This article appeared in the October 1, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader, 2024)

A couple of years ago, I got whacked with a bout of long COVID. I was in the hospital three times in the same year with bronchial pneumonia. When something like that happens, you start to think, “Well, I guess this is how it’s gonna end.”

I had already been thinking of making a film about mortality, but it was while I was sick that I began to realize that if I wanted to make a film about dying, then I’d better hurry up! It was around this time that my friend Russell Banks [author of the source novel behind Schrader’s Affliction (1997)] was actually dying, and he had just written a book about the experience, which he called his version of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Unfortunately, Russell died before I finished the script, but now his Ivan Ilyich could become my Ivan Ilyich.

The title of Russell’s novel is Forgone, but he had wanted to call it Oh, Canada, which he couldn’t do because Richard Ford had a book called Canada coming out at the same time. I guess you can’t have two East Coast writers with books with the word “Canada” in the title come out in the same month. But he said to me, “If you make the film, please go back to the original title.”

The protagonist of Oh, Canada, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), has created a myth of his own life as a draft dodger and a maker of political documentaries. As he says at one point in the film while being interviewed: “I made a career out of getting people to tell me the truth. Now it’s my turn.” Come to find out, he didn’t dodge the draft to avoid the Vietnam War, but to flee his marital responsibilities.

Leonard Fife is a great role and a lot of actors could have done it, but you’ve sort of seen those people—Jonathan Pryce or Anthony Hopkins, for example—do this kind of thing before. But Richard has never played old, and he still doesn’t look old. It’s easier to make him look 60 than it is to make him look 80. [Gere is 75.] So I thought, “That’s interesting. That has a little topspin to it.” That’s why I went to him—not because he was the only one, but because he was the most interesting one.

It became an interesting puzzle. I hadn’t done a mosaic film since Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)—the idea being like when you drop an object on the floor and then you start picking up the pieces and rearranging them. Here we had different formats, color schemes, and time periods, with a narrative centered on two different storytelling traditions: documentary and fiction.

If done right, an activist documentary has the power to be both politically and cinematically effective. It’s hard to do, because once you start recreating things, as many filmmakers do nowadays, it’s a slippery slope. A lot of the quasi-documentaries out there—Netflix makes a lot of them, mostly about serial killers—are just exploitation. The ideal is more like Frederick Wiseman.

One thing I added to the story was Leonard showing up as his older self in memories of his youth. So in certain scenes you’ll see Jacob Elordi, as the younger Leonard, leave the room and then Richard enter the room as if nothing’s changed. Memories are projections, and they’re not perfect. It was also fun for Kristine Froseth, who plays the younger Leonard’s wife. We would shoot these kinds of scenes over the course of one day, so in the morning she would do a scene in bed with Jake and then in the afternoon she would do a scene in bed with Richard. I said to her, “It’s not going to get any better than this!”

This interview was conducted at the 2024 Sarajevo Film Festival.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and the founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series in Los Angeles. In addition to his work for Film Comment, he is a regular contributor to Artforum, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Sight and Sound, and more. He is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.