Venice. Paul Schrader looks back on his 50 years in cinema: “I was very lucky”

Before the world premiere of Paul Schrader’s latest film, master gardenerAt the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, the legendary screenwriter and director was forced to reflect on his 50-year career in film. Next week, in Venice, the author will receive an honorary Golden Lion for his contribution to cinema.

At the start of the press conference, Schroeder was asked which of the films he had directed he thought best represented him.

“You know, directors like and dislike their kids for different reasons,” he replied. “It’s probably my favorite Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, just because it’s the most damn thing there is. I still can’t believe I made this movie. it’s the most personal for me first remodeled any Suffering. I think it’s the best stylistically. The comfort of strangers. cat people There is something special. You know, others, for other reasons. So I was very lucky. But I also made zeros, like all of us.”

Schrader added that creating art that will stand the test of time has increasingly become his concern. He explained, “More and more, movies seem to have an expiration date, and it’s very difficult with art: how do you give a film or a work of art an expiration date? How do you make a movie that makes people come back to see it 20 or 30 years later?

The director recalled a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen on the subject. “Bruce was very deliberate about it,” he said. “I would go into a song and erase certain lyrics so you wouldn’t understand them for two or three reads, all to improve the lifespan. Of course, you’ll never know until 20 or 30 years later if you were successful or not.”

Asked what aspect of his career he thought Venice would recognize with the Golden Lion for career achievements he will receive next week, Schrader pointed to the different phases he has had throughout his career. “I started out as a film scholar, became a screenwriter and then a director,” he said. “But I’ve also become something of a businessman, because how else can you make these weird little movies without a poor idiot like me with a beggar’s plate up my ass? So that alone is worthy of a Golden Lion,” he said, laughing at the crowd. “But I think that’s all for all these things.”

Raised in a strict Calvinist family in Michigan, Schroeder didn’t see a film until he was 18, but later became one of Pauline Keel’s critical protégés, writing movie classics. Transcendental style in cinema: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer At just 24 years old. By 26, he was broke and living in his car, writing a screenplay for what would become Martin Scorsese’s. Taxi driver. With this groundbreaking screenplay, Schrader gained access to Hollywood executives and sold his next screenplay to Sydney Pollack. yakuza (1974), for $300,000, a record sum at the time. He went on to write or co-write additional Scorsese classics. a brave bull, Christ’s Last Temptation s raising the dead. He made his directorial debut in 1978 with a crime drama. blue necklace (starring Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel) and has since directed 21 more titles, including his self-titled “Man in a Room Alone” stories. american gigolo (with Richard Gere) The one who sleeps in the light (Willem Dafoe), first remodeled (Ethan Hawke) and card counter (Oscar Isaac). He has compiled a collection of horror biographies such as the Japanese drama, MishimaIt is arguably the most original film ever financed by a major studio; Patty Heartst; s auto focus, the story of the horrific secret life and murder of 1960s TV star Bob Crane. He also wrote nearly a dozen screenplays for other directors.

At the end of the press conference, Schroeder was asked if he wanted to direct any of the scripts he had written for other directors.

“Well thank God I wasn’t driving Taxi driver, – The river. “I was arrogant enough to think I could direct it, and I could have been a career killer. Instead, I learned by looking over the child’s shoulder.”

Of his move to the director’s chair, he said: “It wasn’t so much that I thought my scripts were messed up. Maybe there were some things I could improve on, but there were some things I could get worse at. The truth is that I felt half human as an artist. I said to myself, “If you want to be a writer, be a real writer and make people read your words.” If you want to be a filmmaker, be a real filmmaker so people can see your movies.’ What is a screenwriter called? So that’s what took me from being just a writer to directing.”

Schroeder suggested this master gardener “A Man in a Room Alone” may be his last film. In a low-key but sensitive performance, Joel Edgerton stars as the new film’s protagonist, Narvel Roth, the meticulous gardener of Gracewood Gardens, the sprawling botanical estate of wealthy landlady Mrs. Haverhill, beautifully populated by Sigourney Weaver. When we first meet him, Narvel is as devoted to tending the estate’s beautiful grounds as his eccentric employer. But when Mrs. Haverhill demands that Roth hires his troubled niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell), a young black townswoman, as a new apprentice, her Spartan existence thrown into chaos, revealing terrible secrets of a violent and racist past. that could endanger everyone.

“Years ago I met a character who was sort of a product of European literature (Dostoevsky, Camus, Sartre) and ended up in the movies as a taxi driver,” Schroeder said of his method. “He was a new character in the movies and he’s been with us in the movies ever since. Sometimes I check. And as technology became available and budgets dwindled, I had more freedom. So I visited him three times in a row.”

According to Schrader, the biggest difference from the current character is that he has aged a little as a director and, consequently, the thematic interests in him have changed. “When I was young,” said Schroeder, “I would approach an older man like Peter Boyle (as Taxi driver) and say, ‘I have these terrible thoughts in my head. Now he’s an older boy and the young ones are approaching – an environmentalist (first remodeled), a boy who wants revenge (card counter), a girl from the city center (master gardener). It’s just the aging process and how that character developed.”

“I hope I’m done with him,” he added with a laugh.

Like all your Alone Man stories, master gardener based on the issue of deliverance – although the sins that need to be forgiven in the case of this film are provocative even to Schroeder. On the subject, the director said: “I don’t know if [the gardener, played by Edgerton] can be forgiven I don’t know if this story is possible: that you can be a white nationalist and be forgiven by a black girl in kindergarten. It may be a fantasy, but it’s a very interesting fantasy. And that’s what we do in art. We created these hypotheses that are worth thinking about.”