Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Venice Film Festival has begun, with world premieres including Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, Pablo Larraín’s Spenser, Edgar Wright’s Last night in Soho, and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. I’ll be talking about as many of them as I can here on the podcast. But to start off, I thought I would talk with Paul Schrader, whose his new movie The Card Counter has its world premiere in Venice before its U.S. release on September 10th. Oscar Isaac plays a quiet gambler haunted by his time as a military interrogator at Abu Ghraib. He gets taken on by a gambling recruiter played by Tiffany Haddish, and befriends a strange young man played by Tye Sheridan, who has some scary ideas. I talked with Schrader a little about Venice (where he set his 1990 film The Comfort of Strangers), and about finishing The Card Counter in a pandemic, Tiffany Haddish’s vital importance to the movie, gambling, and of course the last movies he saw.

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Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets

Photo by Steve Snodgrass