Before the pandemic, Schrader had a standard routine when beginning a screenplay. He'd tell the germ of a story out loud; if the tale held a small group's attention for ten minutes, he'd go home, write it down with more detail, and run through the process again. He'd get up to twenty minutes, then forty-five. If the story still kept people interested, he'd set it all down on a legal pad, devoting a handful of words and a time stamp to every scene he envisioned. These final outlines are dense, uniform--almost without exception, they fit onto one page--and visually striking, like mathematical proofs. "Paul's writing is all about concision," Scorsese told me. "Everything counts, there's not a word out of place, and all the parts work together like a Swiss watch."