Oh Canada Director Paul Schrader didn't think long before deciding to reunite with Richard Gere, 44 years after they filmed American Gigolo together, for his latest film about a dying draft dodger and documentary maker who tries to get his life back on track in one last interview.
In Schrader's latest film, which had its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Gere plays Leonard Fife, an American who fled to Montreal to escape the Vietnam War and later became a celebrated documentary filmmaker.
But now that he's battling terminal cancer, Fife rises from his deathbed and looks into the camera to recall key moments in his life and his many failures and lies. “Any actor could nail this role. It's a great role,” Schrader said. The Hollywood Reporter on his film adaptation of Russell Banks' 2021 novel Discounted.
“After seeing Anthony Hopkins do it, and after seeing Jonathan Pryce and Tommy Lee Jones do it, I thought to myself, Richard [Gere] has never been this old and this would help word of mouth and sales of the film,” he said.
But while Gere was always supposed to bring Oh Canada At the box office, Schrader chose Jacob Elordi to play a younger version of Fife when he was known primarily just as Nate Jacobs Euphoriaand he hadn't yet made his breakthrough in the role of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola's film Priscilla biopic.
“We got him (Elordi) for a nickel and a dime for that reason,” Schrader recalled after asking casting agents who could play a younger version of Gere's character. “I didn't need a name. I had Richard and that was enough. But I saw his performance on Zoom and, if that were 40 years ago, that's the guy I would have cast. American Gigolo,” added the director speaking of Elordi and his on-screen charisma, which mirrored what Gere had brought to Schrader's 1980 crime thriller.
Oh CanadaBecause it portrays a man considering his legacy just before he dies, it tackles heavy themes of mortality, memory, and truth. This is partly because Schrader chose to adapt Banks' Discounted novel just as the famous American writer was dying of terminal cancer.
“I heard that Russell was sick and that I should go see him like I did every summer. He called me and said, 'I can't do this this summer.' And I started realizing very quickly that this was serious,” Schrader recalled.
The banks had written Discounted, which portrayed a terminally ill filmmaker revealing the secrets of his life to his wife and the world when he was healthy. “The irony is, of course, he died pretty much the way he researched it,” Schrader said of Banks.
He was able to consult with his novelist friend via email as the screenplay was adapted for Oh Canada emerged. Banks died in January 2023, at the age of 82, about two weeks before Schrader finished his script.
A film about looking back on life and laying it bare also appealed to Schrader himself after his own health scares during the pandemic, where he had three hospital stays in a year to treat his bronchial ammonia. “And the last time I was in the hospital trying to breathe, I thought, maybe this is how it’s going to end. Maybe COVID is going to kill me,” he recalled.
Schrader survived, but not without confronting his own mortality. “Of course, when you're laying there thinking this could be it, I'm also thinking about what I want to do creatively, or whatever. You're saying to God, I might die, but I have a new idea. Can we postpone it for a year?” he recalled.
Fife's Interview on the Point of Death Oh Canada It is conducted by two camera operators who are his former students, and are played by Michael Imperioli and Caroline Dhavernas. And Fife’s much younger wife Emma, played by Uma Thurman, is always on hand as the dying and often abrasive director, through flashbacks mostly involving Elordi, talks about his life.
Schrader recalled an email from a dying Banks in which, apparently feeling better one day, he told the director, “If I ever write again, I will never write a book about an artist dying of cancer and seeking redemption.”
“He had become that character,” the Oh Canada said the director. Schrader's film will screen at Roy Thomson Hall on Friday, before two more films in Toronto on Saturday and Sunday.