There are some lovely casino sequences in the film, with all the hands shot like in this Bresson-ian way. I’m interested in how you researched them?
Yeah, there is that mixture of close-ups and tableaux, but it isn’t just Bresson, that’s Sergio Leone.
Really there’s not much to do. We had a guy, Joel Stapleton, who is an announcer at tournaments, it’s what he does for a living. You can learn everything there is to know about poker in a couple days. It’s luck. You don’t have repetitive champions. Nobody wins five years in a row. There’s no Venus Williams in poker. So, it’s luck, there are some rules but they’re not that complicated. Whereas the next one, I could spend two lifetimes researching horticulture and still not know everything. When I do a film about gardens they have to be right.
What stage are you at with ‘Master Gardener?’
We have to shoot end of January, so we’re under the gun already. I’ve gotta re-write the script, I’ve gotta reread it on the way over. Ethan and Oscar wanted to do it, but that character is an ex-thug, bit of a muscle guy, so I’m doing it with Joel Edgerton. He’s the main gardener. It’s a private garden estate, open to the public one day a week, a historic garden, 100 years old, stuff like that. He’s in the witness protection program and this is how he kind of disappears. He has a little cabin where he lives and where he works, a new identity a new look, but then events conspire.
“First Reformed” came after a few challenging years. You had this fiasco with “Dying of The Light.” Can you go into it a bit?
I learned a hard lesson there. In our new world of financing, somebody like me needs final cut. I didn’t need it when I began but I need it now. just too many people financing movies who just don’t know, don’t care, literally don’t care. You can see on ‘Card Counter,’ there are 18 executive producers, people I never met, and they all gave money and didn’t have any say. Martin Scorsese with “Silence” had sixty, six-zero [laughs]. That’s the new economics of trying to do something serious.
Was it a similar experience to making “Dominion?”
I got suckered into this “Excorcist” prequel that Frankenheimer was gonna do. It was already up and running but Frankenheimer died unexpectedly, and it was offered to me. I was warned against it, people said to me “these are not good people. These are bad people.” Everything they do ends up quarrelsome, ends up with bad blood. Obviously, a director is an alpha creature, full of hubris, so I said I could handle it. I couldn’t handle it. So, I learned my lesson twice, hopefully that was enough.
There is so much discourse around your work these days, do you often read reviews of your own films or some of the stuff on Twitter?
I mean you sort of read them like this [holds the phone at arm’s length], the better they get the closer it gets, the worse they get…
I’m not on Twitter. I’m on Facebook, you can sort of compose a thought more there, if you have something you thought about that you think might be interesting, rather than Twitter where you start breaking it up into 120 characters. Then of course there’s TikTok, which is Facebook for the illiterate. [Laughs].
You were recently asked to take a hiatus from your Facebook page. What happened there?
Well, I can understand that. Focus Features is the company that released ‘Card Counter,’ right around the time they were releasing “Stillwater” with Matt Damon. And Matt Damon gave a perfectly harmless interview where he made some remark that he had used the word “f*ggot” earlier in his life and his daughters had pointed it out to him. And all of a sudden there was the opportunity to put the three words, “Matt,” “Damon” and “f*ggot,” in the same sentence. And of course, click click click click.
Focus was furious. They said, we’re doing all we can to promote this film and we lost two full days, because for two days it’s all people are talking about. And there’s no way to really stop it, because all these reviewers are just looking for that, and you can stumble into it without really knowing you’ve stumbled into it. Like you can say something relatively harmless like, “Kevin Spacey is a good actor,” or, “Harvey Weinstein changed the face of our industry,” and he did, and people are like, “how dare you.”
You spoke earlier about a resurrection…
There’s a line John Huston says in “Chinatown,” “Whores, building, and politicians. They all get respectable if they last long enough.” You can say the same thing for artists if you just last long enough.
I’m curious, do you think we are starting to see a return to a more provocative cinema in general? Eroticism, for one, seems to be coming back. Cannes this year was notably horny.
There was a time when you could actually go to the movies to see naked people but that’s long gone. In fact, they’ll tell you that often nudity works the opposite. People will say: if I wanted to see nudity I’d hit some keystrokes. Also, actors and actresses are much more reluctant now, you would think they wouldn’t be, but in the past, they would do some nudity in a film and the film would be gone. Now nothing’s gone. Now every scrap of nudity they’ve done in their career, you put their name next to nude on Google, and boom, there it is.
Where you’re seeing it come out is on episodic TV, where even still it’s kind of forbidden. So “Game of Thrones,” or “White Lotus,” though it’s still kind of forbidden fruit. The buzz on that film out of Cannes [“Titane”] was— I mean don’t want to say anything about a film I haven’t seen but I have to admit—reading about the film after it won [the Palme d’Or] I thought: I suppose I have to see this.
“First Reformed” introduced a new audience to your movies. They clearly continue to stand out for people, even from your contemporaries in “New Hollywood.” Why do you think that is?
A lot of that had to do with the fact that so many directors of my generation, Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola, Spielberg, were really influenced by the movies they saw as kids. I never saw any movies when I was a kid, so I came in at college level, basically the European cinema of the ‘60s, so my reference point was always a little bit different than the traditional film school Hollywood.
Growing up in that community, were you aware of films in any way?
No, I didn’t know anyone who saw films. The standard church thing was: well this Disney film, there’s nothing objectionable about it, but it’s an evil industry and therefore the money for the films that are not offensive goes to the ones that are!
You’ve mentioned having only seen 30 films or so by the time you met Pauline Kael. Was that an advantage in some way? Why do you think she took such a shine to you?
I mean it was an advantage in the sense that I was focusing on certain films. I was in my third year of college. I’d started to go to the theatre but mostly I was going to serious movies and 16mm art-house stuff at the film clubs. I was programming stuff like that.
That was kind of just what she did at that time. She had a whole group, always young men, particularly the first group, and she read everything, and she tracked everything, and so she was able to place people because she had a reputation of knowing all the young writers. So, a publication would call and say they had an opening and ask if there was anyone she would recommend. And that’s what extended her power base, because she could call you up and say, “We should really get behind ‘La Chinoise.’” So she was always on the lookout for someone who was a keeper in that way. I guess I impressed her.
“The Card Counter” is available now on Digital, On-Demand and DVD/Blu-Ray.
[The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity]