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 peo-
ple 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 stepfa-
ther and their mother. To play the fa-
ther, the Safdies cast Ronald Bronstein,
who was known for directing an inti-
mate, black-hearted 2007 drama called
“Frownland.” Josh met Bronstein on the
street, at the SXSW festival, and loved
his twitchy energy and his long, expres-
sive 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 cel-
ebrated: 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 be-
come the third member of Team Saf-
die. They have an elegant basic arrange-
ment, Bronstein says: “I write with Josh,
Josh directs with Benny, Benny edits
with me.”
Bronstein has an office at Elara Pic-
tures, 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, undis-
tracted by the city noises leaking in from
two sources: Broadway, through the win-
dow, and a cluster of editing screens,
through the door. An assistant editor
poked his head into the office, wonder-
ing whether to take home a copy of
“Uncut Gems,” to do more work over-
night. 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.
“We’re all anxious people, in differ-
ent ways,” Bronstein says, of himself
and of the Safdies. A decade older than
the brothers, Bronstein can serve as a
figure of restraint. “I don’t get carried
away by life as easily as they do,” he
says. While the brothers orchestrate
spectacles, his job has often been to
make sure that quiet, intimate moments
ring true. Bronstein describes the differ-
ence between the brothers in bluntly
Freudian terms. “Josh is maybe the most
anally repulsive creator that I’ve ever
come across,” he said, admiringly, in a
documentary produced by Criterion.
“He’s always shitting everything out;
he’s also always taking in new influ-
ences.” By contrast, he said, “Benny is,
like, continence incarnate”—more cir-cumspect, at least most of the time.
Bronstein recalled that, when he was
trying to film a follow-up to “Frown-
land,” Benny, who was one of his stars,
had a tendency to interrupt rehearsals
with bouts of weeping.
“Daddy Longlegs,” their first project
together, was a critical hit: in 2010, it
won the John Cassavetes Award (given
to a film with a budget of less than half
a million dollars); in the Times, A. O.
Scott called it a “lovely, hair-raising film.”
The Safdies imagined that “Uncut Gems”
would come next. Josh began hanging
out on Forty-seventh Street, trying to
penetrate the world of jewellers, while
also turning out short films and docu-
mentaries. When the brothers were hired
by the Turtle Conservancy, a conserva-
tionist group, they produced a series of
standard celebrity public-service an-
nouncements, and then something very
different: a four-minute fake documen-
tary about a rare-animal smuggler in a
hotel penthouse in Hong Kong, which
was so realistic that the Conservancy“Hi! I’m the worst possible thing you could say
at any given moment. Mind if I just hang out here
in front of your face for your entire life?”