Josh Safdie has a thing about garbage. In the process of making his new film Marty Supreme, one of the first conversations he had with production designer Jack Fisk amounted to: What should the trash look like?
“Jack was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to make the perfect garbage,’ ” the director recalls.
He wasn’t wrong. For Safdie’s most expensive undertaking to date — as well as his first period film — the garbage on the invented streets of 1952 New York symbolized everything about how the filmmaker intended to make this movie.
“I had a herculean task of having to create the illusion of life. I was chasing the imperfection of humanity, so I had to first create the exactitude of life,” Safdie says. “If you see footage of Jack, he’s going around slicing shavings of carrots all over the street. You don’t see those carrot shavings, but you feel them — and the actors felt them.”
Marty Supreme signals a thrilling new chapter for Safdie, the director who made his name in a filmmaking partnership with his brother, Benny, on gritty features including Heaven Knows What, Good Time and the beloved Adam Sandler vehicle Uncut Gems. In this endeavor, he was alone in the director’s chair, as the siblings separated professionally some years back to make their own movies (Benny’s The Smashing Machine also came out this year). It’s no coincidence that Marty Supreme — the tale of a broke table tennis player driven to near madness to become the sport’s world champion — is the project with which he went out on his own.
Table tennis runs in the family for Safdie. Generations before him played it, leading to him finding the sport as a kid. “I really took to it, I think partially because of my ADD — in order to be a successful ping-pong player, you have to pay attention, and I found that the sport allowed me to do that,” he says. Years later, he was inspired by the rise of Marty Reisman, whose autobiography provided the seed for this wholly original saga and the fictional lead character, Marty Mauser. (The book was brought to Safdie’s attention by his wife, Sara Rossein, a researcher and executive producer on Marty Supreme.)
“I started looking at these intense young men who had these dreams that no one believed in, and it hardened them, and there was an urgency to them because if they didn’t get it done, life would wear them down and the dream would disappear,” Safdie says.
Uncut Gems was released around this same time in 2019. “When that film came out, I felt an intense hollowness,” Safdie says. “I cried when someone asked me what was next.”
Safdie actually started out as a solo director with the 2008 feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed. “I was 23, and I made it for no money, and it was being financed in a very strange way where it started off as a job — and then the person who greenlit it as a job left the company,” Safdie says. “But I was such an intense believer in everything that I did, even when everybody else wasn’t. That individualist pursuit — it allows the world to conform to the unreasonable man, as George Bernard Shaw said.”
This “conforming” evolved into genuine audience appetite once he and his brother started helming features together, with Ronald Bronstein always on board as co-writer and editor (Bronstein does both jobs again on Marty Supreme). Their work was defined by stressfully cascading plots, breathless energy and ingenious street-level filmmaking, both in the casting (led by Safdie’s longtime colleague Jennifer Venditti) and actual shooting locations. The movies blurred the lines between documentary and fiction.
“I’d go out into the real streets with my known actors like Adam Sandler, camouflaging them and putting them in scenarios with real people around them — and banking on the fact that these unsuspecting people would probably react in some way,” Safdie says. “I believe that passionate exuberance and persistence align together to make something quite infectious. But you have to have an obsessive passion over something because the job of a director is to transfer enthusiasm.”
After making 2017’s Good Time, Safdie met Timothée Chalamet at a party in New York and spotted an instant future collaborator. This paid off when he realized the movie that would follow Uncut Gems would need an actor of Chalamet’s star power, charisma and dedication — specifically when it came to the mechanics of table tennis training. Safdie isn’t one to take half measures, and fortunately, neither was his lead actor.
“It had to be written for the performers to memorize the choreography, and there’s this unknown thing: How are they going to do it? Will they be able to do it? So it helped knowing that Timmy is obsessed with precision and focus with the requirements of table tennis,” Safdie says. “But you’re leaving your trust in someone else’s hands in a way that is scary for me.” Safdie had never actually filmed sports or action sequences much at all, and they were to be Marty Supreme‘s kinetic centerpiece. This marked, like much of the film, uncharted territory. “The movie was so gargantuan and demanding that there was never enough to do,” Safdie says of the resources at his disposal.
To some degree, he is speaking literally. Marty Supreme is pricey. The sets built by Fisk traversed New York City and required the funding of a midbudget studio film (this is reportedly the most expensive production in A24’s history). Which brings us back to the meticulously designed garbage on the sidewalks. “The period element was the biggest fear — but also the most exciting and inspiring,” Safdie says. “Obviously, fear is about the unknown, and tackling the challenge of it seemed inspiring in a way.”
Some two weeks into shooting, producer Eli Bush approached Safdie with a smile. Safdie asked him what was so funny. “He goes, ‘It’s like you’re making a $20,000 movie. Your vibe is as if you’re making a small, independent film,’ ” Safdie recalls. “That is the mindset that I brought to it. I’m chasing this feeling that the movie is happening in real time. You’re watching it unfold as life unfolds.” Then, because of the stakes for this movie — both for Safdie and for A24 — Marty Supreme‘s life got interrupted. “You get jolted out every once in a while by a bond company showing up on set,” Safdie says with a laugh.
