32 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
for “Uncut Gems,” but initially
puzzled by the brothers’ rever
ence for Howard. “They loved
him,” Sandler recalls. “On the
front page, it says ‘In Howard
We Trust.’” In the film, Howard
is incorrigible, seemingly intent
on destroying his family and his
business. “It took me a minute,” San
dler says, “because he feels selfish to me.
But something that really helped me
was—they were, like, ‘Yeah, he does
selfish shit, but he’s a dreamer. He wants
his big day. He sees other people get
ting their ass kissed and he wants his
own big moment.’”
T
he Safdies’ father, Alberto, a Se
phardic Jew who grew up in Italy
and France before moving to New York,
worked for a time as a runner and a
salesman on Fortyseventh Street, bring
ing jewelry from the district to shops
in the boroughs; he would come home
with stories of all the Howards he met.
Alberto Safdie was by all accounts an
unpredictable father; the brothers re
member spending days at home alone,
locked in a small bedroom, with a pile
of comic books and basketball cards.
But he transmitted to his sons an at
tention to the characters of the city, and
an obsession with film. Not long after
Benny was born, Alberto bought a video
camera and began making home mov
ies. In search of exciting footage, he
would send the boys hurtling down too
steep ski slopes, or goad them into reën
acting fights from the previous day.
Sometimes they became aware that he
had been secretly filming them, which
made them both selfconscious and cu
rious. Which moments did their father
consider worth filming? Partly in self
defense, they started commandeering
the camera to make their own films:
goofy horror movies, parody documen
taries, even an anti smoking propaganda
film, starring Josh as a smoker who sud
denly dies.
Alberto split with the boys’ mother,
Amy, when the brothers were young;
to explain the situation, he instructed
them to watch “Kramer vs. Kramer,”
the brutal 1979 custody drama, leaving
them to work out for themselves the
complicated relationship between the
filmed world and the real world. The
Safdies spent their boyhood shuttling
between Queens, with their fa
ther, and Manhattan, where their
mother lived with their step
father, who worked in finance.
Their upbringing was “very
fucked up,” Josh says, but they
endured—becoming, in Benny’s
words, “not just normal broth
ers” but also fellowsurvivors. They
graduated from Columbia Grammar
and Preparatory School, a private in
stitution on the Upper West Side; in
the early two thousands, they arrived,
a year apart, at Boston University. By
then, they had cofounded a doityour
self filmmaking collective called Red
Bucket, and begun paying special at
tention to films that blurred the line
between fiction and documentary. Their
boyhood favorites had included action
movies like “48 Hrs.”; now they were
discovering films like “Close Up,” from
1990, by the Iranian director Abbas
Kiarostami, who used both archival
footage and reënactment to tell the real
story of an obsessive fan who imper
sonated a celebrated director. In Bos
ton, they studied with Ted Barron, a
historian of contemporary independent
American film, who was impressed by
their industriousness. “They were al
ways making stuff,” Barron says. “The
other students would only make films
when they were told to.”
This was the era of “Jackass,” the
MTV show built around silly and pain
ful stunts, and the Safdie brothers’ early
work could be prankish. In one short
film from 2008, which they describe as
a “social experiment,” Benny plays a
dickish businessman on a city bus, voic
ing increasing annoyance at a crying
baby; eventually a longhaired Good
Samaritan pushes him out the rear door,
to the delight of fellowpassengers.
Most of the people were innocent by
standers, but the Samaritan was a friend
of the Safdies’, Casey Neistat, who was
then emerging as a kind of online au
teur. (Neistat and his brother Van made
imaginative viral videos, including one
in which Van illegally bicycled through
the Holland Tunnel; a few years later,
they got an HBO show.) Neistat re
members the Safdies as adventurous
but cerebral. “They were coming from
a far more informed, intellectual, kind
of academic side of the film world,” he
says. It’s not hard to imagine a longerSafdie film that followed the baby’s
mother, slightly freaked out by the out
burst that interrupted her ordinary day.
Benny Safdie graduated in 2008,
but he skipped the ceremony to fly to
Cannes, where his short film “Acquain
tances of a Lonely John” was screened,
alongside Josh’s début feature, “The
Pleasure of Being Robbed.” The films
had been selected independently, and
the programmers were surprised to find
that the two directors were brothers.
The early Safdie films were nearly twee,
because the main characters tended to
be wistful and a little restless. (In “Lonely
John,” Benny plays an unmoored young
man with a small apartment who likes
to hang out at his local gas station.) But
the brothers were determined to avoid
easy sentiment and easily sympathetic
characters. After Cannes, with some
financing from a French company, they
started work on an unabashedly auto
biographical project, “Daddy Longlegs”:
a feature about a young father, loving
but wildly unreliable, trying to make it
through a twoweek visit with his two
young sons. The mood shifted unpre
dictably from playful nostalgia to men
ace and back again, or nearly back again;
once you’ve seen a character chopping
up a sleeping pill to keep his children
in bed longer, it’s difficult to view him
as a wellmeaning guy trying his best.O
ne afternoon, at a cheap Thai res
taurant in midtown, Josh Safdie
tried to explain his complicated feelings
about his chosen profession. “I think
movies are against nature,” he said. “It’s
the most perverted art form.” He was
talking about how filmmakers manip
ulate the world around them, using view
ers’ voyeurism to trick them into caring
about an invented reality. “It’s trying to
replicate life,” he said. “Which is fucked
up—and so powerful.”
The brothers’ mixed feelings about
their medium often center on actors in
particular. “Actors have a certain amount
of psychotic energy,” Josh says. “They
want to be other people.” Instead, the
Safdies often cast people who seem in
capable of being anything other than
themselves. In the new film, Sandler’s
girlfriend is played by Julia Fox, a glam
orous figure from New York’s down
town bohemia, who is essentially making
her acting début as the female lead in