Credits: We’re Going to the Zoo, The Pleasure
of Being Robbed, Daddy Longlegs, Good Time,
Uncut Gems
“I was an undergrad at Boston University when
I met Josh. He had some vinyl records, and we
looked at each other, and I think immediately
we could just tell we were both displaced New
Yorkers. The appeal of working with Josh and
Benny was, for me, very much that we all grew
up understanding the different boroughs of
New York. When they were kids they spent
half of their time in Manhattan and half of
their time in Queens, while I was a kid from
Brooklyn who would try my best to get into
Manhattan whenever possible. There’s this
real sense among native New Yorkers about
venturing into metropolis, especially when you
were always kind of the other, so I think as kids
we all fetishised Manhattan in the same way,
and that was kind of a draw for the kinds of
art we were making.
“Working on Uncut Gems, the world we
were trying to enter is so incredibly insular.
I think that’s partly the reason there are so
few projects shot in the Diamond District.
But each one of those buildings is a hive, with
restaurants and stores that are only for other
diamond dealers to access. It was incredible
to immediately get access to a world where
you’re on the other side of the velvet rope.
In terms of aesthetic, it’s inherently a movie
about self-centred people who probably
developed their tastes 20 years ago, so I
had to look at what would have been popular
among those deplorable kinds of people at the
turn of the ’90s as opposed to now – like the
kind of things Donald Trump was into when he
was in real estate. The real thing is so much
more garish and so much more over the top
than we played it in the movie – we couldn't
even go into these places with cameras and
have the audience believe it. You know, the
marble floors and Corinthian columns, and
it's still these pastels and kind of putrid ’90s
money tones, but in 2019. It’s the projection
of minimalist post-modern money in interior
design, and working out how to encapsulate
that for someone who is always just five
minutes behind the times.”Credits: Daddy Longlegs, Heaven Knows What,
Good Time, Uncut Gems
“In 2007 I had finished Frownland, a movie
I had made myself that had taken six
years, and it just barely slithered across
the finish line. When I lobbed it out at the
world, I was not mentally in a state to either
successfully promote it or to pull myself up
by my bootstraps and figure out what my
next project would be. So I was so defeated
internally, grappling with that uncertainty.
Josh saw Frownland when it premiered.
I didn’t meet him at the premiere, and I don’t
know what it is that I sparked in him, but he
sort of hunted me down at a point where
I was feeling creatively bankrupt. He insisted
I star in a feature he was planning, which was
baffling to me, because I had never acted
before. I said yes but under the condition
I could come on as a writer. So I joined Josh
on Daddy Longlegs and it ended up being an
amazing experience. It was maybe one of the
only times in my life that, existentially, I felt
I could just be in the backseat of a car and
not have to worry about the direction – and
that was nice.
“So I write with Josh, and Josh directs
with Benny, and then Benny edits with me.
When it comes to editing, Benny's very good
with action, and I tend to take the human
interaction. Those aren’t hard and fast rules,
and it’s harder to tell with Gems who cut
what, but I tend to view human interaction
as existential medieval duels, so I like to cut
the stuff that gives me the most space in
terms of shot/reverse-shot confrontations
between two humans. And Benny tends to
take the wilder material, the more chaotic,
movement-based work.“One thing the three of us share is that we’re
very anxious people by nature, constantly
flailing to gain control of things that seem to be
beyond our grasp. And none of us are hippies,
none of us are loose about how we approach
these things, even on set when you’re directing
and you have this script which is this great
ballast. You’re holding onto this script as if
you were someone who’s prone to throw up
and found yourself on a rollercoaster, holding
on to the side of the coaster car.”Credits: Good Time, Uncut Gems
“There was a building on Broadway where the
Safdies were working with [YouTuber] Casey
Neistat or they shared a studio with him, and
they were doing little film type things for Kate
Spade and Jack Spade where I was working
at the time. So I watched the Safdies running
around shooting, and because I was running
around the streets taking a tonne of photos,
I guess they were paying attention. Not just
to who I was taking photos of for Instagram,
but when we were walking around together,
all the details I’m obsessed with, all these
uniforms of New York – I don’t just mean like
letter carriers, I mean like doctors, lawyers
in their seersucker, Orthodox Jews, bankers.
So they took a liking to what I was doing, and
when they were planning Good Time, these
photos I was taking just started to inspire
characters and characters’ looks.021