He’d get chided for long shooting days. “I’m like, ‘Well, I’m shooting this movie in 46 days. I promised we wouldn’t go one day over. I’m sorry I’m going to have to go late,’ ” he says. “But these presences, you can’t avoid them. You have to engage with them. You have to be polite, you have to show your appreciation.”
That perhaps is the greatest sign of Safdie’s growth as a filmmaker. After all, his trajectory from scrappy on-the-fly indies to a star-driven period drama reveals that the pipeline for rising great directors still exists — however precarious it feels in a time of industry consolidation and budget-crunching.
“Dreams and love are the two things that transcend time. Movies transcend time. When you’re in a theater and you can’t pause it, there is an incredible relationship with time that we don’t get to have in any other parts of the contemporary life that we live now,” Safdie says. “The film is a big dream, and I just hope that aligns with everybody right now. This became a vessel, for me, for dreaming and what it means to think bigger than where you are.” — David Canfield
Dead Man’s Wire
Gus Van Sant, the revered director of 18 narrative features over the past 40 years — among them such classics as Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Elephant and Milk — recently attended the Miami Film Festival’s GEMS event. There, he collected the event’s Precious Gem Award in recognition of his body of work, including his latest film, Dead Man’s Wire, and recorded an episode of THR‘s Awards Chatter podcast.
Dead Man’s Wire was inspired by a true story from 1977, but it feels eerily timely today. It centers on a working stiff (Bill Skarsgard) who feels that he’s been screwed by his mortgage company and abducts the son (Dacre Montgomery) of the company’s CEO (Al Pacino) — demanding restitution and an apology. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and, after a 2025 awards-qualifying run, will be released by Row K Entertainment in January.
During this conversation, Van Sant reflects on Dead Man’s Wire, which marked his return to feature filmmaking after seven years of working on fashion and TV projects, including directing several episodes of Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.
The underbelly of cities that have great wealth has been a theme in your work, particularly your films set in Portland. When you first came to Hollywood in the 1970s, it sounds like you were seeing people living out on the streets just minutes from mansions and movie stars, and that was your first inclination to direct a feature making that a part of the subject.
Yeah. I was one block away from Hollywood Boulevard. It was sort of where everything happened, where the post office was and where places to eat were and where the newspapers were. There were a lot of people that had come to find work, trying to figure out where they fit in. I think the numbers of sort of wayward people was well known. There was a history that people ended up in Hollywood, even starting in the 1910s, looking for work. And they were still coming and still being rejected and ending up wandering the streets of Hollywood and Hollywood Boulevard, in particular. You could see the stories around you. Alice in Hollywood was an early film that I made that was about a girl who comes to Hollywood from the Midwest.
Dead Man’s Wire is one of a handful of projects in your filmography that was written by somebody else. The film is set in 1977 but comes out in 2025 at the time of Luigi Mangione. What appealed to you about it? It’s certainly not the first time you’ve made a film about a little guy taking on the system.
It was a screenplay that had been developed during COVID by Austin Kolodney, a first-time screenwriter. He had been showing it around. There were a lot of different lower-budget companies that had read it and considered it. Tom Culliver, one of the producers, was interested in producing it, and they got it together with an actor and a director just within the past year and a half, and that team fell apart for different reasons. Cassian Elwes, the main producer that I knew that was part of the project, was somebody I ran into in a restaurant, and he said, “Hey, I have this story you might be interested in doing. We have to shoot it soon.” It was September. He wanted to shoot it in November and finish it before December. And I liked that challenge. All the Ryan Murphy things were done superfast. So I was used to working fast, and I kind of liked it. So I said, “OK, let me read it.” It was shooting in Louisville, where I was born, and I thought, “Well, I could learn more about Louisville, my birthplace.” And so I got a hold of it. And then I suggested Bill Skarsgard and Dacre Montgomery.
Where do you know them from?
I had never met either one of them, but I knew them from their films that I had seen. At times, I’d asked Bill to play parts and he would say, “Yeah, for sure, if it’s the lead, but if I’m not playing a lead, then I’ll play a bit part.” I never got him into anything, so I suggested them and Cassian said, “Fine.” We didn’t shoot in November, but we did prepare through November and shot at the end of December.
With a $15 million budget?
An undisclosed amount, but something like that.
What do you make of these weird real-world parallels?
At the time — it was September of last year — there was no Luigi Mangione, and there was no presidential election yet. So many things had changed while we were shooting that really brought into question all these different things that were in our film, and sometimes we were worried. It’s like, “Is this good or bad?” We weren’t sure, but they were timely. When we first showed it in February, I was a little curious about the mess, the sort of activity in the film and the mindsets in the film, that the audience that was going to watch it had really been hit over the head with a lot of different things that had happened in the past few months, but they laughed a lot. — Scott Feinberg
This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.