↑ Romancing the stone: Adam Sandler stars as a hard-driving New York City jewelry dealer
THEY CALL HIM SANDMAN;
he calls them “the boys.”
It’s an unexpected friend-
ship, maybe, between
53-year-old comedic
superstar Adam Sandler
and street-level thirty-
something auteurs the
Safdie brothers, but a
genuinely fond one. And
fruitful, too: The trio’s first
project together, the
kinetic thriller Uncut Gems,
quickly became one of
the breakout films of the
fall festival circuit; now,
there’s growing talk of an
Oscar nod for Sandler’s
bravura turn as a Manhat-
tan jeweler whose
personal and professional
lives threaten to tip toward
calamity over the course
of several feverish, increas-
ingly unhinged days.
“These boys went at
me pretty good,” Sandler
says of a frenetic month-
long shoot that often
involved putting his char-
acter, Howard Ratner, in
various comprising posi-
tions—including nude in the
trunk of a car. “They beat
me up, I’d say, maybe 120
different angles worth.”
“He literally looked like
a cheetah afterwards,”
co-writer and co-director
Benny Safdie, 33, admits.
“Just black spots all the
way up and down.” It was
all in service to the vérité
madness of the movie
(which is executive-
produced by Martin Scor-
sese and also features
retired NBA power forward
Kevin Garnett, R&B star
the Weeknd, and Tony-
winning actress Idina Men-
zel, among others). “I think
we really benefited from
coming off the heels of
Sandler’s 49-city comedy
tour,” co-director Josh
Safdie, 35, says. “Watch-
ing him as a performer
find ways to inject improvi-
sation into those lines....
It’s a very human, raw
place to be, to put yourself
out there like that.”
Sandler did months of
research, including deep
embeds with his real-life
Diamond District counter-
parts, but ultimately put
his trust almost entirely in
his young collaborators.
“I would just keep question-
ing the fellas what they
were thinking and what
they wanted. They talked
to me about Al Goldstein
DIRECTED BY Josh and
Benny Safdie STARRING Adam
Sandler, Kevin Garnett
IN THEATERS Dec. 13
and Rodney Dangerfield
and other strong, opinion-
ated Jews. And then
we met guys on the block
[during the shoot] where
we’d go, ‘Wow, that was
such a Howard moment.’ ”
With or without Acad-
emy gold, could the actor
see himself returning
to the Safdies’ wild world?
“Of course I would die to
work with them again,
because it’s a brand-new
feeling. But the funniest
thing is when I would say to
them, ‘Your future is so
bright,’ they didn’t want to
talk about that. They were
like, ‘I just like Gems, man.’”
—Leah Greenblatt
THE
Surprise Contender
UNCUT GEMS
EW ● COM NOVEMBER 2019 67
UNCUT GEMS
:A24
