IBC
The creative team behind Uncut Gems translates its
brash beauty and adrenaline rush to 1950s New York City in screwball drama.
article here
The kinetic narrative of Marty Supreme may be driven
by the intoxicating charm of its title character but it’s the pantheon of
indelible supporting characters which brings the film to life.
“There are more than a hundred featured characters in the
film — every day on set different actors arrived with these unforgettable
faces,” says cinematographer Darius Khondji (Delicatessen, Seven). “The
faces look like something out of a Honoré Daumier painting — [and] were
incredible to photograph.”
Loosely based on the autobiography of flamboyant table
tennis hustler Marty Reisman, director and co-writer Josh Safdie sets his tale
amid the teeming working-class life of 1950s Lower East Side Manhattan.
Timothée Chalamet stars as the bold, fast-talking dreamer, hellbent on turning
an overlooked sport into a personal springboard to glory.
Khondji, reuniting with Safdie after collaborating on Uncut
Gems, shot Marty Supreme on 35mm film (specifically Kodak VISION3
500T 5219) using Arricam-LT cameras and vintage Panavision C Series anamorphic
lenses.
“The old glass of the anamorphic format appears to make the
actor bigger,” says the two-time Academy Award nominee. “It has the strength of
black and white film. You can tell a very intimate story with anamorphic.”
They strived for the same “brash beauty” of Uncut Gems
which Safdie urged Khondji to revisit “as if discovering it in 1952.”
“I photograph faces all the time, but this changed my way of
thinking about film and digital," says the DP. “When I push the negative
slightly, it gives a special texture to the image that I cannot get from
digital.”
For reference, Khondji checked out the work of 1950s street
photographer Helen Levitt and colour pioneer Ernst Haas, as well as American
experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Specifically a 1955 colour short called Orchard
Street which Jacobs shot guerrilla style in the area and documenting the
daily life of mainly immigrant Jews in the Lower East Side. From 19th
century French artist Daumier and turn of the 20th century American
realist painter Georges Bellows he took the idea of lighting portraits with a
warm light from below.
A scene in which Marty talks with fading movie star Kay
Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) on the phone was shot in realtime with both actors in
different rooms on adjacent sets. Khondji had to light both rooms and shoot
with two cameras.
“I love the blurred line between documentary and fiction,”
he says.
They only had one day to shoot in the bowling alley so
Safdie requested the space be lit in 360-degrees so he could move the camera
around really quickly.
For the film’s table-tennis matches, Khondji used three
cameras fitted with wide-angle lenses to capture the game’s dizzying
back-and-forth. “Sometimes we were directly in the line of fire, with two
cameras shooting at each other, one hidden between two actors,” explains
Khondji. “It felt like a documentary style of filmmaking, photographing what
was playing out in front of us in the limited time we had to shoot it.”
He credits camera operators Colin Anderson (who also worked
on One Battle After Another) and Brian Osmond, gaffer Ian Kincaid, and
colourist Yvan Lucas.
“I’ve worked with a lot of directors and I was surprised by
how much Josh had laid out the scenes in his head before we filmed,” says
Khondji. “Every director has their own way of doing things, but Josh has an
obsessive, intuitive way of making movies. Stylistically speaking, he knows you
usually don’t capture wide-angle shots using long lenses — but the rules don’t
matter to him.”
A face tells a thousand stories
Khondji also credits casting director Jennifer Venditti with
finding the extraordinary number and variety of people – professional actors
and first timers alike – to inhabit the film’s world.
Using a process that began with Heaven Knows What
(Venditti’s first collaboration with Safdie) and further developed on Good
Time and Uncut Gems, she scouted streets for hundreds of
unforgettable faces.
“There’s no pretence when someone is owning who they are,
and that’s what I’m always looking for when I’m casting un knowns,” says
Venditti. “It’s all lived experience — sometimes it’s rough, other times it can
be gorgeous to watch. We are taking non-professionals and putting them into
this fictitious world. Their signature authenticity is the alchemy.”
