Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.
Paul SchraderI would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman, What he has left is a legacy greater than any other director.... I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value.
Paul SchraderI had this whole issue of doing a crime film in the 2010s. The genre's been mined very, very heavily. Post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino, post-Guy Ritchie, what do you do? I wasn't attracted to pulp so much as all of a sudden I had a pulp problem. I had to find a way to make this interesting, because there's a lot of crime films that come out on VOD every week, and a number of these star Nicolas Cage.
Paul Schrader