Paul Schrader just can’t stop working. Despite having had his fair share of health issues over the past few years, his persistence in making cinema hasn’t diminished.
In July 2025, Schrader wrapped filming “The Basics of Philosophy,” starring Jack Huston, a film centered on a university philosophy professor and shot in the stylistic mold of Schrader’s “Man in a Room” trilogy: “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” and “Master Gardener.”
This year, he’s planning on shooting two films—his words, not mine—and has now set a cast and start date for one of them.
“Non Compos Mentis,” which will shoot in New York this spring, is set to star Liam Hemsworth, Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Pidgeon, and two-time Oscar winner Dianne Wiest. The project is seeking U.S. distribution and will be hitting the EFM market this week.
Described as an “erotic thriller,” “Non Compos Mentis” follows two silver-spoon brothers—played by Landry Jones and Hemsworth—grappling with their mother’s slow descent into dementia (Wiest). One is a buttoned-up New York defense attorney; the other, a ruthless corporate heir. Their already brittle relationship implodes when the attorney plunges into a dangerous affair with a much younger woman (Pidgeon), triggering a combustible love triangle that spirals into obsession, betrayal, and a cutthroat war over the family fortune.
Suffice it to say, Schrader’s six-decade filmmaking career has been quite the journey. Beyond his own directorial efforts, he’s penned some of the most iconic scripts in American cinema—“Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” not to mention “Rolling Thunder,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and “Bringing Out the Dead.”
If I had to make a list of his best films as a director, it would have to include “Blue Collar,” “Mishima,” “Affliction,” “Auto Focus,” and “First Reformed.”