Paul Schrad­er: ​‘My movies are more on the wit­ty clever side than the drop-your-pants fun­ny side’

In Mas­ter Gar­den­er, Paul Schrad­er con­tin­ues his late-career cycle of ​“man in a room” films, about men who car­ry the sins of a nation, and work towards an increas­ing­ly unlike­ly, even mirac­u­lous redemp­tion. First Reformed​’s Toller (Ethan Hawke; priest com­plic­it in eco­log­i­cal des­e­cra­tion) and Card Counter​’s Tell (Oscar Isaac; pro­fes­sion­al gam­bler com­plic­it in Abu Ghraib tor­ture), meet Mas­ter Gardener’s Narvel Roth (Joel Edger­ton), an expert hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ist whose tor­so, con­cealed under anony­mous work­wear, is cov­ered with neo-Nazi tat­toos, traces of his for­mer life, under a dif­fer­ent name, as a mur­der­ous mem­ber of a neo-Nazi militia.

Roth has turned state’s evi­dence, dis­avowed his old ways, and turned over a new leaf as the head gar­den­er at Grace­wood, a plan­ta­tion turned botan­i­cal gar­den run with an iron fist by Mrs. Haver­hill (Sigour­ney Weaver). But Narvel’s monk­ish exis­tence is upend­ed by the arrival at Grace­wood of Maya (Quin­tes­sa Swindell), Haverhill’s trou­bled bira­cial grand-niece. Narvel and Maya form an unlike­ly bond, which seems to offer up an even more unlike­ly hope: that Narvel’s sins, a nation’s sins, can be redeemed, and a new kind of life can flour­ish in Gracewood’s soil.

To leav­en the seri­ous top­ics, let me first ask about the jel­ly­fish wall­pa­per [at Grace­wood manor]. I know, from read­ing your inter­views around First Reformed, that you like to have basi­cal­ly bare rooms, with one ele­ment of décor that draws the eye…

I was in an aquar­i­um in Van­cou­ver, look­ing at the jel­ly­fish, and I thought, ​“That’s real­ly cool, that would look great as wall­pa­per.” We made it. The think­ing was to get away from the stereo­type of the South­ern plantation.

I was curi­ous in part because in First Reformed there’s that eye­ball lamp in Aman­da Seyfried’s liv­ing room, which sug­gests T.J. Eck­le­burg in Great Gats­by, the eye of God look­ing down. I was hav­ing more trou­ble with the sym­bol­ism, if any, of the jellyfish.

No real sym­bol­ism! Just a sense of odd­ness. There’s an ele­ment of the film that’s a fable. Art can do var­i­ous things – art can say, ​“This is the way it is.” And it can also say, ​“What if it was this way?” So this par­tic­u­lar film doesn’t real­ly say that white boys can become tol­er­ant lovers of bira­cial peo­ple. But it does say, ​“What if? What if it was pos­si­ble to change?”

How hands on are you, in gen­er­al, with the respec­tive crafts departments?

That’s the director’s job. Whether the actor has his cuff but­toned or unbut­toned, whether there’s a speck of dirt on his hand or not, that’s your respon­si­bil­i­ty. At the end of a motion pic­ture, a direc­tor can sit in the edit­ing room and look at ten thou­sand deci­sions that were made instan­ta­neous­ly, and say, ​“Well, that’s who I am.”

One more bit of pro­duc­tion design I enjoyed in Grace­wood is the won­der­ful reclin­ing nude in the din­ing room, so that while Sigour­ney Weaver and Joel Edger­ton are hav­ing their very man­nered con­ver­sa­tion (and every­thing is wash­ing over them), there’s also this—

Well, it was the young Sigourney[‘s char­ac­ter]. That was the idea – the odd thing in this real­ly spare room is, she has a por­trait that she did when she was a teenag­er, of her nude.

How fun­ny are your movies to you, generally?

I think they are… More on the wit­ty clever side than the drop-your-pants fun­ny side. I have done a cou­ple films where every­body knew this was fun­ny. Like Auto Focus. You know, when those two guys are jerk­ing off to their own porn? That was fun­ny. It wasn’t rom-com kind of fun­ny, but it was funny.

I’m curi­ous as well about how you are as a direc­tor of per­form­ers. Egerton, as Narvel, like a lot of your char­ac­ters who keep diaries, deliv­ers a very neu­tral voiceover that seems to me to seep into the rest of the scenes. How do you like the oth­er actors to match or play off that? How do you get what you want out of them?

One thing I tend to say to actors: ​“You like to imag­ine your­self as a tree, dri­ven by the wind, stand­ing upright.” I said, ​“I want you to change that image in your head. You are now the coast­line. Sol­id rock. And the ocean is crash­ing against you. And it comes and it goes, and you don’t move. That ocean is some­times called day play­ers, it’s some­times called plot points, it’s some­times called wit­ty lines. But they will go, and you will stay.”

Richard Gere said to me at an awards cer­e­mo­ny for Ethan [Hawke], ​“How did you get him to do so lit­tle?” And then when I showed Card Counter to Joel, Joel replied, ​“Oscar [Isaac]’s real­ly good when he doesn’t do much!” And so then it was Joel’s turn. And now it’ll be Richard’s turn again.

Is this relat­ed to the idea of the film as a fable?

