Stephen Rodrick’s interview with Paul Schrader in Variety is a thing of great heft. Over the course of the piece, Schrader grapples openly with the looming spectre of death, contacts Kevin Spacey to star in a potential Sinatra biopic and revisits a decade-old feud he has had with his own interviewer. But that isn’t why people will remember it. No, they will remember the interview because, out of nowhere, Martin Scorsese’s dog eats Paul Schrader’s finger.
During one of their conversations for the piece, late last year, Schrader turned up for dinner with “a massive, bloody bandage” wrapped around his hand. Rodrick asks what happened, and then pastes in a transcript of the following exchange.
