Paul Schrader, 75, has lived through almost five decades in the center or in the margins of American cinema, and well deserved the name of “veteran”, since his first feats of arms in the mid-1970s, a mythical era of which he remains. one of the privileged witnesses. His twenty-second feature film, The Card Counter, looks at another kind of veteran, this time encamped by an Oscar Isaac all in internal tension: a former torturer of the Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, reconverted into a professional card player, and dragging his guilt of a casino the other, in the four corners of America.
How would you sum up the subject of “The Card Counter”?
This is one of those movies that I love to make that has to do with a job, like Taxi Driver [réalisé par Martin Scorsese sur un scénario de Schrader], American gigolo or On the road to redemption [dont le protagoniste est le prêtre d’une petite église réformée]. So many films about men who define themselves by their occupation. Underneath it, a deeper unease is buried. It can be a personal or societal problem: global warming, as in On the road to redemption, the midlife crisis, as in Light sleeper, or the loneliness of young men, as in Taxi Driver. In The Card Counter, it is an indissoluble guilt, because it is linked to the fact of having taken part in the crimes of one’s own country.
Filming was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. How did you deal with this difficulty?
We had shot three quarters of the film when the lockdown came. Six months later, we were able to grab a few days and finish the film. Despite the hiatus, it was interesting, because most of the time, in a low budget independent film, you don’t have any wiggle room. But this time, I was able to start editing, thinking about the scenes I still had to do. It gave me the opportunity to show the assembly to Martin Scorsese [crédité comme producteur exécutif] and ask him, “Marty, what can’t I see?” How can I resume and improve? “
Your hero is a convict turned card player. But the America he crosses is filmed like a large open-air prison.
All casinos in the world are alike. In Macau or Atlantic City, it’s always the same damn thing. They are all plunged into a sort of eternal twilight. It’s like a life in limbo, a world where the hero is neither completely dead nor quite alive. He wanders the gambling halls, which are like a purgatory. It keeps him busy. Like in poker: you just wait. It’s a good metaphor for existence itself: waiting for something to happen.
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