A meditation on mortality, memory, past sins and confessions, director Paul Schrader’s latest movie is the drama “Oh, Canada.” Debuting at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year (read our review), “Oh, Canada” is an adaptation of the novel “Foregone” by the late author Russell Banks—a writer that Schrader already adapted for 1997’s “Affliction.” The film stars Richard Gere, the star of Schrader’s 1980s hit, “American Gigolo,” and their first collaboration since some 30 years ago.

READ MORE: ‘Oh, Canada’ Review: Richard Gere & Jacob Elordi Are Brilliant In Paul Schrader’s Moving Contemplation Of Legacy [Cannes]

The drama centers on Leonard Fife (Gere), an acclaimed, but aging documentary filmmaker suffering from oncoming dementia and one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. A documentary crew from one of his protégés is scheduled to be shot at his house, but instead of sitting down for an interview, Fife decides to use the cameras to confess and share all the secrets he’s been holding on to de-mythologize his mythologized life. What spills out is a torrent of dark admissions, but is this Fife unmasking himself, or are his memories all conflating into a muddled soup thanks to his dementia?

Co-starring in the film is Jacob Elordi as the younger version of Fife before he leaves for Canada, Uma Thurman as his wife, Victoria Hill, Michael Imperioli, Penelope Mitchell, and Kristine Froseth also co-star.

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“Oh, Canada,” hits theaters in limited release today via Kino Lorber, and we recently connected with Schrader over Zoom to discuss his new film.

You adapted Russell Banks’ “Affliction” in the ’90s to great acclaim, and returned to him some 30 years later, what motivated that?I would normally visit Russell every summer for a week or so in the Adirondacks. I contacted him and said, “What’s a good week this year?” And he said, “Not this year got cancer, I’m getting chemo.” So that threw me. I had not expected that— he was a very outdoorsy Hemingway of ’82 type, and he had written a book about dying several years before when he was healthy. I said, “Gosh, I should read that book.” I read it, and I thought, “Well, that’s what I should be doing. It’s time for me to do a dying movie, and I better hurry up.”

I have had some health problems COVID—and because when you’re in Russell’s tradition, you can’t make a deathbed film, it’s too arduous. So, you have to make your deathbed film way before your deathbed. And I said, “No, it’s time for me to make a film about dying.” Fortunately for the script, he was alive through most of the writing of it, so I was in touch with him, and he died two weeks before I finished the script He wasn’t able to write it, but he was very happy that I was taking this o. On the one hand, it was very satisfying to benefit the film development and to be able to make a film dedicated to him. On the other hand, it’s obviously, quite sad.

What changed from the book to the film?Well, he wanted to call the book, “Oh, Canada,” to begin with, but Richard Ford had a book coming out called “Canada,” and they’re both upstate New York writers. And you would have two of them in the bookstore around the same time with the title ‘Canada.’ And Richard Ford got there first, so Russell had to change it. So, he said, “Please use the title. I want to do it originally use.” So that’s why I called it, “Oh Canada,”

So, have you consciously moved away from Man from A Room stories?Yeah, I found myself—critics like trilogies, but they’re not so crazy about tetrahedrons [laughs]. So maybe I should try something else out.

I remember seeing you at NYFF with ‘Master Gardener,’ and you said your next film was based on a nurse, but obviously, “Oh Canada” came first. What happened to that?Well, that’s what I was writing— about a nurse in Puerto Rico, and that’s what I was doing when I found out about Russell’s cancer. I back away from that.  I sold it to Elizabeth Moss. I don’t know much about what’s come of it since, but that’s what I was planning to make until I realized it was time to do my “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”

So, you belatedly reteamed with Russell years later, and then Richard Gere; the film is another belated reunion. Was that a conscious mirroring?Well, Richard exploded after “American Gigolo,” and he became a big-ticket actor with a big budget and all that, which is not generally what I do. So. we went our own ways, and then this came up, and this was a great role, fastball right down the center of the plate. A good actor will knock that out of the park, but we’ve seen good actors knock that out of the park. We’ve seen Anthony Hopkins do it, we’ve seen Tommy Lee Jones do it.

