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 47th 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
to 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 47th 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, ‘Your015