It's two movies for the price of one today! (Podcast remains free.) In 2014, Paul Schrader directed Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin in a thriller about a CIA agent with frontotemporal dementia trying to hunt down an old enemy before his mind goes. The money guys took the film away from him, edited it into a totally anonymous Redbox movie themselves, and released it as "A Paul Schrader Film" anyway. He was contractually prohibited from disparaging the result, but Schrader, along with the cast and producer Nicholas Winding Refn, publicly disowned the released version, and Paul drank himself into a stupor. Several years later, during the editing process on First Reformed, he returned to DYING OF THE LIGHT and made it into something between a director's cut and a fascinating work of video collage art called DARK, which is legally unreleasable but available to view for free. It's so nuts, and it changed the course of his career. We're gonna talk about it!

Further Reading:

"Warning: 'Dying of the Light' Is Not a Paul Schrader Movie" by Anne Thompson

"Paul Schrader's Secret New Movie: How the Director Resurrected a Wild Nicolas Cage Performance Without Permission" by Eric Kohn

Further Viewing:

DARK (Schrader, 2017)

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