Paul Schrader was late. We called and texted, and when we finally got in touch with him, he apologized, explaining that he was stuck in a car, not moving, on the West Side Highway. All southbound lanes were shut down because there had been a shootout between a fleeing drug dealer and the NYPD and the cops were hunting for the shell casings. When Schrader arrived, we began the interview and asked him what his plans were in the wake of First Reformed. He told us: “There was something I was going to do in April that I wrote but that fell apart half an hour ago on the West Side Highway.” This was a fitting introduction to the writer of Taxi Driver; some latter-day Travis Bickle was holding up traffic and preventing the interview from happening as planned. Bickle is American cinema's quintessential angry young man, sexually frustrated, alienated by a city he despises, fascinated by pornography, and eventually obsessed with guns. As written by Schrader, Travis is a landmine waiting to go off and a template against which the rest of his career would react.

He would continue to explore the themes Travis personified, albeit with a different visual approach than Taxi Driver's director Martin Scorsese, a frequent collaborator. Elsewhere, Schrader seems eager to leave Travis behind altogether, traveling as far afield from his iconic creation as possible. Schrader would remark later in the interview: “Well, you don't have that many stories to tell. I think it was [Jean] Renoir who said, ‘Every director has one movie to make, and he just makes it in different ways.’ And for me, the defining moment is when I realized I needed to get out of an insular community, one which was not only trying to dictate what you did but also what you thought. And you’ll have to do that with a certain amount of propulsion and a certain amount of cruelty. And so when you take that urge and then you mix it with the Christian dogma which is a lot about the dark night of the soul and the need for redemptive blood, and you start mixing those two together, and in an adolescent way, it comes out as Taxi Driver and in an old man's way it comes out in First Reformed.