The Safdie Brothers’ Full-Immersion Filmmaking (original) (raw)

When the game was over—a one-point Knicks loss, not that it mattered—Josh couldn’t resist descending a few rows to talk to the guard who had shushed him. Like many people who like to get into a bit of trouble, Josh has a corresponding knack for talking himself out of it. The guard, turning conspiratorial, told him, “If it was me, I don’t give a shit. It’s an N.B.A. rule. You’re not allowed to bother the refs, and you can’t bother the players during time-outs.”

The brothers were listening intently, but they were also watching, noting not just the guard’s pungent white-New York accent but also the fit of his jacket, and the purposeful way he gripped the railing when he descended to the section below. Maybe one of these days they’ll need someone to play a Madison Square Garden security guard.

“Sandman!” Josh Safdie said, picking up his phone. “What’s going on?” He and his brother were in a sound studio in midtown, making last-minute alterations to “Uncut Gems.” On the screen, an image of Sandler, in character as Howard, was frozen in mid-patter. Josh talked quietly for a few minutes, then hung up and turned to his brother. “Sandler couldn’t believe we were back in the mix,” he said. The Safdies love crosstalk and ambient sound; they hate the idea of forcing actors to deliver credible dialogue in artificial silence. Now they were preparing a special mix for the Dolby Atmos system, which allows filmmakers to create the sensation that sounds are emanating from specific places in a room.

For years, the brothers were do-it-yourself visionaries, finding ingenious ways to make their little movies seem big; they used the city as their soundstage in part because it was free. When they began shooting “Uncut Gems,” last year, Josh was annoyed to see that his crew had posted flyers with filming permits on Forty-seventh Street; he was hoping to keep a low profile, in order to capture life in the district. Then he saw the platoon of trucks parked around the corner and remembered that he was involved in a major production, much too big to be surreptitious. For street scenes, the Safdies assembled about a hundred extras, who mingled with people going about their business. If the extras caught someone gawking at Sandler, or at the camera, they were instructed to create a simple distraction: approach the gawker and, posing as a tourist, ask for directions to the nearest subway station.

“This is very new—this whole experience,” Benny Safdie said. For “Uncut Gems,” they commissioned a score by the electronic musician Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never. The sound is neoclassical, inspired, at various points, by Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 and by Vangelis, the pioneering synthesizer wizard. And yet the most memorable sound is the raspy buzzer of Howard’s shop, which serves as the film’s irregular heartbeat. On this day, the brothers were trying to make the mix a little clearer, to allow viewers to separate the voices from the noise. They worked for a long time on a moment near the end of the first act, when an African-American character named Demany, played by Lakeith Stanfield, issues a pithy summation of Howard, the hero: “He just a fuckin’ crazy-ass Jew.”

The Safdie brothers spent a decade trying to make “Uncut Gems,” driven by their abiding affection for Howard, who is, some early reviewers have noticed, something of an asshole. A critic on IndieWire called him “the most contemptible character” Sandler has ever played, which means that he outranks both title characters of “Jack and Jill,” Sandler’s 2011 comedy, about a man with an annoying sister, which currently has a three-per-cent positive rating on the review site Rotten Tomatoes. Sandler says that he was impressed by the script for “Uncut Gems,” but initially puzzled by the brothers’ reverence for Howard. “They loved him,” Sandler recalls. “On the front page, it says ‘In Howard We Trust.’ ” In the film, Howard is incorrigible, seemingly intent on destroying his family and his business. “It took me a minute,” Sandler says, “because he feels selfish to me. But something that really helped me was—they were, like, ‘Yeah, he does selfish shit, but he’s a dreamer. He wants his big day. He sees other people getting their ass kissed and he wants his own big moment.’ ”

The Safdies’ father, Alberto, a Sephardic Jew who grew up in Italy and France before moving to New York, worked for a time as a runner and a salesman on Forty-seventh Street, bringing jewelry from the district to shops in the boroughs; he would come home with stories of all the Howards he met. Alberto Safdie was by all accounts an unpredictable father; the brothers remember spending days at home alone, locked in a small bedroom, with a pile of comic books and basketball cards. But he transmitted to his sons an attention to the characters of the city, and an obsession with film. Not long after Benny was born, Alberto bought a video camera and began making home movies. In search of exciting footage, he would send the boys hurtling down too-steep ski slopes, or goad them into reënacting fights from the previous day. Sometimes they became aware that he had been secretly filming them, which made them both self-conscious and curious. Which moments did their father consider worth filming? Partly in self-defense, they started commandeering the camera to make their own films: goofy horror movies, parody documentaries, even an anti-smoking propaganda film, starring Josh as a smoker who suddenly dies.

Alberto split with the boys’ mother, Amy, when the brothers were young; to explain the situation, he instructed them to watch “Kramer vs. Kramer,” the brutal 1979 custody drama, leaving them to work out for themselves the complicated relationship between the filmed world and the real world. The Safdies spent their boyhood shuttling between Queens, with their father, and Manhattan, where their mother lived with their stepfather, who worked in finance. Their upbringing was “very fucked up,” Josh says, but they endured—becoming, in Benny’s words, “not just normal brothers” but also fellow-survivors. They graduated from Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, a private institution on the Upper West Side; in the early two-thousands, they arrived, a year apart, at Boston University. By then, they had co-founded a do-it-yourself filmmaking collective called Red Bucket, and begun paying special attention to films that blurred the line between fiction and documentary. Their boyhood favorites had included action movies like “48 Hrs.”; now they were discovering films like “Close-Up,” from 1990, by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who used both archival footage and reënactment to tell the real story of an obsessive fan who impersonated a celebrated director. In Boston, they studied with Ted Barron, a historian of contemporary independent American film, who was impressed by their industriousness. “They were always making stuff,” Barron says. “The other students would only make films when they were told to.”

