‘I’m afraid of electromagnetic catastrophe’: Josh Safdie on Marty Supreme, latent Jewish anxiety and why men get lost | Marty Supreme

Josh Safdie, 41, is best known for the films he made with his brother Benny, which are action-packed films like Uncut Gems, Good Time and Heaven Knows What.

Last year, the brothers split and filmed separate films loosely based on real athletes. Benny made the wrestling drama The Smashing Machine, starring The Rock; Josh follows the life of Marty Risman, a shoe store clerk in 1950s New York, who aspires to excel at table tennis but must scramble to finance his move to tournaments in London and Tokyo.

The film – whose score draws heavily from the 1980s – is A24’s most expensive film ever and is hoping to scoop major awards for its star, director and writer. It also features one of the most brutal and personal supporting casts ever, including David Mamet, Sandra Bernhard, acclaimed artist Philippe Petit, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, British Indian academic Pico Iyer, Abel Ferrara, and Tyler the Creator.

Gwyneth Paltrow is lured out of retirement to play the fading movie star, Kay, with whom Marty begins an affair. Meanwhile, Kevin O’Leary – the Canadian businessman best known as Mr. Terrific on Shark Tank, the American version of Dragon’s Den – makes his film debut as her billionaire husband Milton, with whom Marty shares a dynamic not unlike that between Guy Pearce and Adrien Brody in The Brutalist.

You have said that Marty represents the confidence, arrogance, and ambition that America expressed in the postwar years. Who represents America today?

I think the victory in World War II really ignited the idea of ​​the American dream. That an individual can change the world. You can be anyone from anywhere and you can find glory and there is a reason for your existence.

Then, in the 1980s, America was emerging from defeat in Vietnam and from a cultural and economic depression. So Reagan tried to revive the American dream. But this time, it was in quotes. The 1980s were the first postmodern era, and really the most enduring era. You walk around and hear 80s music all the time. It was the last truly modern movement. Then capitalism triumphed, the past began to haunt the future, and the future was merely a revisiting of the past.

What is happening now, because of the lasting impact of the 1980s, is that the American dream – the pursuit of prosperity – is in quotation marks. This may be more difficult to achieve.

The film seems rooted in this positionMilitary literature Bellow and Ruth. Young Jews stalk their way to New York

These wide-eyed people who live with a sense of urgency, outside of time, are very attractive to me. I love the Budd Schulberg movie What makes Sammy run away? Mordecai Richler’s book The Apprenticeship of Dodi Kravitz was very influential. This chronicle of the Lower East Side, all these distinct individual characters living on top of each other in chaos. I and [co-writer] Ronald Bronstein also read a lot of non-fiction books, which were not very well written. But usually, the worse the writing, the better – for cinematic purposes.

Is there a type of anxiety innate to certain ethnic groups? Could you have written this story about a non-Jewish community?

I think there are certain disturbances in Jewish culture. Not so much in the Old Testament text. But among Jews culturally there is a sense of constant rebuilding. The idea that “we may have to move at any moment.” It is a nomadic culture that has been transmitted a lot. This impermanence is actually quite spiritual, but I think there is an underlying anxiety in this lifestyle because of it.

Near the end of the film, at the Tokyo Tournament, Milton says he is a vampire. What does it mean?

What we saw in post-war Japan was unique: the way they accepted defeat after what had been a largely intense and violent culture. The war did not end for them until 1952, when America began to leave.

I thought: How wonderful that they used table tennis to get out of isolation. They invented this new bat, which they called the atomic paddle, and with it they wiped out everyone. It was the beginning of passive colonialism, corporate colonialism and globalization. But there were plenty of protections to prevent American companies from moving to Japan. Sony is called Sony because [Japanese] The founder heard soldiers calling young children “Sonny.”

A vampire is no different than a person who sucks oil from the planet. They are parasites that live outside of hosts. Milton is a vampire. It is a cold, institutionalized capitalist colonizer. They will exist forever; I don’t see them going anywhere. There is art in what they do, and obviously there is a lot of destruction as well, but sometimes there is beauty. That’s why I chose Mr. Wonderful. Kevin is the asshole on this show. He’s the rudest. And he actually came up with this vampire line.

Marty’s friend and colleague Bing Table tennis champion, Bella (played by… Saul’s son Geza Rohrig) Marty tells how he came across some bees while imprisoned in AuschwitzBee hives. He secretly smeared honey all over his body and let his fellow prisoners lick it off him later.

This is based on a true story. Alojzi Ehrlich was a young Jew from Hungary, whose life was saved by Auschwitz officers who recognized him and his talents. He was a genius. Like a lot of these players: very high IQ. Oddly enough, this sport attracted a very eccentric type of person: smart, but who got bad grades and couldn’t get a job. But they can get rid of the bombs [as Ehrlich did and Röhrig’s character does] And be in a hotel like this [Claridge’s] Because they were international, and they were thinking big. I learned more about the Holocaust in that little story than I have from some movies that are only about the Holocaust.

Milton is angry because he lost his son in the war and believes part of the reason was to defend the Jews. In his letter to Marty there is a kind of latent anti-Semitism buried. This is his way of coping. I’m not someone who thinks the whole world looks through that lens. I’m much thicker than that.

The honey-licking sacrifice contrasts with the vampire’s sucking

Of more interest to the vampires is the shot of Marty and Kay in the hotel room. [Production designer] Jack Fisk was doing silly things like putting up paintings that evoked Transylvania and such. Kai literally bites young Marty’s neck. She is trying to suck the youth out of this man and get his passion.

Do today’s seniors do this?

There is an obsession with youth more than ever before. I believe that within our lifetime, there will be ways to raise life expectancy in rich countries by 50 years. And in the end, eternity. And this is scary. Because the ending is very important. Narration is important. Imagine sitting down to watch a movie with no running time.

I’m also afraid of an electromagnetic catastrophe and losing everything. Some intelligent life form found this planet and we’d all be gone: all the hard drives dead. Not this [aliens] He would have no idea how to get information from them. But the things captured in the film they will be able to see. That’s why I shoot film: it saves.

How dangerous do you think this is?

I think if that’s a possibility, it will happen. Maybe an asteroid will hit the world first. It’s all just guesswork, and I get paranoid sometimes – but I have CDs, and I put a lot of jpegs in them, which are my childhood photos that I scanned and are now gone, dead, no information. So I imagine someone could [easily] Destroying a cloud farm.

There is impermanence in life now. Someone once told me to collect the 20th century. It will be the most valuable, because it was the moment we saw things change.

Marty Supreme begins at the moment the baby is conceived – where we see the sperm swimming towards the egg – and occurs over the next nine months. Is it a rejection of the idea that men don’t do much during pregnancy? Are men, like sperm, programmed to compete?

I think men are lost and women have a very concrete understanding of the purpose of humanity. You see, in the middle of the sperm chaos, there’s something like: I need to be the one. Then there’s the egg in there. And if you look at the universe, these [eggs] They are the planets.

When my daughter was born, she didn’t need her father. She needed her mother and this led to a strange existential malaise about what a father was. At some point Marty says [his pregnant girlfriend] Rachel: “I have a goal. You don’t.” That’s why you laugh. But the beautiful thing is that his dream is the egg being formed in… [customised Marty Supreme table tennis] ball. He ends up achieving his dream.