Following the success of the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, the siblings were drawn into different directions ultimately as filmmakers, Benny gravitating toward the Dwayne Johnson MMA project Smashing Machine and Josh, along with the duo’s scribe collaborator, Ronald Bronstein, to an original tale of a post World War II global ping-pong champ in Marty Supreme.
On today’s Crew Call, Josh Safdie makes it clear that there’s no bad blood between him and his bro. “People always want drama,” he tells us. He also explains what happened to the brothers’ 48 Hrs. redo at Paramount.
Marty Supreme lit up like a Christmas three this past weekend with a near $146K, the best theater average YTD and post Covid theater average from a 3-day of $875K at six NYC and LA theaters. The pic further expands this week on Christmas.
Marty Supreme was a confluence of several ideas, i.e. an autobiography of table tennis champ Marty Reisman, post-World War II colleagues who Safdie’s great grandfather use to hang with.
“All these misfits, guys with high IQs who did terribly at school or were dropouts; super serious dreamers who would bet on who could throw a peach pit higher on Broadway and 52nd Street,” he says. This in addition to “deep rooted psychological places” that spur from the minds of Josh Safdie and Bronstein.
Safdie, left, with Chalamet
At the center of the Reisman story, Safdie says, “there was a man who had a dream that no one believed in, he was a pathological dreamer. And there was a subculture, which is always an interest to us because subcultures are usually indicative of a grander culture in some way in their rejection or in the rejection of their culture.”
The duo talk about the casting of the project, down to Kevin O’Leary who plays the antagonist pen baron Milton Rockwell who sponsors Timothée Chalamet’s Marty to a tabletop tennis championship in Japan. While O’Leary might appear to have slipped out of the seams of a John Cassavetes movie, it’s his first time on the big screen after a career as a self-made entrepreneur, and Primetime Emmy winning producer and co-host of ABC’s Shark Tank.
“In the casting process you’re looking to align the character with the essence of that person. Kevin is the epitome of the American dream. He’s almost the performative sense of the American dream. He represents cold corporate, cruel capitalism,” says Safdie.
Many of the characters in Marty Supreme certainly come with their warts and all.
Says Safdie, “No one in this film is spared from humility, This film is about control and no one has control of their own lives. They’re all being led by this invisible force. And I think that makes the characters malleable in a sense of relatability.”
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