In this conversation between filmmaker Paul Schrader and one of his cinematic heroes, French director Robert Bresson, each illuminates a central struggle that defines their shared obsession, what Schrader will call in a number of other places “the existential hero.” Before his much-discussed slide into depression and obsession with guns and pornography yielded the fury of the screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976, Scorsese), Schrader began his work in the film industry as a critic, stumping in the press for films like Pickpocket (1959, Bresson), which he wrote about for two consecutive weeks in 1969 upon seeing the film in Los Angeles. In his column, he spoke unflinchingly of his admiration for Bresson who, in Schrader's effusive estimation, “attempts and achieves the highest function of art; he elevates the spirit, not only of his characters and viewers, but somehow of the system which has entrapped us all.” Rhetorically adopting Bresson's thematic preoccupation with confinement, Schrader describes his own relationship to Pickpocket as though he were its prisoner: “as long as Pickpocket is showing in town I don't have the desire to talk about any other picture.” He pursued this idea in what will remain his most impactful contribution to cinema history, the isolated cabbie at the center of Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Travis is the first of Schrader's “men and their rooms,” created in the image of Bresson's films, especially Pickpocket.

Schrader has long credited his own filmmaking career to the inspirational example of Pickpocket, but Bresson's films likewise inspired his further work in criticism; Bresson was one of the trio of filmmakers Schrader studied at length in his 1972 book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Though Schrader's chapters on Ozu and Dreyer are illuminating, his passion for Bresson in the book's middle section stands apart; Schrader the critic clearly sees Bresson as the ultimate practitioner of transcendental style, which Schrader the filmmaker demonstrates through his continued referential and reverential attitude toward Bresson. His intellectual fascination with Bresson’s work matches his instinctual draw to it.