This was the era of “Jackass,” the MTV show built around silly and painful stunts, and the Safdie brothers’ early work could be prankish. In one short film from 2008, which they describe as a “social experiment,” Benny plays a dickish businessman on a city bus, voicing increasing annoyance at a crying baby; eventually a long-haired Good Samaritan pushes him out the rear door, to the delight of fellow-passengers. Most of the people were innocent bystanders, but the Samaritan was a friend of the Safdies’, Casey Neistat, who was then emerging as a kind of online auteur. (Neistat and his brother Van made imaginative viral videos, including one in which Van illegally bicycled through the Holland Tunnel; a few years later, they got an HBO show.) Neistat remembers the Safdies as adventurous but cerebral. “They were coming from a far more informed, intellectual, kind of academic side of the film world,” he says. It’s not hard to imagine a longer Safdie film that followed the baby’s mother, slightly freaked out by the outburst that interrupted her ordinary day.

Benny Safdie graduated in 2008, but he skipped the ceremony to fly to Cannes, where his short film “Acquaintances of a Lonely John” was screened, alongside Josh’s début feature, “The Pleasure of Being Robbed.” The films had been selected independently, and the programmers were surprised to find that the two directors were brothers. The early Safdie films were nearly twee, because the main characters tended to be wistful and a little restless. (In “Lonely John,” Benny plays an unmoored young man with a small apartment who likes to hang out at his local gas station.) But the brothers were determined to avoid easy sentiment and easily sympathetic characters. After Cannes, with some financing from a French company, they started work on an unabashedly autobiographical project, “Daddy Longlegs”: a feature about a young father, loving but wildly unreliable, trying to make it through a two-week visit with his two young sons. The mood shifted unpredictably from playful nostalgia to menace and back again, or nearly back again; once you’ve seen a character chopping up a sleeping pill to keep his children in bed longer, it’s difficult to view him as a well-meaning guy trying his best.

One afternoon, at a cheap Thai restaurant in midtown, Josh Safdie tried to explain his complicated feelings about his chosen profession. “I think movies are against nature,” he said. “It’s the most perverted art form.” He was talking about how filmmakers manipulate the world around them, using viewers’ voyeurism to trick them into caring about an invented reality. “It’s trying to replicate life,” he said. “Which is fucked up—and so powerful.”

The brothers’ mixed feelings about their medium often center on actors in particular. “Actors have a certain amount of psychotic energy,” Josh says. “They want to be other people.” Instead, the Safdies often cast people who seem incapable of being anything other than themselves. In the new film, Sandler’s girlfriend is played by Julia Fox, a glamorous figure from New York’s downtown bohemia, who is essentially making her acting début as the female lead in one of the year’s most anticipated films. The Safdies have found that a useful tension is generated when professional actors are forced to contend with people playing themselves. “When Adam goes into that jewelry store and talks to two real jewellers, they’re not used to being on camera,” Benny says. “But he’s not used to being in jewelry stores.”

As the Safdies were casting “Daddy Longlegs,” Josh noticed two young boys on the street who seemed perfect. They turned out to be Sage and Frey Ranaldo, the sons of Lee Ranaldo, the Sonic Youth guitarist, and Leah Singer, an artist; the boys agreed to act in the movie, and their parents appeared as their stepfather and their mother. To play the father, the Safdies cast Ronald Bronstein, who was known for directing an intimate, black-hearted 2007 drama called “Frownland.” Josh met Bronstein on the street, at the SXSW festival, and loved his twitchy energy and his long, expressive face—he bears a faint resemblance to Kramer, from “Seinfeld.”

Bronstein had been impressed by one of Safdie’s early short films, “We’re Going to the Zoo,” in which Josh plays a free-spirited hitchhiker. “It was just so light on its feet—it was like a helium balloon,” Bronstein says. “My balloon was filled with lead.” But he had no special interest in acting, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself, so he agreed to star only if he could consult on the script. The brothers agreed, and after the shoot they asked him to help them edit. Bronstein’s performance was widely celebrated: in 2010, he won Breakthrough Actor at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, beating Jennifer Lawrence and Greta Gerwig. But he has done almost no acting since then; instead, he has become the third member of Team Safdie. They have an elegant basic arrangement, Bronstein says: “I write with Josh, Josh directs with Benny, Benny edits with me.”

Bronstein has an office at Elara Pictures, the brothers’ production company, a few blocks south of Herald Square. On a recent afternoon, he was sitting in a chair on lime-green carpet, undistracted by the city noises leaking in from two sources: Broadway, through the window, and a cluster of editing screens, through the door. An assistant editor poked his head into the office, wondering whether to take home a copy of “Uncut Gems,” to do more work overnight. Bronstein considered the worst-case scenario. “What if you get mugged on the subway?” he said. “You have no idea how awful it would be.” The film stayed in the office.