The Safdie broth­ers’ guide to shoot­ing New York City

Josh and Ben­ny Safdie are inde­pen­dent sib­ling film­mak­ers who were sud­den­ly launched into the lime­light on the back of a rogue email from secret super fan Robert Pat­tin­son. Their bleak, abra­sive por­traits of life on the mean streets of New York City tick­led his fan­cy, and so he became the star of their fan­tas­tic new fea­ture, Good Time, about a tena­cious crook’s spi­ralling descent into hell. Here the broth­ers talk about treat­ing New York as if it’s a char­ac­ter in the movie, but a char­ac­ter they have cast (like many of their actors) off the street.

Josh: ​“I just saw Gre­ta Gerwig’s movie Lady Bird and it real­ly gave me an enlight­ened sense of the sub­ur­ban plight and the entrap­ment of New York City. It’s a film which looks at this the idea of what New York means in an icon­ic sense. Being born and raised with­in the bub­ble of New York, it’s very hard to artic­u­late what it means as an out­sider. So I can’t real­ly speak to it. It’s real­ly just region­al for us. I’m always more inter­est­ed in region­al cul­ture than I am in cor­po­rate or nation­al cul­ture. If you focus on a region­al lev­el, it’s always going to feel more human. There’s more room for error, there’s more room for voice. So, in a way, we’re very region­al film­mak­ers. But as the say­ing goes, the micro can be the macro, and New York hap­pens to be one of the most diverse places in the world, so the micro real­ly is the macro in a sense. ”

Ben­ny: ​“The direc­tor Thom Ander­sen made this doc­u­men­tary called Los Ange­les Plays Itself, and there’s a sec­tion in it where he talks about how New York has the very unique dis­tinc­tion where you can take a square foot, or one square metre pho­tographed, and at most nine-out-of-10 peo­ple would be able to iden­ti­fy it as New York, regard­less of any land­marks. In a weird way, the city has been syn­the­sised by its past. There’s a soul in every­thing that exists there because it’s been pho­tographed so much and so often.”

“I think that when a lot of movies shoot in New York, the unions and all the sched­ul­ing and what have you real­ly demand a cer­tain lev­el of con­trol over the city and what makes the city be a city. So what you see is a lot of films close down streets and have extras who pre­tend to be pedes­tri­ans. When you start doing things like that, you start suck­ing the soul out the city. Even though Good Time is a way big­ger movie than any­thing we’ve done before, and we did have to close down streets at times, when we didn’t close down a street we would tell our cor­rec­tion assis­tant that nor­mal pedes­tri­ans can walk through. And our AP is like, ​‘Well, what hap­pens if they’re in the shot?’ Well, then they’re in the shot, that’s what hap­pens! Part of what it means to live in a city, par­tic­u­lar­ly New York, is that you have to make do with what you have in front of you, so we don’t want to ever cut that out.”

Josh: ​“When it comes to the city, we embrace its move­ment and its unpre­dictabil­i­ty. You can look at New York as a very pre­dictable place. If you look at it from above, it’s just block by block by block. But we’re just try­ing to get to this idea of the expe­ri­ence of the city, where there are peo­ple lit­er­al­ly five feet in front of you try­ing not to bump into some­body else. ”

Ben­ny: ​“Our loca­tion and our cast­ing also feeds in to this. We called our loca­tions man­ag­er a cast­ing direc­tor for loca­tions because we did this thing where, in the open­ing cred­its, we give a street-cast­ing cred­it. Some­one said to me, ​‘I’ve nev­er even heard of that before, why is it in your open­ing cred­its?’ and I said because it’s kind of the most impor­tant part of our process. We’re not look­ing for the actors who are respond­ing to the back page, we’re look­ing for the actors who are liv­ing the character’s lives. Some­times they just don’t even know it. That’s like not shut­ting down the street on a con­cep­tu­al lev­el – you’re bring­ing the street and real life to film.

“Take some­one like John Cas­savetes, who does kind of the oppo­site. He takes actors and turns them into real peo­ple. My point is that I think what the audi­ence responds to is the vivid­ness, the feel of the city. They’re see­ing it through this region­al cul­ture, and this loca­tion, and through its peo­ple. The peo­ple are cast out of the city, they’re not brought in. Apart from Barkhad Abdi and Jen­nifer Jason Leigh, they’re all local actors or peo­ple liv­ing their lives and we’re trans­plant­i­ng them into the film. You’re respond­ing because, in an anthro­po­log­i­cal sense, you’re look­ing to paint a por­trait of a place. I nev­er real­ly under­stood doing it any oth­er way.”

Josh: ​“At the same time, the way you’re get­ting access to these peo­ple, the moment you get into con­tact with them is when you start fol­low­ing them. Because you’re see­ing peo­ple as you would in real life. So even though it’s a façade, because it’s a fic­tion­al film, you know that this per­son is com­ing in at this point for a rea­son. It still feels like I’m just pass­ing by and fol­low­ing this per­son from now on; now I’m going to have to study him. You’re going to learn about him, in real time almost. Every­thing works from the top down, pro­duced from the bot­tom up. Every­thing has to feel inte­grat­ed. That’s how we cap­ture a city.”

Good Time is released in cin­e­mas on 17 November.