Mon­ey on the Street: A Con­ver­sa­tion with the Safdie Brothers

Josh and Ben­ny Safdie are a cou­ple of real Noo Yawkahs, so much so that they don’t even pro­nounce the term that way. They grew up fer­ried between Dad’s in Queens and Mom’s on the Upper West Side, devel­op­ing an infat­u­a­tion with Gotham’s grit and eccen­tric­i­ty that has informed their vivid body of work.

The broth­ers’ world teems with crooks, addicts and sleaze­balls – off-colour char­ac­ters such as deluxe jew­eller Howard Rat­ner, the anti­hero played by Adam San­dler at the heart of their lat­est and great­est film, Uncut Gems. Draw­ing from mem­o­ries of their father’s work in the Dia­mond Dis­trict, the leg­end of enve­lope-push­ing Jew-Über­men­sch Al Gold­stein and a life­long pas­sion for pro bas­ket­ball, they’ve made the rare Big Apple movie that feels as hec­tic and relent­less as the city itself.

LWLies: With so much loca­tion shoot­ing in the heart of Mid­town Man­hat­tan, how did you make it all work, espe­cial­ly get­ting a star like Adam San­dler in and out?

Josh Safdie: As ear­ly as nine years ago, I start­ed try­ing to devel­op a rap­port with some­one in the Dia­mond Dis­trict, and even­tu­al­ly I did. Through some kind of barter deal – our lawyer told us recent­ly that he found the old con­tract – we designed him an Uzbek-style lounge for the pent­house of one of the Dia­mond Dis­trict build­ings, and he gave us six months of free rent in the area. In our mind, we looked at that loca­tion as ​‘on location.’

When we got to scout­ing, it became a night­mare: ele­va­tors on Shab­bos stop­ping on every floor, all sorts of dif­fer­ent stuff. A logis­ti­cal mess. So we aban­doned that, and decid­ed to build every­thing in Howard’s office and show­room on a stage. And the chal­lenge there – I’m gonna get to your ques­tion – was how to bring 47^th Street to our stage on Long Island. We end­ed up just bring­ing peo­ple from the actu­al street to come hang out, and our cast­ing direc­tor found a lot of the right peo­ple to pop­u­late the set­ting and give the walls life.

Take that idea on this metic­u­lous, obses­sive lev­el, and apply it to get­ting Adam San­dler and Eric Bogosian on a busy street cor­ner. It was a man­date from the begin­ning for Amy Lau­rit­sen, our first AD, that we would nev­er close down a street. Ever. She had done that on Suc­ces­sion, maybe some oth­er TV, and she was aware of how some­thing like that works. There are ways of doing it – peo­ple with sand­wich boards, that’s part of it.

Ben­ny Safdie: We also had a cer­tain num­ber of SAG extras there on the ground, and that turned out to be a pret­ty big deal, because we had to go through and pick each of the peo­ple in the back­ground one by one. Who would be on this block at this time? It was an inter­est­ing process of fig­ur­ing out the faces; any­one who walks by could have their face in the frame at any moment, since we’re not going to block it. You accept that if they’re there at that moment in time, they’re meant o be there, even if they’re an eye­sore or doing some­thing wrong.

JS: The way we shoot, we try to mix in with the ener­gy of the street as much as pos­si­ble. On 47^th Street in par­tic­u­lar, it was dif­fi­cult. There was one scene we had to cut out, which end­ed up being fine, it wasn’t work­ing anyway.

Is that where the set pho­to of Adam San­dler chas­ing a woman in fish­nets came from?

JS: When you write a 170-page script, and intend on keep­ing up a break­neck pace, you know ahead of time that not everything’s get­ting on screen. When we start­ed out, we had the gen­er­al shape of a three-hour movie. Our first act, in New York after Ethiopia, was real­ly com­pli­cat­ed, with an entire char­ac­ter arc that had to go. Pom Kle­men­ti­eff is in the movie for five sec­onds now, but her char­ac­ter was more impor­tant. She was some­one who took some­thing from his apart­ment, and the cred­it sequence where Julia Fox gets him to come to bed, that was orig­i­nal­ly sev­en pages long. The first edit had it at six-and-a-half minutes.

