I remember the evening I first met Pauline as vividly as a first date. Sitting around an oak table, beneath a spider-patterned Tiffany lamp, we ate and drank and argued: the quintessential Kael experience.

It was the summer of 1967 and we were in New York City. I was a college student, and had enrolled on a summer course at Columbia film school. I was mad for Pauline’s second book, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which had just come out in paperback. So was my friend Paul Warshow. His father, Robert, had been a film critic for the Nation and had died young. Pauline had been a friend to Paul ever since. So we went to her apartment for dinner. I had only seen a couple dozen films at the time, but had strong opinions. I couldn’t understand how she could champion L’Avventura but not La Notte. She found my advocacy of Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman quaint. I thought she was being harsh; later experience made me realise she was being kind.

Artwork for the Rob Garver documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael. Photograph: 29Pictures

Pauline was then writing for the New Republic. She had recently reviewed Masculin-Féminin after it had lasted but a week at the New Yorker cinema. Her review, blown up and mounted outside the movie house, brought Godard’s film back for a successful run. Her bully pulpit techniques, the ones she had honed at the Berkeley Cinema Guild, now worked in New York. She was on the cusp of exercising her clout. That headiness, that evangelical purpose, permeated the room.

The hour grew late. Paul left. Having drunk excessively, I ended up on the sofa. The following morning, after scrambled eggs and toast, she escorted me out. “You don’t want to be a minister,” she told me. “You want to be a film critic. We are going to keep in touch.”

Thus I was ushered into the Paulettes. I saw her again that summer and corresponded after returning to Calvin College, sending her articles I’d written for the school paper. She offered to help me get accepted at UCLA film school. UCLA was then, as now, the acme of film schools, very difficult to get into, but she was friends with its head, Colin Young. She assured me that her word would have weight.

I would go to bed at night and pray to God to keep Pauline Kael alive …she was my only way out of the Christian Reformed Church and Grand Rapids

Those were the days when I would go to bed at night and pray to God to keep Pauline Kael alive. I dreaded picking up the paper and reading that she died. She was my only way out of Calvin, the Christian Reformed Church and Grand Rapids, Michigan. If she dies, I’ll be trapped there forever! Please God, just let her live another year. I won’t ask anything else.

Well, she lived, I was accepted at UCLA and my life changed. She helped me get a weekly reviewing gig at the Los Angeles Free Press. Like her other acolytes, I read her religiously, sent her everything I wrote and waited for her call. The phone would ring. Pauline, in that passionate, bullying voice, would explain that such-and-such a film (La Chinoise, for example) needed our support, and to the barricades we’d run.

Pauline was a complex mentor. On one hand, she infused your life like a whirlwind, dominating your thinking, affecting your personal relationships, demanding fealty; on the other, she could not respect anyone who would not stand up to her. Love her too little and she attacked you; love her too much and she disregarded you. It was a formula for heartbreak – a heartbreak I think the acolytes felt more deeply than their mentor. Mine came in two stages.

Richard Gere in Schrader’s 1980 film American Gigolo. Photograph: TCD/Prod DB/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy

The first was Christmas 1971. I had flown to New York to visit her. At that time, newspapers and magazines around the country would solicit Pauline’s recommendations before hiring a film critic; she was the clearinghouse. She explained that she was thinking of me for a paper in either Seattle or Chicago; Seattle, she felt, would be best. It was an arts town – a movie town, a serious town. I could develop a readership. I was in doubt. I had never made a living as a writer. Yet I was torn. I explained to her that I’d been experiencing some personal turmoil and was thinking about writing a screenplay. If I left Los Angeles, I was afraid that possibility would be gone forever. If I didn’t try now, I never would. She was unmoved: “I need an answer.” I asked if I could have a week to think about it (it was the holidays, after all). She said no; she needed my answer now. I said something to the effect: “If you need the answer now, the answer would have to be no.” Silence. Some cold chitchat. My time, I realised, was up. I excused myself, left, returned to my hotel room and made a plane reservation for Los Angeles. On the flight home I thought: “Well, you fucked that up. You’re no longer a film critic. You better try hard to be a screenwriter.”

The second break was in 1979. I was preparing American Gigolo at Paramount. Pauline also had an office on the lot, having been brought out by Warren Beatty to develop scripts. (Warren is the master of patient seduction. He is also the master of patient revenge. In manipulating Pauline, the critical bete noire of commercial Hollywood, he accomplished both.)

Paul Schrader in 2016. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

I had seen her a couple times in the intervening years. I sent her the script of Taxi Driver and had dinner with her and Brian De Palma at the Algonquin Hotel after the film’s release. She’d seemingly forgiven me for forsaking film criticism. Now she’d told David Chasen, a vice-president at Columbia Pictures, that I was a good writer but a terrible director. I asked her to lunch on the lot. I explained that she was free to say anything about me she wished in print; when she bad-mouthed me at a cocktail party, she was not acting as a critic but as a Hollywood insider. And was thus my enemy. The break was then complete. Communication ended. I used to look forward to her comments. Now I appreciated when, for whatever reason, she chose not to review a film I was involved in.

I began to fear her death anew. My mother had died in 1978, and I blamed myself for not expressing my love for her until it was too late. What if this ultimate family drama were to be reenacted? What if Pauline, my second mother, the enabler of my creative life, were to die before I had a chance to express my gratitude?

I didn't care so much if she thought I was a good director; what mattered was that she cared for me

Fortunately, an opportunity for rapprochement availed itself 10 years later. Not all family dramas end in silence and darkness. Terry Rafferty, New Yorker film critic, moved near my country house in Chappaqua. He mentioned Pauline, and I asked if he would call her, speak to her on my behalf. Terry made arrangements for us to drive up to Great Barrington and visit her. I got out of the car with trepidation, walked towards her rambling brown Victorian. Terry trailed thoughtfully behind. She appeared on the porch, smaller than I remembered, and opened her arms. After a sustained embrace she said: “I saw your film The Comfort of Strangers. I liked it. You’ve become a good director.” I didn’t care so much if she thought I was a good director – what mattered was that she cared for me.

Over the last decade, I visited Pauline most summers. One occasion stands out. I was returning from Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires. I called and said I’d like to stop by. I knew she had just returned to Great Barrington after two operations in Boston. She said she wasn’t fit for company. I told her I would stop by nonetheless. Her daughter, Gina, ushered me up to Pauline’s bedroom, and I was taken aback by her appearance. Always small, she now seemed skin and bones. I could encompass her wrist between my thumb and forefinger. I pulled up a chair and began time-honoured bedside chatter: how are things, fall is early, blah, blah, blah. But she would have none of it. She wanted my opinions on movies. I spoke in gentle tones, clearly a mistake. Retorts shot from her mouth like spinning razor blades, adjectives zipping passed my head, adverbs cutting my bare arms, clauses battering my torso. I told her the thing I had never told my own mother on her deathbed. I told her that I loved her.