by James Mottram
Paul Schrader is a veteran of Hollywood’s second coming – that now-golden 1970s period of filmmaking when the studios gave carte blanche to directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski and William Friedkin.
For his part, Schrader penned Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese before working with him on Raging Bull and, later, on The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead. In the midst of this, Schrader’s conjured a handsome directorial career of his own with films like Blue Collar, Light Sleeper, Affliction and, more recently, First Reformed, which saw him nominated for his first ever Oscar.
Now Schrader, 77, is back with the beguiling drama Master Gardener, starring Joel Edgerton as Narvel Roth, a reformed neo-Nazi working for Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), a society lady whom he must pander to in more ways than one.
Is Narvel a character that springs from you?
“I don’t think of this so much as a personal statement as a kind of fable of our times. A kind of ‘What if?’ story. This story that I’m telling in the movie is not very realistic. Could it actually happen? Probably not. But it is interesting to think about and to put yourself in that position, to say ‘What if?’ So, I don’t see Narvel as that personal. I see him more as an emblem. Certainly, we all have our racist buttons, but it’s not been something I fought with.”
What is your diagnosis of contemporary America?
“It’s not very good. It’s a rather bleak moment in U.S. history, and it could get much darker very soon. But looking across the globe, the U.S. is not uniquely in trouble this way. And I think the biggest differences are for a hundred years, the world has thought of us as a kind of beacon, a kind of enlightenment of democracy. And now the world has started realising that it’s very fragile in this country too.”
What does it take for you to get hooked into a story?
“Usually, I start with an occupational metaphor, some occupation, that has a richness to it. Whether it be a taxi driver or poker player; something that is more complex than it looks on the surface. Gardening can be many things to many different people. A right winger can say, ‘We’ve cut out the weeds’ and the left wingers say, ‘We would make the world bloom’. So, I start out with a kind of occupation, and then try to set that against a larger social issue, whether it be racism, or torture, or climate change. And then you’re just playing around, and you have an interesting character, and how they swim in this pond of a larger social issue.”
The character of Narvel is writing a journal, a conceit you’ve used in previous films. Do you keep one?
“I don’t keep one myself. I love the distancing device of it. And obviously, I’ve taken this from [Robert] Bresson, from Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest. Because it’s a way to separate what’s happening from what you’re seeing, because you’re hearing about it, you’re reading about it, and it creates a distance. Bresson famously would do multiple distances. The scene I remember from Pickpocket where he says, ‘I went into a large bank and sat down’. Now, you read those words in a diary, you hear him say that and then you watch him do it. Now you’re getting the same information three times. What does that do to you as a viewer? Well, that puts you in a kind of a distant space and in that space, you can start to play with viewers’ reactions. So, I use it to be distant.”
How is it to work with Joel Edgerton?
“Oh, wow, Joel is… he’s a director himself. So, he understands exactly what your needs are. But then, he also understands what his role as an actor is. So, he’s a great pleasure to work with. But I think in general, the era of actors behaving badly is receding, I think more and more. The actors who are now successful are successful because they are diligent and work hard. And the era of badly behaving actors, I think, is going away simply because nobody wants to hire them. We don’t need to hire them anymore. There are only about four or five in the world who can afford to be bad!”
And what drew you to Sigourney Weaver?
“Well, Sigourney… there aren’t that many actors in that age range that are still sharp, and there’s not that many roles. So, you come down to around ten people, and I had known Sigourney, but originally, Glenn Close is a close family friend and Glenn would always say, ‘When are you going to write a role for me?’ So, I did, I wrote a role for Glenn. And then she turned me down! Once she turned me down, I said, ‘Well, whose next?’ And Sigourney was the first up as the next one. So, that’s how it actually came about. I am actually glad it worked out this way because I got to know Sigourney, who’s very funny and witty and smart.”
After an Oscar nomination for First Reformed and success with The Card Counter, how do you feel about this late career activity?
“I think that I have accomplished what I set out to do. If I can accomplish some more, that’s good. But it’s a terrible thing to feel that you didn’t quite live up to what you wanted to do or wanted to be. And I felt that after First Reformed; if that was going to be the end, I had no problem with that being the end. And I’ve been able to do two films since. Hopefully another film after that. I look at other people’s careers, directors who have ended up doing things that they’re ashamed of or were lost. And I was almost at that point in my career. I had a film that was taken away from me, and it looked like that was going to be the end. And fortunately, I was able to pull it together. So, I will have a very good feeling about the arc of what I’ve done. I think even though many of my films are not big box office films, they do have what we call a shelf life, which is people kind of return to them. Whereas so many films come out, go away and are forgotten. I’ve been fortunate to be involved in a number of films that are still part of the conversation. A film like Taxi Driver is nearly 50 years old, and people still talk about it like it came out this year.”
You’re a very outspoken Facebook user. How come?
“As for Facebook… I started out as a film critic. A lot of my friends are film critics, a lot are filmmakers. And it’s a new way to kind of gossip and speak in a larger community and bring films and actors and books to people’s attention. And I know that if I’m reading Facebook, and some of the people who are my friends mentioned a film two or three times, I think I better go see that one. So that’s the real function for me. Critics can only help you so much… you have to rely on your friends who you trust. And if you’ve got fifty friends you trust and they start mentioning a movie, then you’re gonna go see it.”
As a critic yourself, how do you feel about the critical community now?
“Well, I mean, you can’t make any money and that’s a big problem. There’s more criticism than ever, in terms of words and blogs. If you go into Rotten Tomatoes, there’s hundreds of comments. It’s like everything else. When you had a handful of critics and a handful of movies, it was a much cleaner conversation. Now we have more movies than we can watch and more critics than we can listen to and none of them are making any money.”
Scorsese has been quite anti Marvel. What are your thoughts?
“I think you need to see every one once. I mean, I saw Star Wars. That was enough. I don’t need to see all the other Star Wars movies. And obviously Black Panther, you want to see it the first time because it’s important sociologically. But am I going to see Black Panther 5? No, I’m not. There’s just not enough nourishment there. So, I watched them out of social curiosity. Once you’ve seen Iron Man, you don’t need to see Iron Man 2. They are really designed for the mentality of people who read comic books, and I stopped reading comic books many years ago.”
How do you see the evolution of cinema going forward?
“In my film The Canyons, I was talking about theatrical cinema, which is more or less dead. It’s a niche cinema now, theatrical. And theatrical is like a fraction of what video games are. So, what we used to call ‘the movies’ is now similar to theater or opera. It’s a small section of the audio visual entertainment world. You certainly can’t be optimistic about theatrical. It’s only going to exist on the margins. And in terms of audio visual entertainment, there’s just an explosion. At any given time, there’s something like 500 films or TV shows being made – original scripted material. So, you can’t be pessimistic about that. I said to Scorsese once, when he was talking about preserving film, I said, ‘Why should we preserve film if we can’t preserve the people who watch it?’ And so that’s a larger issue.”
Master Gardener opens in cinemas on 7 December 2023