BS: Going back to the loca­tion shoot­ing, we’ve always left our side­walks open for peo­ple to walk through, but we had a sort of pro­tec­tion this time. The more back­ground play­ers you have, the more passers­by think it’s nor­mal. If peo­ple are just walk­ing around on the street instead of form­ing a crowd, every­one acts fine. Peo­ple took us for a con­struc­tion site, because the work moves so quick­ly with­out mak­ing a scene. We’re doing every­thing on walkie-talkies instead of bull­horns or loud­speak­ers; no big partitions.

In terms of bud­get and stars, this sounds like a big­ger oper­a­tion than you were both used to. With the way you describe your meth­ods, a lot of which involves strip­ping pro­duc­tion down to the essen­tials, how do you scale up?

BS: When [DP] Dar­ius [Khond­ji] saw Good Time in Cannes, he came to us and said, ​‘If you want to lev­el up, I want to be your guy.’ We got along with him. We did a short film for Jay‑Z togeth­er to get a feel for the col­lab­o­ra­tion, because we’d heard that he does, like, 12 set-ups a day, and we’re used to some­thing in the mid-twen­ties. So we did ​‘Mar­cy Me’, and it was by far the most hec­tic shoot I’ve ever been a part of. I was in a heli­copter for most of it. Just pure may­hem, but Dar­ius was like this Zen cen­tre to it. His art­form is light. He said, ​‘Josh, frame the film, I just want to light it and give my opin­ion on lens­es.’ That was awesome.

He also helped bring the right crew on board, peo­ple who’d under­stand the vibe. We made it clear when we were inter­view­ing assis­tant cam­era oper­a­tors that we wouldn’t be using marks. We warned them, ​‘You’re going to have to shoot anamor­phic lens­es, low-angle, two to three inch­es of lee-way to stay in the right depth of field.’ Dar­ius told us, ​‘Your movie’s going to be out of focus. You know that, right?’ We need­ed the best AC, and we found this guy, Chris Solano, who told us about the cult sur­round­ing this piece of equip­ment called the Light Ranger 2. Kubrick was obsessed with it. He used it a lot on Eyes Wide Shut, but the tech­nol­o­gy wasn’t quite there yet. It looks like this giant thing on a tri­pod attached to the cam­era. But it’s real­ly just a field that inter­prets your frame and breaks it down like The Matrix, with all these mov­ing graph bars, and the AC has to inter­pret them and fig­ure out how to lock the field in. It’s real­ly, real­ly hard.

BS: There were times when his video feed would go out, but Chris would still be work­ing the Light Ranger just by feel­ing it. He couldn’t even see the lev­els, but he was like Neo, he’d just know where the graph bars were intu­itive­ly. His tal­ent allowed us to get away with not using marks. Chris was a mas­ter, and we had a sec­ond cam­er­ap­er­son named Olga who was also total­ly great, but then we also need­ed a third AC for some splin­ter unit stuff we were doing. That third one wasn’t so good at it, and we instant­ly realised how valu­able Chris and Olga were. Smoke was spring­ing out of the guy’s ears – doing this prop­er­ly is that difficult.

JS: Dar­ius under­stood the type of pro­duc­tion that we want­ed this to be. We talked about 360-degree light­ing. We talked about Cas­savetes. We talked about this Francesco Rosi film, The Moment of Truth – incred­i­ble movie, shot in Tech­nis­cope, informed a lot of the Passover seder sequence. Cri­te­ri­on lent us their screen­ing room to watch it with some of our crew.