So I was thinking, “What would make this more interesting?” What would be a hook that people haven’t seen before? And Gere had never played old before: that would interest people, the dying gigolo, the old Richard gear. What would Richard be like as an old man? Because he still looks very youthful at 75, it’s easier to make him look 60 than 80. So that’s why I went to him: because it had that buzzy factory and also because he needed the role. He was at a point in his career where he would work for nothing to get this kind of role.

The film isn’t autobiographical because Russell wrote it, but it still feels very personal. Was the mortality angle of it all speaking to you?Yeah, it’s not autobiographical. Russell wrote an autobiography called “The Odyssey,” and it had all that, but I had learned the hard way that when I write really autobiographical material, it was weaker than the scripts that weren’t. I needed a little metaphorical distance between my life and my character’s life, so I was very happy using the metaphor of Russell’s life and more comfortable than using the metaphor of my own.

You’ve got some great up and coming actors in this Jacob Elordi and Kristine Froseth, who I think will blow up at some point too. Do you really pay close attention to those on-the-rise actors?Well, there’s a lot of new people out there, and it’s a lot of work to follow them all, and that’s really what casting directors do. It’s not possible for me. I watch a film daily and watch as much as I can, but I can’t keep track. You hire a casting director with a whole staff of people, and they keep track of all these new talents coming in, which ones are the month’s flavor and which ones will have a little longer career arc.

You’re really vocal on social media and—Well, I’m not really on social media; I’m just on Facebook. Facebook is my— I began my career trying to be a film critic, and I still have that critical itch, and sometimes it becomes quite strong. And I can’t write proper criticism because I risk pissing someone off, or hitting someone I may want to work with. So, I scratch that itch from time to time on Facebook. I do the little program notes like how Pauline Kael used to do at the Berkeley Rep, so that’s how I see Facebook as my own little bill notes.

I feel like you and Quentin Tarantino share that same itch: moviemakers, but also with a call to writing criticism.Yeah, and Tarantino would be a fool to say something bad about me on social media, and I would be a fool two times over to say something bad about him. So, there are limitations. We live in a realistic, practical world, and so just because you have an idea doesn’t mean you should express it.

Oh, speaking of “The Movie Critic,” Tarantino would remake/reshoot “Rolling Thunder” based on what you wrote, right?Yeah, he wanted to do a ’70s movie that used clips from the ’70s, but he also wanted to shoot the original ending of “Rolling Thunder,” which he was going to shoot as an original, and he asked me if I had permission, and I was flattered. But then that movie went belly up for reasons I still can’t ascertain. But I never think movies go away, so maybe we’ll see it again one day. I won’t be surprised, but it seems to have gone dark.

What was different from the released movie and the original script you wrote?I was under the throttle of [Sam] Peckinpah, and the original ending was a total slaughter, and everyone dies. No man standing, nothing. Just bodies like the ending of “The Wild Bunch,” so Robert Ryan walks in and sees them, and they’re all dead. That was the ending, and it was just pushed back from the studio. I wouldn’t change the ending, so someone was brought in to change it and make the protagonist survive.

Back to “Oh Canada,” I particularly loved the music, the lugubrious alt-country score.Yeah, well, I had heard Phosphorescent [Matthew Houck], as I said a few years ago at Brooklyn Steel, and I really liked him, so he was stuck in my mind. And this film came, and I thought, maybe I could do a song cycle—which I did in “Light Sleeper”— which is a series of four or five songs, sung and written and performed by the same artists that form a third story arc other than the dialog and the action. I had done something with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club members in “The Card Counter.”

“I wanted something anti-anthemic. And I know [Bruce] Springsteen (read that story here), but it’s not in his toolkit to do an anti-anthem. I went back to Matthew because he’s officially anti-anthemic. And then the “O, Canada,” [national anthem] rendition with his voice cracking and the funereal keyboards. He was the right choice.

“Oh, Canada” opens in theaters today, December 6, in limited release.