Oh Canada director Paul Schrader didn’t think long before deciding to reunite with Richard Gere, 44 years after they made American Gigolo together, for his latest movie about a dying draft dodger and doc maker looking to set the record on his life straight in one final interview.
In Schrader’s latest movie, which is having a North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Gere plays Leonard Fife, an American who fled to Montreal to avoid the Vietnam War and eventually became celebrated as a documentary director.
But now facing terminal cancer, Fife rises from his deathbed and looks into a movie camera himself to recall key moments in his life and its many failings and lies. “Any number of actors could knock this out of the park. It’s a great role,” Schrader told The Hollywood Reporter about his movie adaptation of Russell Banks’ 2021 novel Foregone.
“To have seen Anthony Hopkins do it, and to have seen Jonathan Pryce and Tommy Lee Jones do it, I thought to myself, Richard [Gere] has never played old and it would help the buzz and sales for the film,” he said.
But while Gere was always to carry Oh Canada at the box office, Schrader cast Jacob Elordi to play a younger version of Fife when he was mostly known only as Nate Jacobs on Euphoria, and had yet to break out in the role of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla biopic.
“We got him (Elordi) for a dime and nickel for that reason,” Schrader remembered after asking casting agents who might 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 this was 40 years ago, this is the guy I would have cast for American Gigolo,” the director added of Elordi and his on-screen charisma that mirrored what Gere brought to Schrader’s 1980 crime thriller.
Oh Canada, as it portrays a man considering his legacy just before he dies, deals with weighty themes like mortality, memory and truth. That’s in part because Schrader chose to adapt Banks’ Foregone novel just as the celebrated American writer was himself dying from terminal cancer.
“I had heard Russell got sick and I was supposed to go up and see him like I did every summer. He called me and said, ‘I can’t do it this summer.’ And I started very quickly to realize this was serious,” Schrader remembered.
Banks had written Foregone, which portrayed a terminally ill filmmaker pouring out to his wife and the world secrets about his life, when he was healthy. “The irony is, of course, he died pretty much in the way he had researched it,” Schrader said of Banks.
He was able to consult with his novelist friend via email as the adapted script for Oh Canada emerged. Banks died in January 2023, age 82, around two weeks before Schrader finished his screenplay.
A film about looking back on life to bare all also appealed to Schrader himself after his own pandemic-era health scares, where he did three stints in a hospital in one year to treat his bronchial ammonia. “And the last time I was in hospital trying to breathe, I felt, 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. “Obviously, when you lie there, thinking this could this be it, I also thought what do I want to do creatively, or anything. You’re saying to God, I may be dying, but I have a new idea. Can we put it off for a year?” he recalled.
Fife’s deathbed interview in Oh Canada is conducted by two camera operators who are former students of his, and are played by Michael Imperioli and Caroline Dhavernas. And Fife’s much younger wife, Emma, played by Uma Thurman, is always at hand as the dying and often abrasive filmmaker, through flashbacks that mostly involve Elordi, talks about his life.
Schrader recalled one email from a dying Banks where, apparently feeling better one day, he told the director, “If I ever write again, I will never write another book about an artist dying of cancer who seeks redemption.”
“He had become that character,” the Oh Canada director said. Schrader’s movie will play at Roy Thomson Hall on Friday, before two additional movie plays in Toronto on Saturday and Sunday.
