plenty of commenters to have conniptions, but Schrader is an inveterate provocateur and I wouldn’t imagine his language is accidental, in that he ends the post with a question: “Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?”

Any passing knowledge of Schrader, particularly the story of how and why he wrote Taxi Driver, answers that question. Amid a divorce fog of pornography and alcohol abuse, suffering a stomach ulcer and living in his car, he knocked out the first draft about a possibly psychotic, definitely lonely, young man who turns to violence after failing to find connection. He wrote it, he’s said, to “exorcise the evil I felt within me”.

As varied and successful and fascinating as his other films have been, I think Taxi Driver is the film that will forever define Schrader in cinema history – and it’s a film this renowned director didn’t actually direct, with that falling to Martin Scorsese. Does my opinion of Schrader’s work here, or elsewhere, mean he should value the work any more or less? Of course not. He wrote the script to figure out something for himself.

In the field of screenwriting and filmmaking there’s a lot of talk about how to “make it”, by which is meant, I think, breaking through and making a living. But the only making it is making it – creating something. That’s a little more nuanced a notion in film, where the screenplay isn’t generally regarded as the final artform – the item to be appreciated by others.

But it can be appreciated, or understood, or used, by you – its creator. This weekend I was a judge for The Pitch Film Fund, in which – after an initial online process – filmmakers pitch in person to a panel for funding to make their shorts inspired by stories or verses in the Bible.

This meant listening to some great pitches and discussing them with a really insightful and fun panel – Alice Cabañas of BFI Network, Elizabeth Oldfield (host of podcast the Sacred and author of the excellent Fully Alive) and the writer and actress Gbemisola Ikumelo (a previous Pitch finalist who has gone on to win a BAFTA and who I had to particularly not fanboy over for her work on A League Of Their Own).

It also meant saying no to eight of the ten filmmakers, who have received great support – and a residential at a rather lovely hotel – thus far, but, let’s face it, really wanted the production cash. I know I would.

When I was first invited to judge for The Pitch – in 2009 – it was because I was a successful film journalist who knew the Bible, somewhat. In the intervening 16 years I’ve written several screenplays, directed four short films and tried, thus far unsuccessfully, to make a feature film. All of which is to say back then I was blissfully ignorant of how painful it was to not make something.

Now, I see the filmmakers pitching and feel their pain when we pass and know quite intimately how it feels. But it doesn’t mean those entries weren’t worthwhile, just as it doesn’t mean anything we write that is not consumed doesn’t have value.

The day after The Pitch a very successful producer, whose work I respect very much, passed on a script of mine so politely and definitively I had to assume he truly despised it. Indeed, after some prodding, I discovered that he had taken almost exactly the opposite emotional reaction and message from the material than that which was intended. Of course, it stings somewhat. But whether it’s a fault of transmission or reception, whether that script is ever made as a film, it helped me figure a few things out – about anger, prejudice, class and fear, about what can, or should, drive us.

Maybe no one else will see what is in my head. Maybe that film, in particular, will never be made. But it has helped make me… it has helped save me. God knows, AI couldn’t do that. Schrader knows, too. We each have our own Taxi Driver – and the journey is the destination.