As Paul Schrader neared the end of his interview with Martin Scorsese for a 1982 edition of Cahiers du Cinéma, he shifted the conversation from their past collaborations to more heady material:

Scorsese's humorous misunderstanding of Schrader's question in fact highlights a duality that would come to define their next collaboration: an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel The Last Temptation of Christ (1955, first English edition 1960). The concept of an internal battle was already familiar territory for both Schrader and Scorsese, whose depictions of Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta's disordered psyches in Taxi Driver (1976, Scorsese) and Raging Bull (1980, Scorsese) were praised for their aesthetic and verbal intensity. Nevertheless, their choice to grapple with the Christ figure, and specifically Kazantzakis's troubled, human version of Christ, pushed their brand of psychological torment to new and profound physical and spiritual limits. However, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988, Scorsese) was not Schrader's only Bildungsroman portraying the metaphysical struggle between a father and son in the 1980s, nor was it his only adaptation of a popular novel. During the summer of 1982, after Schrader delivered the second draft of his script for Last Temptation to Scorsese, he made a deal with producer Jerome Hellman to adapt Paul Theroux's recently published work, The Mosquito Coast (US edition 1982). The novel recounts events involving Allie Fox, an ingenious and increasingly unhinged inventor, through the eyes of his teenage son Charlie as the family journeys to the jungles of Honduras to pursue Allie's dreams of Edenic independence from American society.

Schrader may not have set out to write two adaptations back to back, but when he reflected on the process of adaptation years later, he spoke about the difficulties he faced condensing the lengthy books into two-hour films, stating, “it's actually easier to write original scripts than to adapt books, because when you write an adaptation you have two employers, the person who's paying you and the author of the book, both of whom militate against your own creativity and make writing a slower and more difficult process.” This chapter explores the practical challenges that Schrader faced in translating Kazantzakis and Theroux's prose from the page to the screen, but more broadly, it articulates Schrader's contributions to these texts as they evolved from the outline stage, through multiple drafts, including when the drafts passed out of Schrader’s hands to the directors. The wealth of archival material in the Paul Schrader Papers at the Harry Ransom Center offers a unique opportunity for adaptation scholars to consider both the practical and theoretical questions raised during the screenwriting process.