Filmmaker Paul Schrader revealed some of the details of his next project at the New York Film Festival during the Q&A for his beautiful and more optimistic new film, “The Master Gardener.” During the discussion with NYFF’s Dennis Lim and the film’s stars Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver, Schrader said his next film would be about a “trauma nurse working in Puerto Rico.” But as he detailed, in his conversation about “The Master Gardener” and the so-called God’s Lonely Man trilogy that includes “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter,” this vocation, trauma nurse would just be the “occupational metaphor” used to hide what the film is really about.
“I’ve always been interested in this type of particular character,” Schrader explained about what is entailed in the God’s Lonely Man trilogy characters, noting that it also includes his “Taxi Driver” protagonist. “It’s someone who has a self of guilt, self-punishment, he’s done wrong, and he could make some kinds of amends through sort of self-sacrifice; this goes all the way back to Travis Bickle. So, [‘The Master Gardener’] is an iteration of that form which has a more life-enhancing conclusion.”
“These are stories about a man in a room, alone, wearing a mask—the mask is the occupation— and he’s waiting for something to happen,” Schrader clarified. “So you’re always looking for a mask that has a resonance that people don’t associate with it.” The filmmaker used “Taxi Driver” as the analogy, describing how people used to associate Taxi drivers as “garrulous best friends,” but in actuality, he saw it as the “black heart of Dostoevsky…riding through this yellow coffin in the sewers of the city.”
In fact, Schrader suggested this new film would be a tetralogy, the fourth film in this new Bresson-ian method, but said, “Critics love trilogies, they hate tetralogies, so I better call it a trilogy. If I call it a tetralogy, they’ll get angry at me.” The difference, he said, to somewhat separate the fourth film from the three that came before it would be turning the “him into a her,” echoing comments he recently made where he suggested his next protagonist would be a female because it was time to “write about what you don’t know,” he said of turning the “write what you know” phrase on its head.
“So, I’m trying to write about this character again, but I’ll have to step aside, and it’s time to make him a her,” he revealed “It’s [about] a trauma nurse in Puerto Rico.”
In “The Master Gardener,” the occupational metaphor is that of obviously a highly disciplined and committed gardener, who is rigorous in his knowledge, study, and dedication to the field, a master in horticulture, botany, etc, and a prototypical Schrader character. However, the film, as in all the films in his God’s Lonely man trilogy, is a metaphor, in this case, a film really about how easily the seeds of things like hate and or love can take root, and how the nature of rebirth, as all plants go through, can grow into a spiritual revival that can also take form as redemption.
So, while we know the mask of the next film, what it’s about and who will star is anyone’s guess at this point. Although, we could see familiar names giving him ideas. Schrader said Ethan Hawke (star of “First Reformed”) and Oscar Issac (the lead of “The Card Counter”) gave him the idea of Joel Edgerton starring in “The Master Gardener.”
Sigourney Weaver also noted that “The Master Gardener” gives two fantastic roles to women, one for Quintessa Swindell, who co-stars in the film, and herself.
“I was immediately intrigued; Paul is a titan,” Sigourney Weaver said, describing why she decided to work with Schrader when asked during the Q&A. “Even though he’s written wonderful parts for women, he had written some part of this for me. And I was so astonished by the script. It was so dense but so sparse. It has no transitions or explanations. It’s so mysterious, and I was really blown away by it. And the character of [my character], Norma took my breath away, I had never come across a character like Norma, and so I thought ‘wow, this is fabulous.’”
“The Master Gardener” has no distribution yet, but it’s a terrific film, and if can somehow use its energy to slingshot itself into a similar, but new Paul Schrader with a rare female protagonist, hell, who isn’t interested in that?