by James Mottram
Paul Schrader remains one of Hollywood’s great maverick talents. The 75-year-old may be best known for scripting Martin Scorsese classics like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, but his career as a director is just as impressive. Films like American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, Affliction and First Reformed, which gained him the first Oscar nomination of his career in 2018, have shown him as one of the great American storytellers when it comes to dealing with male crisis.
It’s a theme he returns to for his new movie The Card Counter, which stars Oscar Isaac as William Tell, an ex-con working the casino circuit. Co-starring Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Schrader’s go-to guy Willem Dafoe, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear Tell was a private contractor working in Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison where detainees were held and tortured by the CIA during the Iraq war.
During the Venice Film Festival, FilmInk sat down with Schrader to unpack this “stain on a nation”.
What was the starting point for The Card Counter?
“The starting point for these kinds of films… is usually an occupational metaphor, whether a taxi driver, or gigolo or minister or drug dealer. And then you start to find the problem underneath the metaphor. Or sometimes, you start with a problem and then you find the metaphor. And once you have a metaphor and a problem, then you can start exploring plot. So, I was looking at professional gamblers on television, thinking it’s such an interesting way to spend your time. Because all you’re really doing is running numbers. Card counting if you’re playing blackjack. Odds, if you’re playing poker, and you’re just running the numbers or waiting… waiting for that hand that occurs two-three times a day where two players both think they’ll win, and both go all in. Sometimes, it takes four or five hours right before that happens. And I thought, this is a kind of purgatorial occupation. Neither alive nor dead through grifting. And I thought this is interesting, how we think of gamblers. We think of them in a much more glamorous way. And same thing with a taxi driver… you don’t think of a taxi driver as the black heart of existentialism.”
William Tell has spent nine years in jail for his part in Abu Ghraib. Were you interested in exploring redemption and guilt?
“The problem was that… we live in a society where no one is responsible: I didn’t lie. I misspoke. I didn’t touch her appropriately? I made a mistake. And I come from a culture where you’re born soaked with guilt and only get guiltier. You’re responsible for everything. You’re responsible for things you didn’t even do! And I said: ‘So you have a character like this, who has been punished by the government… but doesn’t feel that he’s been punished enough. So, the punishment goes on.’ And you think that’s interesting. Well, what can he have done that is so terrible? It has to be more than a murder or assault. It has to be something that is unforgiveable; it has to be a stain on a nation. And then, of course, you think of Abu Ghraib as the unforgiveable. Because it just doesn’t go away, those images. They don’t go away after you’ve been in jail nine years.”
What gave you the idea to show the flashbacks to the prison with a disorientating fish-eye lens?
“I mean, I didn’t have the time or the money to compete with films like Zero Dark Thirty that dealt with this. And also, I was dealing with the distorted recesses of memory. And so, if you’ve ever seen pictures of the barracks of Abu Ghraib, it’s just a rectangular box. What we show… this is not the real Abu Ghraib, it didn’t actually look like this… but this is Dante giving you a little tour. What was nice about the lens is that it doesn’t cut very well. Once you commit yourself to that lens, you’re doing single takes. And so, I had these two scenes, which would technically take at least two days. And I said, ‘I’ll use this lens, I can shoot it in one day. One in the morning, one in the afternoon and pick up a day and do something else.’ So, it worked out both ways.”
What led you to casting Oscar Isaac?
“I always had my eye on him. About fifteen, twenty years ago, I tested him for a film that never got made. And I was gonna give him his first leading role. A film in Mexico [that] fell apart. So, I knew him, and I thought about him for First Reformed and then I thought Ethan [Hawke] is about ten years older, so I went to Ethan. So, when you’re doing these lower budget films you have to have access to the talent because if you go through the representatives, it never gets to them. That’s what the representatives are there for, to make sure that they don’t do the Paul Schrader film! Because there’s no financial upside. So, when you send it to Brad Pitt, and three months later, you get turned down, you don’t even know if he ever actually read it. So, I went to Oscar… and I like lean, classic movie style looks. Do you know who Raymond Novarro was? He and Valentino were the two great Latin stars of the silent era. Both extraordinarily handsome men. And Oscar… I thought of Raymond Novarro and I also thought of Marcello Mastroianni as a sort of template for this glamorous guy who keeps everything close to the chest.”
The credits read ‘Martin Scorsese Presents’. How did the collaboration with your old friend come around?
“It’s not really so much a collaboration. We were working on something that we want to do, a long-form thing for TV. And I was putting this project together. I thought that his name might help the packaging. So, I just said to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to share a card again after all these years? You can present. I’ll write and direct.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s do that.’ And so, it was a favour between friends.”
Did your Oscar nomination for First Reformed not help in getting you a bigger budget and access to cast?
“Well, in order to keep full control, I have to work at a certain budget level. And for this film, that was about four, four and a half million. I go above that, I start to risk interference. So, it’s as much self-discipline… there are only a handful of directors of my age, who can get away with that. Marty and Steven [Spielberg] run up the budget, and play with the big toys, but I can’t, and I don’t write material that demands the big toys. By the big toys, I mean, sets and extras and action sequences. And so, it works. It works out nicely for me.”
You were three-fourths done when The Card Counter got shut down due to COVID. How did you cope?
“First of all, we went home, like everybody else. And just tried to keep track of my actors. They were in other projects, and Oscar had grown out his beard for Dune reshoots and I had to convince him, but a window opened up, and we were able to go back and finish it. What made it interesting… usually a low budget film, you get your days of shooting, and that’s that – no reshoots. You don’t have the budget for reshoots. Here, we had a built in reshoot because I had five or six scenes, character scenes, that we hadn’t shot yet. So, I could edit the film and put up a still and say, ‘Scene to be shot’ and have the actors read the lines. And then I can show it around to, say, Scorsese, and say ‘I’ve got five or six scenes to do yet. I can rewrite them all. What am I missing?’ Which is sort of the same thing that happens when you have the budget to reshoot.”
What’s next for you?
“Well, I was hoping to be in Australia in about a month. We were gonna film a new film in your summer, our winter. But one postponement after another… and yesterday I heard that people may not be able to get in or out [of the country] this calendar year.”
The Card Counter plays at the Sydney Film on November 3, 11 and 12. It goes on general release on December 2.
Main photo by Franck Ferville
