that. After long enough, he took a shine to
us. We never really spent money apart from
the deal that our locations manager cut with
him directly. Joe had this mayoral presence
on the block, where he let everyone know we
were okay and introduced us to everyone. If
he told another jeweller that we were okay to
shoot in his shop, the guy would let us, on
the understanding that Joe would owe him
a favour. It was hard to ingratiate ourselves
with everyone, but once we did it was hugely
helpful. Plus, we have Sephardic Jewish
roots, and a good portion of the Bukharan
community is Sephardic too. Slowly, really
over the course of a decade, we built up trust.
Then we brought them Adam Sandler.
Suddenly, all the doors blew right open.
Sandler’s such a mensch, so everyone was
generous with their time, letting him trail
them. They realised we were interested for
the right reasons, genuine reasons. By the
time we got to shooting on 47th, we were
basically accepted by the block as a whole.
BS: We had a location scout just for 47th.
We had a casting team fanning out just to find
background people for 47th. We ran into one
of them and started talking about something
or other, and Cat with the props department
walks by at the same time holding a backpack
containing hundreds of thousands of dollars’
worth of jewellery. She knows she’s holding
onto a bunch of $75,000 watches, and she’s
trying to act nonchalant. She’s trailing this guy,
Izzy, who’s making a custom ring for Sandler
for the movie. Then the set decorator comes
out of nowhere, shouting, ‘On the eighth floor
of this place, we found the person who sells
all the scales for weighing out jewels! It’s a
gold mine!’ It was like we had our own tiny
community inside of this other tiny community.Was it always going to be Adam Sandler?JS: 2010, we start writing the script. 2012,
me, Benny and Ronnie [Bronstein, co-writer
and co-editor] were trying to figure out who
could play this Al Goldstein-like Jew, who we
revered in his heroism and fearlessness and
humour. We all loved Adam Sandler, grew up
on him. It had to be him. We went to him,
having just finished Daddy Longlegs, and his
team passed. Didn’t even get to him. So wethought we’d make Howard older, and we
started talking with Harvey Keitel. We had a
Passover dinner with Amar’e Stoudemire and
Harvey Keitel in 2013. Harvey’s amazing –
he’s Harvey – but we just thought the part
wasn’t quite right for him. We went off and
did some other stuff, and after finishing up
Heaven Knows What in 2015, we came back
to the idea.Hang on – you went to a Seder with Harvey
Keitel and Amar’e Stoudemire?JS: Oh, we organised this Passover dinner! Or
wait, was this a Shabbat dinner?BS: It was a Passover dinner.JS: No, I think it was a Shabbat that was just
near Passover.BS: It was Passover! I remember.JS: You’re right, yes, that’s right. But yeah,
Amar’e had let us host at his house, and we
had invited Harvey and his wife and son. It
was a really nice dinner, honestly. He loved
the script, he’s a great actor, but Howard
shouldn’t be that old. He’s gotta be late
forties. We ended up talking with Sacha Baron
Cohen for a while. He did a table read that
went really well, but then he was impossible
to pin down. Once Scorsese got involved as
an exec producer, Jonah Hill got interested,
and we started thinking about making Howard
younger. We both thought he’s a great actor,
but with the age his kids needed to be, it
didn’t make sense. That collaboration fizzled
out once he went to go direct his own movie.
So now we’ve finished Good Time, it hasn’t
premiered yet, and still we don’t know what
we’re going to do for the next one. We go to
Cannes for Good Time, and Adam Sandler’s
there with The Meyerowitz Stories, and we’re
dying to get a meeting with him.BS: But he’s with his family, doesn’t really
know who we are, gives us the polite brush-
off off. ‘We’ll do it another time,’ he says.
We didn’t really blame him. Then he saw the
movie and he flipped out. Finally he calls us
asking if we’ve got anything for him. We’re
like, ‘Well, there’s this one thing we sent you
five years ago...’ He asks us to send it to
him and reads it within three hours. He was
a little scared at first, but [producer] Scott
Rudin ordered us to get on a plane to LA and
talk to him.017