Miramax Presents The Film That Lit My Fuse is a Deadline video series that aims to provide an antidote to headlines about industry uncertainty by swinging the conversation back to the creative ambitions, formative influences and inspirations of some of today’s great screen artists.
Every installment asks the same five questions. Today’s subject is Paul Schrader, whose latest film Master Gardener opens in theaters this weekend through Magnolia Pictures, after premiering last fall to strong reviews at the Venice Film Festival. It is the study of a man trying to shed a hateful past and it stars Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver. Here in Cannes, the big film of the festival that premieres tonight is Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese and Schrader have indelible and formative ties that go back to the 1976 groundbreaking drama Taxi Driver, and continued with Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ. Schrader, who began as a film critic, gravitated into directing, with work that includes Hardcore, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and The Card Counter to name a few. In a special installment of Film That Lit My Fuse that welcomes in the feature’s first sponsor, Miramax, Schrader explains the films that shaped his sensibilities and the ones that made him trade a critic career for one as writer/director.