I devel­oped a new appre­ci­a­tion for real­ly good below-the-line tal­ent on this one. Mia Neal, who did hair for the pro­duc­tion – I always thought hair was impor­tant, and I respect when it’s done well in a movie, but she showed us that it real­ly is an art. She recre­at­ed The Weeknd’s hair­style from 2012, and made Julia look like she’s her own pre­cious gem in every scene, and found the per­fect shade of black to dye Bogosian’s hair because he’s just the kind of guy who dyes his hair. Spec­tac­u­lar job, and she took so much pride in it. Gave us a note at the end of pro­duc­tion that made me cry, along with a bot­tle of cham­pagne that’s still in my refrigerator.

Not a cham­pagne guy?

JS: No, it’s just like, I get super­sti­tious about cham­pagne and cig­ars. I nev­er feel like it’s time to cel­e­brate. When­ev­er you think you should start cel­e­brat­ing, some­thing hap­pens. I’ll be, like, 80 and open­ing my fridge to find five or six cham­pagne bot­tles and a box of cig­ars I’ve nev­er touched. And even at that point, I’ll be think­ing, ​‘Would drink­ing all this cham­pagne at my age be invit­ing death?’ Insa­tiable kind of thing.

You men­tioned that you’d shot all of Howard’s office on a set. What’d you do with the six months at the place on 47^th, then?

JS: We end­ed up using the build­ing, and the good faith with that guy. It’s, uh, okay. Okay. Let me tell you about 47^th Street: we pro­duced a doc­u­men­tary called Everybody’s Street, about street pho­tog­ra­phers. We were kind of involved in the edit, too, and we met this amaz­ing pho­tog­ra­ph­er named Bruce Gilden. We were shoot­ing some B‑roll with him near 47^th Street – this was about eight years ago – and I had already begun research of the cul­ture there. I sug­gest­ed we get some footage of him shoot­ing on the street, and he was like, ​‘No, I can’t go there, some­one fought me last time I took a pic­ture there.’ I was like, ​‘Ah, just try it,’ and sure enough, the sec­ond he steps on 47^th with a cam­era and snaps one pho­to, we’re being pret­ty much attacked. A guy’s threat­en­ing to smash all of our faces in. It’s a lit­tle bar­bar­ic, only because privacy’s so impor­tant. They don’t want peo­ple get­ting pho­tos of what they have. It’s also the most well-armed street in the tri-state area. Our Dad worked there when we were kids, but the only mem­o­ries I have of that come from his storytelling.

But my point is that I want­ed to get into this as an adult, and found that I couldn’t get a point of entry any­where. There was one build­ing, 25 West 47^th Street, that this guy Joe Alishaev owned. He believed in us, after we showed him some pho­tos of us with celebri­ties. This was before we met Rob [Pat­tin­son], by the way. We had to give him print­outs of our reviews in the Times to prove that we were legit­i­mate. ​‘LeBron talked about our movie!’ Stuff like that. After long enough, he took a shine to us. We nev­er real­ly spent mon­ey apart from the deal that our loca­tions man­ag­er cut with him direct­ly. Joe had this may­oral pres­ence on the block, where he let every­one know we were okay and intro­duced us to every­one. If he told anoth­er jew­eller that we were okay to shoot in his shop, the guy would let us, on the under­stand­ing that Joe would owe him a favour. It was hard to ingra­ti­ate our­selves with every­one, but once we did it was huge­ly helpful.

Plus, we have Sephardic Jew­ish roots, and a good por­tion of the Bukha­ran com­mu­ni­ty is Sephardic too. Slow­ly, real­ly over the course of a decade, we built up trust. Then we brought them Adam San­dler. Sud­den­ly, all the doors blew right open. Sandler’s such a men­sch, so every­one was gen­er­ous with their time, let­ting him trail them. They realised we were inter­est­ed for the right rea­sons, gen­uine rea­sons. By the time we got to shoot­ing on 47^th, we were basi­cal­ly accept­ed by the block as a whole.

