American literary giant: 1974

He threw the stack of manuscript papers in his hand onto the coffee table.

"Paul wrote a draft. I made some revisions. Lynn, I also wrote down those ideas you gave me last week. Now the three of us sit down and turn it into something we can all accept."

"I can't accept that," Schrader said.

The room was silent for a second.

"Paul," Scorsese said.

"Martin, I've already told you." Schrader looked up at Scorsese, then at Lynn, and slowly said:

"Travis is not a Vietnam War veteran. He never was."

"He could be," Scorsese said.

“He can’t,” Schrader said. “If he were a Vietnam veteran, then this story becomes a different story. A story about war. A story about PTSD. A story about how we treat veterans.”

"So?" Lynn said.

Schrader turned his head and looked at him.

That's not my story.

"I know this is your story, but I just think it would be better to add the Vietnam War setting to it."

Schrader remained silent for a few seconds.

"My story is about one person's loneliness," he said. "It's about a man in this city, watching it rot away, and rotting away with it. He has no past, because the past doesn't matter. What matters is that he's here now, in this car, on this street, watching the prostitutes, pimps, and politicians, thinking, 'One day the real rain will come and wash all this garbage away.'"

“That’s beautiful,” Lynn said, “but that’s poetry. That’s not a movie.”

Schrader's expression changed.

"What did you say?"

I said that was poetry.

Lynn continued, "I've read the original script; you wrote it beautifully. But beautiful sentences aren't for a movie."

"Then tell me what a movie is, Mr. Lynn," Schrader said. "Have you ever written a movie? How many movies have you seen? How long have you worked in the film industry? How long have you worked as a screenwriter?"

Martin Scorsese's eyes swept over them; he knew that saying anything now would be of no use.

"no."

"Then what do you know?"

“I understand the audience,” Lynn said. “The audience needs to know why this person became like this. They won’t believe someone who suddenly picks up a gun. They need a reason.”

"His reason is this rotten city!" Schrader said, raising his voice. "His reason is all the filth he saw!"

“Everyone sees those things, Paul,” Lynn said. “Every taxi driver in New York sees the dirty stuff.”

Lynn paused, staring directly at Schrader:

"But we didn't all buy guns."

Scorsese lit another cigarette at the table without saying a word.

Schrader smiled.

"So what do you want?" he said. "You want a soldier with PTSD? You want him to have traumatic flashbacks? You want him to collapse and clutch his head every time he hears firecrackers? Lynn, that's a cheesy soap opera that airs on NBC on Sunday nights."

"That's not what I want," Lynn said.

"So what do you want?"

"I wanted a guy who came back from Vietnam. He had no home. No friends. No one to talk to. He started driving a taxi because he couldn't sleep. He looked at the city from his car and saw all the things he'd seen in Vietnam—violence, decadence, madness—only this time no one fired a gun, no one called his name, no one told him where the enemy was. He started to lose himself. He didn't know who he was. He went out with a girl because he thought it would make him a normal person again. He ended up taking her to a porn movie theater."

Lynn paused for a moment.

"Because he no longer knows what is normal."

The room was very quiet.

Scorsese exhaled a puff of smoke and said slowly, "Go on."

“He started working out,” Lynn said. “Not because he wanted to get stronger. It was because his body was the only thing he could control. He couldn’t control the city. He couldn’t control his thoughts. He couldn’t control his dreams. But his body—he could make it hard, precise, a weapon. Because a weapon was something he knew. A weapon was something he learned in Vietnam.”

Schrader remained silent.

“Then he saw that little prostitute,” Lynn said. “Iris. The twelve-year-old girl. He decided to save her. But Paul—”

He looked at Schrader.

"—He didn't save her because he was a good person. He saved her because he needed an enemy. He needed to shoot and kill an enemy. He needed a mission. He was a soldier returning to civilian society, and what he needed most was a mission."

Scorsese stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

"This is what I want," he said softly.

Schrader stood up and walked to the window.

He had his back to them, looking outside. The sound of car horns came from the direction of Times Square, muffled and muffled, through two panes of glass.

"Have you read the articles I wrote about Bresson?" He didn't turn around.

"I've read it," Lynn said.

Lynn recalled reading Schrader's writings in a future collection of film reviews—about the Transcendental Style, about Yasujiro Ozu, and about Dreyer.

Schrader was a theologian. He was not concerned with reality, but with the soul.

“Then you should know what I want,” Schrader said. “I want a character who transcends reality. An archetype. A character like the basement man in Dostoevsky’s novels—whose loneliness needs no explanation, whose anger needs no reason. He simply exists. He is a symptom of this era.”

"Paul," Lynn said.

Schrader turned his head: "I don't want to turn it into a case study. I don't want psychologists and sociologists sitting in a movie theater nodding and saying, 'Ah, this is the consequence of the Vietnam War.' I don't want my film to become a damn anti-war movie."

"That's not an anti-war movie," Lynn said.

“Yes,” Schrader said. “As soon as you give him a label—Vietnam veteran—the audience will understand him through that label. They won’t see him as a person. They’ll only see the label.”

Lynn remained silent for a moment.

Then he said:

"I've been driving a taxi for so many years. Every night I pick up these kinds of people: prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, couples arguing at home, white-collar workers drunk after get off work. I've also picked up some veterans. They don't talk. They get in, give an address, and then look out the window. Their eyes are empty, like someone has ripped something out of their bodies."

Lynn paused for a moment.

I gave one a ride last month.

"He told me to drive to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once we got on the bridge, he told me to stop."

"I stopped. He got out of the car, stood by the railing, and looked at the water."

"I sat in the car waiting for him. I thought he might jump into the river and commit suicide."

"I didn't know what to do. I thought I should call the police, but there was no phone in the car. So I just waited."

"And then?" Scorsese asked.

"Then he came back," Lynn said. "He got back into his car and asked me to take him to a bar in Brooklyn. He paid the fare, gave me two extra dollars, and got out and left."

The room was very quiet.

“That’s what a veteran is like,” Lynn said. “Not flashbacks, not trembling, not yelling. It’s emptiness. It’s those ten minutes on the bridge.”