Finding a metaphor for a problem is what legendary writer/director Paul Schrader sets out to do. This is one of the lessons he imparted to the crowd gathered for his masterclass at Cinéma Impérial for this year’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, which rightly awarded Schrader the 2018 Louve d’honneur prize and treated festival-goers with a retrospective of his oeuvre.

We like to think we’re pretty writer-centric at the agency. And it came as no surprise to hear Schrader say he’d read two books twice before embarking on the writing of mythical Travis Bickle’s journey through New York City in a taxi.

The two books are The Stranger by Albert Camus and Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. Tackling French existentialism in big doses is apparently life-changing. The metaphor for crushing loneliness is indeed embodied by a lone yellow cabbie roaming New York city streets. It would appear the Ethan Hawk character in Schrader’s most recent outing, The First Reformer, is cast in the same mould, in what is yet another spiritual film for this writer/director, which steers us to the heart of every Schrader conversation, transcendentalism style in film. Best described as creating dead time. He gave the example of holding the shot of a character’s exit and “holding on the closed door longer than you normally would. You’re not going to cut. Dead time transfers the action to viewers, engaging them to be moved. It uses the power of cinema against itself to get the viewer to participate.”

Using boredom as technique, subverting the viewers’ expectations and consistently withholding action activates the audience, according to Schrader. Most films today lean into you and give you all the action you desire and ask nothing of you. Transcendental style works the opposite way. You lean back and take your time. “It creates something much more powerful,” he says.

The transcendental style is clearly not for all audience members. Asked what he thought about the change US cinema has undergone since he penned Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Last Temptation of Christ, he said that it was really the US audience that had undergone the biggest change. “It was much easier to get a conversation going around something than it is now. People are much more fragmented now. Films using the transcendental style are still getting made but it’s increasingly hard to get them seen.”

Paul Schrader the film critic turned to spiritual films after seeing Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, a true exemplar of the transcendental style. His early period as film critic and budding script writer, he wrote about in a four-year correspondence with his brother Leonard, newly published by Film Comment. It captures what Film Comment calls an “extraordinary and perhaps unrepeatable era” in world cinema.