Terry Gross: When you started directing as well as writing, what was the most difficult thing for you to learn about directing?
Paul Schrader: Visual logic. I know – I’d come from a background which believed that ideas were in the province of words. If you had something to say, you used words to say them. And it took me a long while to understand that images were also ideas and that they were not synonymous with words and that the image of a fork is not the same as the word fork. And it sounds rather simple, but I tell you; it took me a long time to figure it out.