The legendary writer and director discusses his latest 'man in a room' existential thriller, how his creative process was disrupted by the COVID pandemic and why he doesn’t like to 'let audiences off the hook.'
) or even a reverend — alone, waiting for something to happen. And the film begins to turn when this something happens. I’ve toyed with the possibility of doing this for the female but somehow it always ends up male. In my previous film,, the man alone runs into a kid who needs help. But ultimately that kid is too far gone, and the character’s progression continues after the kid has left the picture. InOscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish in ‘The Card Counter.
It’s a kind of non-life. You’ve been in a casino. You’ve seen people sitting there at the slot machines. Today, you don’t even have to pull the arm anymore. You can just sit there and watch the digital graphics roll by. It’s a deadening. It’s a kind of purgatory. So I thought to myself, “What kind of man doesn’t want to live but doesn’t have the courage to die? How would he fill his time?” So in this case, poker came to me first. That’s a great occupational metaphor for not being alive.
But the truth is, I do my research. I’ve never driven a taxi cab. I’ve never thought of myself as a gigolo. I’ve never been a minister or a professional card player. I’ve never even really been a society fly on the wall. The next guy I’m writing is a horticulturalist. So now, in order to write that script, I had to study horticulture. Believe me, it was a lot easier to study poker than horticulture.
But then, of course, you always start to want to play around a little bit once you have your rulebook. You have to do a few odd shots every now and then to remind the viewer of what you’re up to. I remember when we were shooting, I said to the DP, “Hey, do we have any rail in the truck?” And he said, “Yeah, we have rail.” And I said, “Let’s lay some rail for this shot.” He was all confused: “We don’t move the camera on this film.
But the lens we used is so wide that the only person the lens doesn’t see is the camera operator. By doing it that way, we were able to do both those shots in a day. It was strange for the actors because to get a close-up with it, the lens has to be probably two and a half, three inches away from their face. I was joking with Willem [Dafoe] about it, and he said, “I don’t think I ever did a shot before where I couldn’t see anything except the lens.
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