Being politically correct is kind of boring,” Paul Schrader tells me. It’s a mantra the director and screenwriter has lived by throughout his nearly 50 years of movie-making – years that have made him cinema’s supreme chronicler of male angst and existential anguish. Troubled men crop up in most of his films: the glossy sex work thriller American Gigolo (1980), the erotic horror Cat People (1982) and the neo-noir Affliction (1997).
When he was 26, he wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) – he’d go on to write or co-write Scorsese films including Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) – in the process creating the ultimate movie anti-hero, the lone wolf Travis Bickle played in such blistering fashion by Robert De Niro. Fifty years on, Schrader remains as preoccupied as ever with masculinity at its most twisted. In his most recent film, this year’s Master Gardener, the main male character is a horticulturist with a white supremacist past.
