by James Mottram
Forty-five years ago, Paul Schrader and Richard Gere joined forces for American Gigolo. For Schrader, it was just his third feature as director after he broke through scripting Martin Scorsese’s seminal study of urban alienation, Taxi Driver. For Gere, who’d previously featured in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, it saw him cast in what became one of his signature roles: a male escort named Julian Kay, who becomes embroiled in a murder case.
“That was a whole new character for me. I hadn’t played anyone like him, which is why I wanted to do it,” says Gere, who undeniably reaped the benefit of working with Schrader all those years ago. Outfitted in a stylish wardrobe by Georgio Armani, the actor was propelled to mainstream attention as he became an instant sex symbol. Without American Gigolo, Gere may never have been cast in, say, Pretty Woman.
Now, after four-and-a-half decades, the two are finally reunited for Oh, Canada – a confessional drama based on the 2021 book Foregone by Russell Banks, the late author whose 1989 novel Affliction was previously made by Schrader into a 1997 Oscar-nominated movie, starring Nick Nolte.
The story of Oh, Canada follows director Leonard Fife, played by Gere, who is dying of cancer. With his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) by his side, he’s agreed to an interview – one that sees him confess things few knew about.
So, why take on Banks’ penultimate novel? “The answer is really quite simple,” says Schrader. “He got sick. He was my very close friend, ever since Affliction, and I would spend summers in the Adirondacks with him and [his wife] Chase [Twichell], and I was going to go [in 2022] and he said, ‘You can’t come. I’ve got cancer, I’m going through chemo’.” Instead, Schrader read Foregone, a novel that he says deals with “the degradations of death”, and one he compares to Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. “I wanted to make it for Russell and for me. It became my Ivan Ilyich.”
Banks’ own demise – he died in January 2023, aged 82 – was clearly a huge influence on the production. “We [Paul and I] talked quite a bit in the beginning,” says Gere. “Questions I had about what he was trying to do with this and where the character was coming from. And he was referencing Russell Banks quite a bit. I was finding videos. He had a lot of videos of Russell and photographs of him and his process of getting sick. But on the set, there was very little. It was very clear, once we started shooting, what we were trying to do and where the character was.”
How did Gere find reuniting with Schrader after all these years? “He’s gotten crustier! As we all have!” laughs the actor. Making American Gigolo, “was earlier in his career, and earlier in my career, and he was consciously making an Italian film. And this, I think, was much more in his wheelhouse.”
Intriguingly, Gere’s character – played as his younger self by Australian man-of-the-hour Jacob Elordi – has a chequered past. Faking an identity, he escaped over the border to Canada to avoid the draft in the late 1960s as young men were called up to fight in Vietnam.
“What Russell captured in that book… there was a two, three year period where all young American men had to make a decision that was the beginning of the draft, until a few years later, when it was clear that Vietnam was going to end,” says Schrader.
“That’s the genesis of Russell’s book. I got deferment for physical reasons, but my best friend went to Amsterdam… Oliver Stone went to Vietnam and got an Oscar! We all had to make decision back then, and that’s one of the core nuggets underneath the whole novel and the film.”
For Gere, it was a curious process making the film, not least because the 75-year-old had to play both older and younger. “It was just a tricky mix,” he says, “how to make it work. Going backwards was actually, in some ways, more difficult. Twenty years younger than him. But that was also an experiment. How do we make this real, so it doesn’t look like a CGI job? But we had terrific people. Really top guys. We figured out how to do it. We had tried to put pieces in. In the end, it was a much simpler approach, but very organic.”
Sadly for Gere, he got no screen time with Elordi, the star of Euphoria and Saltburn who plays the younger Leonard, but he did get to hang out with him. “He was going to be me [as] younger. He said that he looked at a few of my early films,” says Gere. “To tell you the truth, he has an incredible warmth to him and a humility about him. He’s genuinely sweet, and he works hard. He comes in to work hard. So, we were never in the same frame together, except once, which no-one would probably notice. He’s in the mirror of one shot.”
Gere points out that Schrader came to him with the script just a few months after Gere’s own father died, just a few weeks short of his 101st birthday. “He was living with me and my kids and my wife, and he was in a wheelchair, and he was clearly on his last days, but the way his mind was coming in and out of many different realities and many levels of consciousness… that’s what I related to very much in this script, and realising that, of course, we’re all going there,” says the actor. “I wanted to capture that with this movie.”
Schrader notes that Gere even told him that he felt that his father was on the verge of confessing something, but never did. “That’s a decision that everyone makes. ‘Do I unburden myself?’ I suppose that you don’t know until that moment comes when you say, ‘I’ve lived this lie long enough. Before I die, I’d like to tell the truth’.” Gere chips in, considering what memories even are. “Memories change. Everything evolves. The things that are in this film, they’re presented as if those are real memories. But I think they’re softer than that. They move, they change, like everything in life.”
Schrader even changed elements of the book to adjust the focus on Leonard, notes Gere. “Paul was trying to find, ‘Where’s the darkness in this? Where’s the bad Leonard in this story?’ He invented this moment where he disowns his son. That wasn’t in the book, but Paul felt it was necessary, and I agree with him. The guilt had to be deeper and more understandable.” Schrader calls this horrifying act “evil of Biblical proportions”, adding: “I tried to heighten the stakes a little bit.”
Of course, what we can all agree on is just why someone might flee to Canada (especially given the current White House administration). “I actually grew up near Canada, in upstate New York,” says Gere, reminiscing. “The north side of Lake Ontario to Canada. So, I felt very close to that mentality. It was cold, freezing. Snow would come late October. We’d still have snow in March.”
The actor, who has also shot a number of movies in Canada, still remembers the impact that filming there had on one of his children. “He said ‘Daddy, can we live here?’ For a kid, it’s like, ‘I feel safe and nice’. Canada has a hugely “different mentality” to the USA, he says.
Oh, Canada is in cinemas from 27 March 2025
