Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader (born 1946) grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and famously did not see a movie until his late teens — then wrote Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull for Martin Scorsese and built a five-decade career as writer-director of American Gigolo, Mishima, and First Reformed, which earned him his first Oscar nomination at 71.

“I’M STUNNED”

In January 2025, Schrader posted on Facebook that he had asked ChatGPT for film ideas in the style of himself, Martin Scorsese, Tarantino, Bergman, and others — and declared himself stunned that every idea was good, original, and fleshed out. In a companion post he said he had fed the model one of his old scripts and, in five seconds, received notes as good as or better than any he had ever gotten from a film executive.

He kept going. By October 2025 he was telling Vanity Fair that the first AI feature is only about two years away and that he has a script that “would be a perfect script to do all AI,” describing the technology as simply a tool — the screenwriter as “pixelator,” sculpting faces and emotions the way a novelist sculpts sentences.

The reaction from fellow writers was largely horror — coming barely a year after the WGA struck partly over AI, the Taxi Driver screenwriter cheering the machine felt like a defection. Schrader, a lifelong provocateur who has never much cared for consensus, seems entirely comfortable in the role.