“The Basics of Philosophy”, interview with director Paul Schrader

Presented in Venice Open – Out of Competition during the Venice Film Festival 2026, The Basics of Philosophy follows John Jorissen, a philosophy professor in the American Midwest working on a book about Spinoza, whose quiet life with his partner Becca and her son Willie is upended when the sudden reappearance of a young man, Miguel Basque, at his estranged father’s funeral forces him to confront a past incident he has never accounted for.

Wracked with guilt and doubting that Spinoza’s God will ever pardon him, Jorissen buys a lethal dose of euthanasia powder even as he asks Becca to marry him. Director Paul Schrader talks about the film’s questions of change and forgiveness, and about how he sees film criticism in the age of the internet.

Change, Guilt, and Forgiveness

Asked about the possibility of change, both in the film and in his own filmmaking over the decades, Schrader ties the question directly to the line his character speaks: “As the character says, I think I have changed but I have not been forgiven.” He describes what drew him to that idea: “Can we really change, and can we really forgive ourselves? I thought that was an interesting theme.” He is less convinced, though, that people themselves change very much at all: “If I go back to even the days before I was a filmmaker, when I was a film critic, I don’t think I have changed that much. The mold is cut for us in our childhood, the computer is programmed, and we run that program for the rest of our days.”

Film Criticism in the Age of the Blog

Asked how he, a former film critic himself, sees film critics today, Schrader points to the internet as the great disruption: “Film criticism has obviously been changed by the internet. You used to be able to come to a festival and do about 20, 30 things, and that would cover the world. Now you do 10,000 things, and you can’t cover the world. Everybody has a blog, everybody has a website. It’s just huge, in a way. So in order to reach the same number of listeners or readers, you just have to do a lot more work.” He says he still keeps a hand in criticism himself, in a smaller way: “I’m quite active on Facebook because it allows me to be a kind of critic of sorts. I can go to a movie, have an opinion about it, and just post it on Facebook. It’s a way for me to return, in a small way, to criticism.”

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