Today, the best writers in Hollywood work for cable rather than in Hollywood, he says. “When I got involved in movies, there was a crisis of content. We sat around and rethought movies, and came up with answers over the next 15 years. Today there is crisis of form — we don’t know how long a movie should be, how to see it, how you interact with it. Movies as you know them will not survive. I prefer using the phrase audio-visual entertainment.” He says it is television today that is exploring emotions while movies are less and less about good writing. “When the theatres start closing and there is a move to downloaded entertainment, the importance of the writer is going to rise again, as the spectacle reduces in importance.”
Schrader, who is visiting India for the second time after almost 20 years, says he is not a real writer. “Real writers write everyday. I don’t write until I know virtually everything is in my head. I wait for months working on an idea and then spend three to four weeks on a script. I haven’t written for a while, but have done two screenplays this year.”

As he puts it, “I am more of a director now as I don’t get too many offers to write. Usually a director likes to push around the scriptwriter, but I’ve directed 18 films, and guess I am not easy to push around!” But as a director, he is not sure of writing for television himself. And as he admits, “it breaks your spirit to write and then not sell.”
Schrader’s films have largely been about the man on the margins. “I like to term them ‘peepers’ – gigolos, drug dealers, taxi drivers – trying to find a life for themselves. I have always been attracted to this character.” The best film he directed in his opinion is The Comfort of Strangers (1990). And the most emotional one for him — Light Sleeper (1992).

Not a fan of Hollywood’s tendency to explain it all, Schrader says, “I like the idea of picking up a man and moving him forward, and letting the audience fill in the backdrop. One of the signs of good art is to get the reader or the viewer to be a part of the process.” For him, the last scene of a movie should be on a sidewalk outside the hall. Coming out of the theatre, “one guy should be saying the director’s a creep, while the other guy says he’s not.” As the film is still on!
And though he is not sure what it will take for a Bollywood film to make it to the world stage – “a bit of luck probably,” he is sure that it has a cult following around the world. And he is all for regional cinema, for as he says, “it is always more meaningful as it is closer to the roots.”