Long known primarily as the screenwriter of Martin Scorsese – from Taxi Driver at raging bulluntil At Open Tomb – in parallel with his career as a director, Paul Schrader enjoys the prestigious recognition conferred on his work as a filmmaker by the Mostra, via the Golden Lion of Honor which was awarded to him in Venice on Saturday 3 September. A distinction received when he also came to present out of competition, despite health problems, his latest film Master Gardenerwith Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton.
As often in the films of the American director of Blue Collar or in 2021 The Card Counter, already presented in Venice, it is about men haunted by the faults of their past, violence, paternity and an impossible redemption. The film tells the story of a gardener with a dark and extremely dark past, caught in a love triangle, against a backdrop of racial tensions.
“You don’t think of Paul Schrader as someone who would write great roles for women. But, at this stage of his life, he created two strong and sexual women”, observed Sigourney Weaver, interviewed by AFP.
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Whether Master Gardener takes up classic themes, Paul Schrader thinks that the racial question, which emerges as the film progresses, with a character who tries to overcome his past as a neo-Nazi without erasing all traces of it, can be burning today, “in our woke age where everything is judged by who might be offended”. He adds : “Maybe (the film) isn’t realistic, maybe it could never happen. But that’s what art is for. To create hypotheses.”
His last three films seem inseparable with their characters seeking redemption, to the point that one could see a trilogy in them. “When I started writing the third, a friend told me it was a trilogy. I said, no, not at all! But then I realized it was.”
If everything seems to smile to Paul Schrader from a professional point of view, the director is greatly diminished by a health problem that arose a few months ago, when he was finishing the filming of Master Gardener. “I can’t breathe, I couldn’t even run a game of mini-golf right now,” told the director to AFP, during an interview on the Lido at the Venice Film Festival. “I could very well be hospitalized again tomorrow.”
His illness has still not been precisely identified, the doctors not being able to tell him if it was a cardiac or respiratory pathology. Today, he fears that his professional horizon will darken when he fully tastes late recognition.
For decades, Paul Schrader has worked as a screenwriter for the greatest, from Martin Scorsese of course to Steven Spielberg (Dating of the Third Kind), Brian DePalma (Obsession), Peter Weir (Mosquito Coast) or Sydney Pollack (Yakuza). His first Oscar nomination – for best screenplay – dates back to 2019 only, for On the way to redemption (2017) with Ethan Hawke, a film released directly on DVD in France.
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Joel Edgerton, starring in Master Gardener, told AFP his longtime admiration for the work of Paul Schrader. “Like a lot of guys of my generation, I wanted to be De Niro, Al Pacino… and Paul was at the center of that time. He’s someone important to me. Working with him was something really special.” Paul Schrader is not one of these directors “whose best works seem to be behind them when they get older”, added the 48-year-old actor.
For the seventy-year-old filmmaker, the Golden Lion of Honor does not completely erase a checkered career, with its share of critical and commercial failures. Working today is totally different, he observes, however, because new technologies make it possible to lower filming costs, and therefore to free oneself from the constraints of the studios. “The good news is that anyone can make a movie today,” he points out. The bad, “it’s that no one can live off it”.