BS: We had a loca­tion scout just for 47^th. We had a cast­ing team fan­ning out just to find back­ground peo­ple for 47^th. We ran into one of them and start­ed talk­ing about some­thing or oth­er, and Cat with the props depart­ment walks by at the same time hold­ing a back­pack con­tain­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars’ worth of jew­ellery. She knows she’s hold­ing onto a bunch of $75,000 watch­es, and she’s try­ing to act non­cha­lant. She’s trail­ing this guy, Izzy, who’s mak­ing a cus­tom ring for San­dler for the movie. Then the set dec­o­ra­tor comes out of nowhere, shout­ing, ​‘On the eighth floor of this place, we found the per­son who sells all the scales for weigh­ing out jew­els! It’s a gold mine!’ It was like we had our own tiny com­mu­ni­ty inside of this oth­er tiny community.

Was it always going to be Adam Sandler?

JS: 2010, we start writ­ing the script. 2012, me, Ben­ny and Ron­nie [Bron­stein, co-writer and co-edi­tor] were try­ing to fig­ure out who could play this Al Gold­stein-like Jew, who we revered in his hero­ism and fear­less­ness and humour. We all loved Adam San­dler, grew up on him. It had to be him. We went to him, hav­ing just fin­ished Dad­dy Lon­glegs, and his team passed. Didn’t even get to him. So we thought we’d make Howard old­er, and we start­ed talk­ing with Har­vey Kei­t­el. We had a Passover din­ner with Amar’e Stoudemire and Har­vey Kei­t­el in 2013. Harvey’s amaz­ing – he’s Har­vey – but we just thought the part wasn’t quite right for him. We went off and did some oth­er stuff, and after fin­ish­ing up Heav­en Knows What in 2015, we came back to the idea.

Hang on – you went to a Seder with Har­vey Kei­t­el and Amar’e Stoudemire?

JS: Oh, we organ­ised this Passover din­ner! Or wait, was this a Shab­bat dinner?

BS: It was a Passover dinner.

JS: No, I think it was a Shab­bat that was just near Passover.

BS: It was Passover! I remember.

JS: You’re right, yes, that’s right. But yeah, Amar’e had let us host at his house, and we had invit­ed Har­vey and his wife and son. It was a real­ly nice din­ner, hon­est­ly. He loved the script, he’s a great actor, but Howard shouldn’t be that old. He’s got­ta be late for­ties. We end­ed up talk­ing with Sacha Baron Cohen for a while. He did a table read that went real­ly well, but then he was impos­si­ble to pin down. Once Scors­ese got involved as an exec pro­duc­er, Jon­ah Hill got inter­est­ed, and we start­ed think­ing about mak­ing Howard younger. We both thought he’s a great actor, but with the age his kids need­ed to be, it didn’t make sense. That col­lab­o­ra­tion fiz­zled out once he went to go direct his own movie. So now we’ve fin­ished Good Time, it hasn’t pre­miered yet, and still we don’t know what we’re going to do for the next one. We go to Cannes for Good Time, and Adam Sandler’s there with The Meyerowitz Sto­ries, and we’re dying to get a meet­ing with him.

BS: But he’s with his fam­i­ly, doesn’t real­ly know who we are, gives us the polite brush-off off. ​‘We’ll do it anoth­er time,’ he says. We didn’t real­ly blame him. Then he saw the movie and he flipped out. Final­ly he calls us ask­ing if we’ve got any­thing for him. We’re like, ​‘Well, there’s this one thing we sent you five years ago…’ He asks us to send it to him and reads it with­in three hours. He was a lit­tle scared at first, but [pro­duc­er] Scott Rudin ordered us to get on a plane to LA and talk to him.

What’s the pitch?

JS: From the begin­ning, we made it clear that we love Howard. He does things that may be quote-unquote ​‘unlik­able,’ but we love him. You can’t help but root for the guy. We weren’t shy about how obsessed we were with his stand-up records, either. On Good Time, when­ev­er we were stand­ing around wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen, I’d say, ​‘I’m hit­ting the record but­ton now!’ in the voice of his char­ac­ter Bar­ry Lakin, who’s in ​‘Sex or Weightlift­ing’. He found out we were seri­ous fans. To me, there’s real­ly no dif­fer­ence between Hap­py Gilmore and Punch-Drunk Love. Only he could do it.