Yeah, that’s part of it, but it also goes back to the Bres­son­ian idea of the actor as a [blank] slate. It goes back to the notion of iconog­ra­phy — the dif­fer­ence between an ear­ly Chris­t­ian icon and a Renais­sance tor­tured saint.

I wish I had had time to rewatch Blue Col­lar before this inter­view. [In Schrader’s 1978 direc­to­r­i­al debut, autowork­ers Har­vey Kei­t­el, Richard Pry­or and Yaphet Kot­to rob their cor­rupt union, but their alliance is test­ed by mutu­al sus­pi­cion.] I’m curi­ous how you view it now, its take on racial ani­mus, its rela­tion to ideas about hatred, cap­i­tal­ism, and to the dis­cours­es of the 1970s.

I think it was either Carnegie or J.P. Mor­gan, one of the two, who said, ​“I could pay half my work­ers to kill the oth­er half.” [The pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal quote ​“I can hire one half of the work­ing class to kill the oth­er half” is most often attrib­uted to a third rob­ber baron, Jay Gould.] I think that’s true.

That reminds me of Mas­ter Gar­den­er. There’s a con­tem­po­rary school of thought that, let’s say, ​“cul­tur­al­ly con­ser­v­a­tive” work­ing-class white men and young women of col­or are actu­al­ly unit­ed by com­mon class inter­ests, and have more in com­mon than not; if they could just put aside their his­to­ry and dif­fer­ences, they could fight the real enemy.

That’s the fable, isn’t it? But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t real­ly work. When you get down to the basics, the moment Don­ald Trump says Oba­ma wasn’t born in Amer­i­ca, you see the divide. Peo­ple know Oba­ma was born in Amer­i­ca, but they want to believe Don­ald Trump because they don’t like Black people.

This leads into some­thing we touched on ear­li­er. I’m curi­ous how you’re feel­ing about mem­o­ry these days. Because to make this fable, the film has some inter­est­ing ideas about for­get­ting and for­giv­ing. Narvel has to erase him­self, change his name, to redeem himself—

On the oth­er hand, he doesn’t take those tat­toos off, because he has to remind him­self that that’s who he real­ly is. He keeps the tat­toos cov­ered, no one sees them, but he sees them every day. He says in the nar­ra­tion, ​“I wear my past on my skin every day.” That was the think­ing behind that — beside the fact that remov­ing tat­toos is nev­er entire­ly suc­cess­ful and is also painful and expen­sive — that he made the deci­sion that he will not let any­one see them, but he will see them himself.

Do you have any tattoos?

No. Not a one. First of all, it was a sin, in my back­ground, to des­e­crate the body. And then, when I came to Hol­ly­wood, the slo­gan was, ​“tat­toos, you lose,” because peo­ple who had tat­toos didn’t get cast, because it was too much work to cov­er them up! Now, of course, the whole ethics have total­ly changed. I’ve worked with Nic Cage a cou­ple times and you have to spend a half hour every morn­ing cov­er­ing his tattoos.

To speak to the metaphors of gar­den­ing, I’ve always had a the­o­ry that some rich peo­ple like breed­ing ros­es because it’s a way that you can still do eugen­ics, and breed for traits—

Well, gar­den­ing is the old­est metaphor there is. We were born in the gar­den and then a snake showed up and we were thrown out. It’s the most pri­mal metaphor of humankind. What I was drawn to, as an occu­pa­tion­al metaphor, was the fact that it can be seen in two dif­fer­ent ways. At the begin­ning [of my career], I was able to get some mileage out of what you per­ceive of as a taxi dri­ver, and what I thought was actu­al­ly there. It’s the same thing we have here with the gar­den­er: you per­ceive him as a car­ing stew­ard of hor­ti­cul­tur­al life… but as his for­mer boss said, ​“we’re gar­den­ers; we pull out the weeds,” mean­ing we pull out the Black people.

So when Narvel is explain­ing Lin­naeus and tax­on­o­my, I def­i­nite­ly had the thought, ​“Oh, this a guy who has thought a lot about biol­o­gy and breed­ing before now.” But that’s not what he empha­sizes; despite the fact that he’s nar­rat­ing the film, and ana­lyz­ing as he goes, not all the metaphors in the movie are on the lev­el that Narvel per­ceives and expli­cates himself.

That’s a lit­tle game I play, and I’ve been play­ing it for quite a few years. You use nar­ra­tion to lull peo­ple. Oscar Isaac tells you how to count cards, he tells you what games to play, he tells you the secrets of pok­er — none of this mat­ters one whit, he’s just dulling you to the nar­ra­tion, so that, in the same voice, he can also slip in some­thing that needs to be said. And the same thing you have here, is, Narvel talks about the his­to­ry of gar­dens, when they all come to bloom and all that. That’s all just… gib­ber­ish. But he’s telling you that so that he can all of a sud­den then slip in the notion that I wear my past on my skin every day. If he didn’t cov­er it with all that cam­ou­flage of seem­ing­ly irrel­e­vant nar­ra­tion, it would be naked and offensive.

And the end­ing quote, which comes from a book by Pene­lope Live­ly, is just about… gar­dens! It’s not any­thing pon­der­ous about race rela­tions or any­thing, it’s just what we use gar­dens for. They can mim­ic nature, or they can rede­fine nature.

Mas­ter Gar­den­er is released in UK cin­e­mas on May 27.