HIGH STAKES

Following his first-ever Oscar nomination for First Reformed, Paul Schrader returns with The Card Counter, casting Oscar Isaac as a pro gambler with a dark, military past. Total Film puts all its chips on a chat with the director and his cast.

-  JAMES MOTTRAM

It’s 10am. The patio at the Hungaria Hotel on the Lido is buzzing with guests, staff, and film-industry types attending this year’s Venice Film Festival. In a quiet corner sits Paul Schrader, the famed writer of Taxi Driver and director of such celebrated films as Blue Collar, Light Sleeper, and Affliction. His last film, 2017’s priest-led drama First Reformed, earned the 75-year-old the first (very overdue) Oscar nomination of his career for Best Original Screenplay.

Now he’s back with The Card Counter, a brooding gambling drama with a darkly political undertow. “I was looking at professional gamblers on television, thinking it’s such an interesting way to spend your time,” he recalls. “Because all you’re really doing is running numbers. Card counting if you’re playing blackjack. Odds, if you’re playing poker, and you’re just waiting… waiting for that hand that occurs two, three times a day where two players think they’ll win and both go all in.”

Schrader’s scripts are often driven by “an occupational metaphor”, he says a taxi driver, a drug dealer, a minister, or gigolo. This time, it was the gambler. “I thought this is a kind of purgatorial occupation. Neither alive nor dead through grifting.” From this, the seeds were planted for William Tell, a card sharp who strategically bets low at casinos to avoid detection. Every bit as tightly wound as Taxi Driver’s Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle, he too is mentally scarred by wartime conflict.