Oscar Isaac on Working With “Punk Rock” Paul Schrader on ‘The Card Counter’

Oscar Isaac in ‘The Card Counter’

Courtesy of Focus Features

Oscar Isaac, fresh from HBO’s Scenes From a Marriage and the big screen’s Dune, focused on another new project, Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter, during a recent Q&A following an American Cinematheque screening of the gambling drama at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre.

The 42-year-old actor poked fun at the 75-year-old Schrader, saying, “Dude’s old — he’s up there. And not the healthiest guy, either. Some of the sounds that come out of him, [makes you wonder], is that a warthog?”

Jokes aside, Isaac said he was grateful to experience the precision of a Schrader set. “The dude was so energetic and so razor-sharp. He just knew what the movie was and what the movie wasn’t. We shot it in 20 days, and we didn’t have the luxury of three takes. It was basically one, two and done. The mixture of trust that he had in us and at the same time, the precision, that was really astounding,” Isaac explained. “Working with a guy that is so punk rock, he’s old-school but subversive in the way he approaches this stuff. He fucks with an audience. He knows what you want and he’s like, ‘Not going to give it to you.’ Being a part of that, for me, was really so exciting and really felt like, and it sounds dramatic, breathing again.”

To play a traumatized ex-con fresh from military prison who turns to gambling, Isaac met with card experts, took a penmanship course and read a book suggested by Schrader called The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. “[The role] was such a gift because there was so much behavior to explore,” Isaac said. [Trauma] is really at the heart of this whole story.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Dec. 1 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.