BTS Marty Supreme

IBC

The creative team behind Uncut Gems translates its brash beauty and adrenaline rush to 1950s New York City in screwball drama.

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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 19^th century French artist Daumier and turn of the 20^th 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.