• The 76-year-old writer-director is back at the top of his game.
• His most recent film “Master Gardener” stars Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton.
• Doctors are unsure if it is affecting his heart or lungs.

Few people believed that Paul Schrader would ever achieve the same level of success as his early screenplays for “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” but now, in his seventies, the writer-director is back at the top of his game.

His concern right now, when he presented “Master Gardener,” his most recent film starring Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton, at the Venice Film Festival, is if he will ever be able to do another.

“I can´t breathe,” the 76-year-old bluntly told AFP at the festival, visibly struggling. “I couldn´t direct a game of miniature golf right now.”

His strange ailment began earlier this year, just as he was finishing “Master Gardener.” Doctors are unsure if it is affecting his heart or lungs.

“When I got to hospital, it turned out I´d been directing for a week with influenza — at night in Louisiana,” he said. “I could be back in hospital tomorrow.”

In a love triangle with strong racial undertones, the movie centres on a gardener with a very troubling background.

“We don´t think of Paul Schrader as writing big parts for women. But he´s created, at this time in his life, two very red-blooded, women,” Weaver told AFP.

“It´s exciting but also difficult to watch,” she added.

“Master Gardener” completes a loose trilogy of films about tough, damaged men seeking redemption, which began in 2017 with “First Reformed” (amazingly, his first to earn an Oscar nomination) followed by “The Card Counter”, which also premiered at Venice last year to strong reviews.

“Certain directors as they get older, you feel their better work is behind them. But I was watching a guy who had one of his greatest works right there,” he told AFP.

“Like a lot of guys in my generation, we all wanted to be De Niro, Pacino… and Paul was very much one of the centres of that era. He´s an important guy to me, and then I get to work with him and that felt very special,” Edgerton added.

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