THE MAN IN THE ROOM

Paul Schrader’s new film, “Master Gardener,” completes a trilogy. But he wants to make one more

- ALEX ABRAMOVICH

Paul Schrader is seventy-six years old, compact, pugnacious. When production on his film “The Card Counter” was interrupted by the arrival of the pandemic, he took to Facebook and railed against the movie’s producers. “I would have shot through hellfire rain to complete the film,” he wrote. “I’m old and asthmatic, what better way to die than on the job?”

Last year, he came close to getting his wish. He was in New Orleans, working on his new movie, “Master Gardener.” First, the retina on his right eye detached. Without surgery, he risked damaging his vision permanently. Afraid he’d never get the movie off the ground if he stopped for an operation, he bought an eye patch instead. Then, in the middle of filming, he started gasping for breath. COVID tests came back negative, so he got a nebulizer and an oxygen tank. When production wrapped, he celebrated at Teddy’s Juke Joint, outside Baton Rouge. The next morning, he flew home to New York.

Schrader was living in a brown shingled house on the edge of a man-made lake in the Hudson Valley. Near the driveway was a greenhouse he’d built for his wife, the stage and screen actress Mary Beth Hurt. She and Schrader have two children, Molly and Sam, both in their thirties, and Molly, who was living in Queens, had come to stay with her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, while Schrader was on location. When he got back from Louisiana that night, his breathing was shallow; the next day, they had to call 911. He had contracted walking pneumonia.

He spent a week in the hospital, watching old movies on cable and posting to Facebook. “AMBIEN DREAMS,” he wrote, several days in: