Josh Safdie, 41, is best known for the films he has made with his brother, Benny – frenetic chancer yarns such as Uncut Gems, Good Time and Heaven Knows What.
Last year, the brothers split and shot separate movies loosely based on real life sportsmen. Benny made wrestling drama The Smashing Machine, starring The Rock; Josh a loose take on the life of Marty Reisman, a shoe-store clerk in 1950s New York, who aspires to table tennis pre-eminence but must hustle to fund his passage to championships in London and Tokyo.
The film – whose score draws significantly from the 1980s – is A24’s most expensive yet and a major awards hopeful for its star, director and writer. It also features one of the wildest and most characterful supporting casts ever assembled, including David Mamet, Sandra Bernhard, high-wire artista Philippe Petit, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, the British-Indian academic Pico Iyer, Abel Ferrara and Tyler the Creator.
Gwyneth Paltrow has been lured out of retirement to play a faded film star, Kay, with whom Marty begins an affair. Meanwhile Kevin O’Leary – a Canadian entrepreneur known as Mr Wonderful on Shark Tank, the US version of Dragon’s Den – makes his film debut as her billionaire husband, Milton, with whom Marty shares a dynamic not unlike that between Guy Pearce and Adrien Brody in The Brutalist.
You’ve said that Marty represents the confidence, cockiness and ambition that America expressed in the postwar years. Who represents America today?
I think that the victory of the second world war really set aflame the idea of the American dream. That an individual can change the world. You can be anyone from anywhere and you can find glory and there’s a reason to your existence.
And then, in the 1980s, America was coming out of the defeat in Vietnam and the cultural and economic depression. So Reagan tried to resurrect the American dream. But this time, it was in quote marks. The 80s were the first postmodern era – and are really the most lasting era. You walk around and hear 80s music all the time. It was the last truly modern movement. It was then that capitalism won, the past began to haunt the future and the future was just revisiting the past.
What is happening now, because of the lasting effect of the 80s, is that the American dream – that quest for prosperity – is in double quote marks. And it might be even harder to achieve.
The film feels rooted in the postwar literature of Bellow and Roth; young Jewish men chasing to make their way in New York
These wide-eyed determined people who live with a sense of urgency, outside of time, are very attractive to me. I love Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? And Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was very influential. That chronicling of the Lower East Side, all these idiosyncratic singular characters living on top of each other in chaos. Me and [co-writer] Ronald Bronstein also read a lot of nonfiction books, which were not very well written. But usually, the worse the writing, the better – for film purposes.
Is there a type of anxiety innate to particular ethnic groups? Could you have made this story about a community that wasn’t Jewish?
I do think there is a certain unrest in Jewish culture. Not so much in the text of the Old Testament. But amongst the culturally Jewish there is a sense of constant rebuilding. The idea of ‘we might have to move at any moment’. It’s a nomadic culture that’s been moved around a lot. That impermanence is actually quite spiritual, but I do think there’s a latent anxiety in that lifestyle because of it.
Near the end of the film, at the Tokyo championship, Milton says he’s a vampire. What does he mean?
What we saw in Japan after the war was so unique: the way they embraced defeat after being such an intense – and pretty violent – culture. The war didn’t end for them until 1952, when America started to leave.
I thought: how fascinating that they used table tennis to come out of isolation. They invented this new bat, which they called the atomic paddle, and with it they obliterated everybody. It was the beginning of passive colonialism and carpetbagging and corporate colonialism and globalism. But there were a lot of protections to prevent American companies moving into Japan. Sony is called Sony because the [Japanese] founder heard GIs calling little kids “Sonny”.
A vampire is no different than someone who sucks the oil out of the planet. They’re a parasite who lives off hosts. Milton is a vampire. He’s a cold, corporate, capitalist colonialist. And they’ll be around for ever; I don’t see them going anywhere. There is an art to what they do – obviously a lot of destruction, too – but sometimes a beauty. That’s why I cast Mr Wonderful. Kevin is the asshole on that show; he’s the most crude. And he came up with that line vampire line, actually.
Marty’s friend and fellow ping pong champ, Béla (played by Son of Saul’s Géza Röhrig) tells Marty how, while imprisoned at Auschwitz, he came across some beehives. He covertly smeared honey all over his body and let his fellow prisoners lick it off him later.
That’s based on a true story. Alojzy Ehrlich was a Jewish guy from Hungary whose life was spared by Auschwitz officers who recognised him and his talents. He was a genius. Like a lot of these players: very high IQ. It’s peculiar the sport attracted a very eccentric type of person: smart, but got bad grades, couldn’t hold a job. But they could dispose of bombs [as Ehrlich did and Röhrig’s character does] and be at a hotel like this [Claridge’s] because they were international, and thought bigger. I learned more about the Holocaust in that little story than from some movies that are only about the Holocaust.
Milton is angry that he lost his son in the war and he thinks part of the reason why was defending the Jews. In his speech to Marty there is buried some sort of latent antisemitism. That’s his way of coping. I’m not someone who thinks the whole world is looking through that lens, though. I’m much thicker-skinned than that.
The honey-licking sacrifice contrasts with the vampiric sucking
Even more of a call to the vampiric is the shot of Marty and Kay in the hotel room. [Production designer] Jack Fisk would do silly things like put paintings around which evoked Transylvania and whatnot. Kay is literally biting the neck of young Marty. She’s trying to suck the youth out of this man and get his passion.
Do older people today do that?
There is more of an obsession with youth than there’s ever been. In our lifetimes, I think there will be ways to raise your life expectancy in rich countries by 50 years. And eventually immortality. And that’s scary. Because an end is very important. Narrative is important. Imagine sitting down to watch a movie with no run time.
I also fear electromagnetic catastrophe and the loss of everything. Some intelligent life-form finds this planet and we’re all gone: all of the hard drives are dead. Not that [aliens] would have any idea how to get the information off them. But things shot on film they’ll be able see. That’s why I shoot on film: it preserves.
How big a risk do you think that is?
I think if it’s a possibility, it’s gonna happen. Maybe an asteroid will hit the world first. This is all speculative and I’m a bit paranoid sometimes – but I have CDs I put tons of jpegs, photos of my childhood that I scanned on which are now gone, dead, no information. So I imagine someone can [easily] destroy a cloud farm.
There is an impermanence to life now. Someone once told me to collect the 20th century. It will be the most valuable, because it was the moment when we saw things change.
Marty Supreme begins at the moment of a child’s conception – we see sperm swimming towards an egg – and takes place over the next nine months. Is it a repudiation of the idea men don’t do much during pregnancy? And are men programmed, like sperm, to compete?
I think that men are lost and women have a very concrete understanding of a purpose for humanity. You see amongst the chaos of the sperm there’s one that’s like: I need to be the person. And then there’s the egg that’s just there. And if you look at the cosmos, those [eggs] are the planets.
When my daughter was born, she didn’t need her dad. She needed her mom and that bleeds into this strange existential malaise about what a father is. At one point Marty tells [his pregnant girlfriend] Rachel: “I have a purpose. And you don’t.” And that’s why she laughs. But the beauty of it is that his dream is of the egg, which forms into the [customised Marty Supreme table tennis] ball. And he ends up fathering his dream.