BS: He has this abil­i­ty to inter­nalise the most absurd prob­lems and make the audi­ence care. Even in a ridicu­lous sce­nario, you’ll believe that this man has to over­come it and suc­ceed, which is exact­ly what we need­ed for this movie. We felt a close­ness to him. It was his idea to play up Howard and his fam­i­ly, which I’ve come to realise is real­ly impor­tant. He want­ed more with the wife and kids. That allows the audi­ence to under­stand Howard a lit­tle better.

JS: One thing we vac­il­lat­ed on a lot was the girl­friend. Was she a secret? Does the wife know about it? When San­dler got involved, he pushed us and Ron­nie as writ­ers to show that the mar­riage had begun to fall apart before this rela­tion­ship start­ed. The wife knew about it, and it both­ered her, and he had too much pride in sav­ing the fam­i­ly to actu­al­ly talk to the kids about it. He’s drag­ging his feet through the split. That gave us a lot, and came from Sandler’s push­ing. But he did let us know ear­ly on, ​‘I want to do your movie.’

So much of Howard’s life involves get­ting him­self out of the cor­ners he’s paint­ed him­self into. Does that mir­ror the process of scriptwriting?

JS: The scene where Howard shows up in his auc­tion, looks in the cat­a­logue, sees his gem in it, and just kind of sighs to see some­thing he’s worked so hard on list­ed with a price – that’s our lit­tle metaphor for mak­ing small inde­pen­dent movies. Weird­ly enough, the cost that they esti­mate for the gem was $200,000, and that’s the exact same bud­get as Dad­dy Lon­glegs. That was sub­con­scious, but it was cool how that turned out. You sweat over some­thing, it unlocks truths in your life, you see so much mean­ing in it, to you it’s price­less, and then you release it. It goes to a fes­ti­val. It’s in a pro­gram, and you’re one of one hun­dred titles. Maybe crit­ics say it sucks. No offence! Crit­ics are valuable.

But all this takes some of the air out of you. A per­son spends all this time cre­at­ing some­thing, and then it’s out in the world, and it’s just an object. You ask how much of Howard’s strug­gles resem­ble our own; the movie can stand in for our process itself, but I don’t want to harp on that too much. I remem­ber that Rocky was orig­i­nal­ly about a screen­writer, and every­one was like, ​‘Dude, nobody wants to see that, let’s make him a box­er!’ All the same, we can see our­selves in these oth­er peo­ple. If he’s not a writer, he’s a box­er. If he’s not a box­er, he’s a jew­eller. It’s a transference.

BS: When Howard gets paint­ed into a cor­ner, clear­ing a way out is the fun. Everything’s so con­nect­ed that chang­ing one thing means chang­ing every­thing. You pull on one thread, and the sweater comes apart. The heli­copter ser­vice, Blade – that’s a screenwriter’s dream when you need to get some­one from A to B and don’t know how. When we were in talks with Joel Embi­id, we took a copter from New York to Philadel­phia. We start­ed hear­ing rich peo­ple say it: ​‘Hop on a Blade!’ The high­er up you go eco­nom­i­cal­ly, the clos­er you get to teleportation.

JS: The vestibule that locks from both sides, that’s the first thing you expe­ri­ence when you vis­it one of these dia­mond shops. You realise you’re enter­ing a place of max­i­mum secu­ri­ty, to the point of para­noia. The split sec­ond between the first door lock­ing and the sec­ond door unlock­ing, we were like, ​‘Oh, this is a very vul­ner­a­ble feel­ing.’ That struck us as some­thing use­ful, a way for Howard to keep a char­ac­ter in a scene and unable to touch him. And it fits with the trap­pings of over­com­pen­sa­tion. If I can keep myself safe like this, I’m untouch­able. That’s the gambler’s mind­set. The filmmaker’s, too.