Today in Porn: Calvinist Lapso Cineaste Edition

Bruce Fretts’s retrospective essay/interview with writer-director Schrader may be of interest to some of the readership here. The occasion for the article is the release of Schrader’s new film, The Canyons:

Aside from [pornography performer James Deen’s] character’s name—Christian—and a “Thy Will Be Done” tattoo across the chest of one of his sex partners, “The Canyons” features no overtly spiritual content. While Schrader denies that the film is about porn, “what’s terribly interesting is these kids in this movie—I’m a generation away from [screenwrier] Bret [Easton Ellis], and Bret’s a generation away from [stars Deen and Lindsay Lohan]—are the result of the post-porn generation. These are kids who have been raised in a world full of Internet pornography. How can that not affect someone’s moral ecosystem? I don’t know. All our cultural artifacts now come with the notion that we have to raise our children in a sea of pornography.”

from Fretts, Bruce. ‘Paul Schrader: Porn Again?’

The Next Is Silence

Deadline Hollywood‘s Mike Fleming, Jr. has the scoop:

Martin Scorsese will finally realize his long-held dream to direct Silence, an adaptation of the Shusaku Endo novel about 17th century Jesuits who risk their lives to bring Christianity to Japan. Financing for the film has been secured […]. The plan is to shoot in Taiwan in July 2014 […].

When I interviewed Scorsese for Hugo during our awards season coverage two years ago, I asked him about why his passion for Silence has never waned. Here is what he said:

DEADLINE: You’ve tried to adapt the Shusaku Endo novel Silence, about 17th century Jesuits who risk their lives to bring Christianity to Japan. It isn’t commercial, it has been hard to finance, but it looks like you’ll finally get your chance to make it. Why has it been so important to you?

SCORSESE: My initial interests in life were very strongly formed by what I took seriously at that time, and 45-50 years ago I was steeped in the Roman Catholic religion. As you get older, ideas go and come. Questions, answers, loss of the answer again and more questions, and this is what really interests me. […]

DEADLINE: We Catholics are always struggling for answers.

SCORSESE: There are no answers. We all know that.* You try to live in the grace that you can. But there are no answers, but the point is, you keep looking. […]