Venditti employed five street scouts and two casting
associates to help her scour New York City, looking for faces on Coney Island,
in city parks, at farmers markets and street fairs, and in table tennis clubs.
For one scene set in a New Jersey bowling alley, Venditti cast young men she
scouted at a memorabilia convention of sports trading-card aficionados. For
scenes set overseas, including a gathering of journalists in London, she
scouted faces at Tea & Sympathy, a West Village hangout popular with British
expats.
Existential medieval duel
The intensity of the script comes from the writing process
between Safdie and Ronald Bronstein. They first teamed up in 2009 on Daddy
Longlegs, a film they also co-wrote and co-edited and which Bronstein acted
in, winning an award for his performance. Their screenwriting and co-editing
continues in Marty Supreme on which Bronstein also shares a producer
credit.
“We're brutal on one another,” Bronstein says. “It might just
come from a pathological fear of boring people and that in itself can turn into
panic. Every single idea has to be torn apart and rebuilt through the other
person's brain.
“The ideas themselves are so personal - everything gets
highly abstract by the time it reaches the screen - but every exchange is
coming from some lived in experience. So we're sharing very intimate things
with each other. The process is invasive and we're not nice in the sense of not
being sensitive to the other's experience. One person throws an idea out and
then immediately the other person is tying it to a chair and beating the shit
out of it, trying to get it to confess its weaknesses.”
He says, “We once had a day long argument about what
happened to a character when he was eight years old. The ad hominem attacks,
which you then see in the movie, like some existential medieval duel, [well]
that’s what’s happening between us in our process.”
This combat extends into post-production where “all
reverence for the script disappears, to the point of self-abnegation,” says
Bronstein. He describes their approach to the edit as “archaeologists
uncovering a massive cache of raw footage,” adding, “Our job is to first stamp
intentionality onto it — to shape it into something that feels new to us.”
Having done this for so many years over many projects he
says he’s passed the point of worrying that their friendship will be affected.
Building the world on sets and streets
Unlike the contemporary setting of Uncut Gems where
Safdie shot on the streets of New York without needing to worry if he captured
passer’s by in shot, every inch of the post-Second World War environment had to
be plotted from costume to colour palette.
They wanted to depict the state of table tennis at the time
as a subculture full of schemers, geniuses, and outcasts played in smoky
backrooms, penthouse parties, YMCAs, Ivy League dorms, and downtown tenements.
Oscar winning sound designer Skip Lievsay (Gravity)
approached the highly complex ebb and flow of dialogue on soundtrack by working
between score and needle drops (from Fats Domino to Tears for Fears) and the
many scenes featuring crowds, audiences or events. Then he’d vary the volume of
the soundtrack and the density of other elements like dialogue and sound
effects, to, in his words, “amp up every situation to get the juices flowing,
like caffeine.”
Three time Oscar winning production designer Jack Fisk (There
Will Be Blood, The Revenant, Killers of the Flower Moon) resuscitated the
period look of Marty’s Lower East Side neighbourhood through set-dressing
facades on existing NYC streets.
“There’s a haunting presence on the Lower East Side that
wouldn’t have the same impact if you recreated it on stage,” says Fisk.
The production made use of three city blocks on Orchard St
to create Marty’s world, from the cramped tenement that he shares with his
mother, to his Uncle’s shoe store, to the pet store where Rachel works, and the
surrounding streets and alleys where Marty races to evade the police.
“These buildings were designed in the 1800s and we were
bringing them back to the 1950s era through their facades and interiors,” says
Fisk. “You can still discover the old spirit of the neighbourhood and its
vibrant street life.”
For the wealthiest quarter of Manhattan during the ‘50s —
the Upper East Side and Fifth Avenue, Fisk scouted and decorated a Manhattan
building designed by Frank Woolworth, (founder of the high street store brand).
His biggest challenge was designing the film’s sprawling table tennis sequences, spanning England, Japan, France, Sarajevo, and Egypt. For the British Open, the production took over Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey, installing 30,000 square feet of wooden flooring to host dozens of players and thousands of spectators.
