Paul Schrader plants a seed in action drama Master Gardener

In the new action drama Master Gardener, stoic Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton, Zero Dark Thirty) quietly tends the grounds at Gracewood Gardens for the estate’s owner, rich widow Mrs Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver, Call Jane) while occasionally also tending her lady garden (cough cough). But a serpent slithers into this Eden when Mrs Haverhill saddles Narvel with a young apprentice – her troubled and rebellious orphaned grandniece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell, Anna in Euphoria S1 episode 7, Laila in In Treatment S4). Maya’s arrival shakes up everything, unbuttoning Narvel’s troubled past and exposing who he was before he arrived at Gracewood.

Stream Master Gardener on Showmax now.

From seed to story with Paul Schrader

Master Gardener’s creator Paul Schrader – writer-director of The Card Counter, director and executive producer of There Are No Saints, and the writer of Robert De Niro’s greatest roles, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull – has made a career out of spotlighting disillusioned men who use violence to “fix” society, when they feel that it isn’t giving them the respect and privilege that they’re entitled to. “The character first evolved with Taxi Driver (1976), which was an outgrowth of the existential hero of European Fiction,” reveals Paul.

The seed of an idea

These lone wolves’ jobs, which they carry out while brooding over the injustice around them, are a jumping off point for Paul as a storyteller. “Whether it’s being a gigolo (American Gigolo, 1980), or a drug dealer (Light Sleeper, 1992), or a gambler (The Card Counter, 2021) or a gardener, it’s about finding a rich metaphor,” says Paul. “Gardening is a particularly rich metaphor, both positively and negatively.”

In Narvel’s story, we find out during a flashback that he was part of a white supremacist murder gang whose job was to “rip out the weeds”. As Narvel lectures about gardens, the character reveals that he now imposes his will on the world in a much more benign way: “Gardening is the manipulation of the natural world. A creation of order, where order is appropriate. The subtle adjustments of disorder, where that would be affected … Gardening is a belief in the future. A belief that things will happen according to plan. That change will come in its due time.”

Paul also uses gardening as a metaphor for the danger of planting dangerous things, as Narval admits to Maya, “Given the right conditions, seeds can last indefinitely. I wear mine on my skin everyday.”

How to grow an idea

“It started out with gardening, much like how The Card Counter started out with gambling. But this was only the start of the creative process,” says Paul. “I started asking why this gardener is such a recluse? From there I thought about the Witness Protection Programme, and again you ask the question, ‘Why is he in the programme?’ This mutated to the idea that he was a gun-for-hire for white supremacists. Asking these questions meant his isolation became completely understandable. As his handler tells him, ‘You’ll never be free from this shadow,’ which is echoed when he says that he wears it on his skin every day in the form of tattoos.”

While Paul acknowledges that Master Gardener is growing in the same ground he’s planted in previous films, he explains that the result keeps changing: “You must create a different social ambience with each film, and then start moving the characters around slightly. It’s all about finding new wine for your skins.”

A new cross-pollination

Narvel’s story grows intertwined with two other figures who contain echoes of Paul’s previous women characters from Taxi Driver. “Here you have a man caught between two women, one old enough to be his mother, the other young enough to be his daughter,” says Paul. “I thought that it would be interesting to see what would happen if Cybill Shepherd’s character, Betsy (a political worker, played by Cybill at the age of 26), had coffee with Jodie Foster’s Iris (a 12-year-old sex trafficking victim).”

What does it say, then, that a former white-supremacist in his 40s like Narvel has sexual relationships with both women – the older white landowner, and her younger, mixed-race grandniece? “We no longer accept the idea that a 55-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman is a perfectly normal arrangement,” admits 77-year-old Paul. “I wanted the age gaps of the characters to add to the unease of the situation. Age, race, and gender made for a good narrative triad, where all the corners of the triangle meet in different ways as they explore the subject matter.”

Time and place

While the film’s plans to shoot in Australia were scuppered by the pandemic, a change of scenery played perfectly into he dynamic between a male white supremacist, a female landowner with inherited wealth, and the younger mixed-race relative she wants trained as a labourer to make her “worthy” to inherit the estate.

Master Gardener’s production moved to Louisiana, where filming had to be timed to coincide with a time of year prior to the big blooming season. The great house in the film, Gracewood, is an amalgam of two former Louisiana plantation houses. Greenwood (a reconstruction of the original mansion that was built in the 1820s by the Barrows family, whose fortune depended on the labour of the 275 enslaved people who worked their sugarcane plantation), and Rosedown (built in 1835, and the source of one of the biggest cotton growing fortunes in the US before the Civil War, thanks to the forced labour of 444 enslaved people). Both estates have since been transformed into botanical gardens.

With Master Gardener, Paul Schrader offers a glimmer of hope for his existential antiheroes. In Narval’s words again, “It's so simple when it begins. You don't ask why? You forget how it started. One day leads to the next, the seeds of love grow, like the seeds of hate.”

Stream Master Gardener on Showmax now.