From the first step when I went in, it felt harrowing," Piyalak Kingkaew, an experienced emergency worker heading the first responder team, told Reuters. "He started shooting, slashing, killing children at the Uthai Sawan daycare centre," Paisal said. Haddish had her own thoughts on the ending and why La Linda is drawn back to William.When he did not find his child there, he began the killing spree, Paisal said. So if you do things like that - it makes people, it stretches their imagination.” Most people don’t think of prison as home. And that’s something I do quite often - use a thing how you don’t expect it to be. “So often it is with these characters - and as Robert Been, the songwriter, sings at the end, ‘just trying to find my way back home’ - and in case prison is a metaphor for home. So it’s not unusual for people who escape one prison only to go in search of a new one, because they’re not ever going to be home until they’re back in prison. Now I don’t believe that, but that’s how I was raised. My background, you know, John Calvin referred to the human body as the prison house of the soul and this whole notion that your body is a prison and you need to escape it.
On what draws him back to the ending and imagery of “Pickpocket,” Schrader said, “It has this idea of returning to your cage. It has its origins in Robert Bresson’s 1959 film “Pickpocket,” which Schrader has referred to as “the most influential film in my creative life.” That image of two people who fate keeps apart separated by a jail cell is one Schrader has used before in “American Gigolo,” starring Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton, and “Light Sleeper,” starring Willem Dafoe and Susan Sarandon. Though their fingers cannot fully touch, they are connected. Separated by the glass of a visitor’s booth, she puts her finger up to the glass that separates them and he matches her gesture. So I don’t see it as dark characters, I just see them as typically complex and contradictory as we all are.”Īt the end of the film, William Tell is in prison and La Linda comes to visit him. And so you’re always looking for people who act and think in contradiction, and so you’re always driven to the darker side because people try to portray themselves as one thing when in fact they’re something else and vice versa. ‘So much I hit her again,’ that’s even more character. “You know, ‘I loved her so much I hit her.’ That’s character. “Contradiction is the heart and essence of character,” said Schrader. Schrader and Haddish participated in a recent virtual screening event for The Times, where the filmmaker addressed what draws him back to the harrowing material of his grim morality tales.
Whether William will allow himself to move forward is a source of tension throughout the film. He was a guard-turned-torturer at Abu Ghraib prison and even after having fulfilled his jail sentence for those crimes, he still feels the weight of an accrued karmic debt he may never be able to pay off.Ī manager named La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) takes an interest in him as a player and perhaps more, while William also intersects with Cirk (Tye Sheridan), the son of a soldier William served with.
His latest film “The Card Counter,” now playing in theaters, stars Oscar Isaac as William Tell, a gambler existing in something of a self-imposed purgatory, drifting between small-stakes casinos and anonymous motel rooms. From the screenplays to “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” for Martin Scorsese to his own films as director such as “Hardcore,” “American Gigolo,” “Light Sleeper” “Affliction” and “ First Reformed,” Schrader has gone right for the dark heart inside of men and swallowed it whole.
Spoiler warning: The following story includes details of the last scene of “The Card Counter.” For less spoiler-y content check out our review and interview with Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish.įor nearly 50 years, writer and director Paul Schrader has been unsparingly examining the dark side of human nature.
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