Lucca Film Festival to Honor Paul Schrader
Veteran director and screenwriter Paul Schrader will be honored at this year’s Lucaa Film Festival with a lifetime achievement award.
The Italian event, which runs Sept. 21-29, will also screen a retrospective of Schrader’s work, including Blue Collar, Hardcore, The Comfort of Strangers, Affliction, Auto Focus, The Walker, The Canyons, The Card Counter, Master Gardener, Mishima, and First Reformed.
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On Sept. 26, Schrader will hold a public masterclass at the Cinema Astra, attended by film students from various Italian universities. The following day he will receive the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
The director began his career as a screenwriter for Martin Scorsese with scripts to such classics as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver before stepping behind the camera for his 1978 directorial debut Blue Collar, a crime drama starring Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel. Schrader’s greatest commercial success came in the early 80s with films including American Gigolo (1980) starring Richard Gere, and Cat People (1982) with Nastassja Kinski. He celebrated a late-career revival with his “man in a room” trilogy, starting with 2017’s First Reformed, starring Ethan Hawke, which earned Schrader his best original screenplay nomination at the Oscars; and continuing with The Card Counter (2021) featuring Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish, and Master Gardener (2022) starring Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver.
His most recent feature, the literary adaptation Oh Canada, starring Richard Gere and Uma Thurman, premiered in Cannes.
Previous Lucca festival honorees include David Lynch, William Friedkin, Susan Sarandon, Isabelle Huppert, and Terry Gilliam.
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