For a long time, he remained in the shadow of Scorsese, faithful screenwriter of Taxi Driver at raging bull. At 76, Paul Schrader finally acquires the aura of a great filmmaker, but confides to AFP that he is ill, and may no longer be able to film.
“I can’t breathe, I couldn’t even direct a game of minigolf right now,” the director told AFP during an interview on the Lido at the Venice Film Festival. “I could very well be hospitalized again tomorrow.”
His illness, which has not been precisely identified, the doctors not being able to tell him whether it was a cardiac or respiratory pathology, started a few months earlier, when he was finishing his last film, Master Gardener.
The figure of New Hollywood was however able to come to Venice, where the Mostra presented him with an honorary Golden Lion for his entire career, and where he was able to present, out of competition, Master Gardener with Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton.
As often in the films of the American director of Blue Collar or last year The Card Counteralready presented in Venice, 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.
“We 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.
Late recognition
It was not until very late that Paul Schrader, who worked as a screenwriter for the greatest, from Scorsese of course to Steven Spielberg (Dating of the Third Kind), Brian DePalma (Obsession) or Sydney Pollack (Yakuza), has achieved full recognition.
His first Oscar nomination (best screenplay) dates back to 2017 only, for On the way to redemptionstarring Ethan Hawke.
“Like a lot of guys of my generation, I wanted to be De Niro, Al Pacino… and Paul was at the center of that era. He is someone important to me. Working with him was something really special,” says Joel Edgerton.
Paul Schrader is not one of those directors “whose best works seem to be behind them when they get older,” added the 48-year-old actor.
Whether Master Gardener picks up on classic themes, Schrader thinks the racial question, which emerges as the film progresses with a character trying to come to terms with his neo-Nazi past without erasing all traces of it, may be burning today, ” in our woke age where everything is judged by who might be offended.”
“Maybe (the movie) isn’t realistic, maybe it could never happen. But that’s what art is for. To create hypotheses,” adds Paul Schrader.
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 that was the case.”
The Golden Lion does not completely wipe out a checkered career, with its share of critical and commercial failures.
Working today is totally different, he observes, however: 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 film today,” he says. The bad news is that “no one can live off of it”.