34 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
had to issue a statement reassuring view-
ers that although the problem was real,
the film was make-believe.
One way of describing the years after
“Daddy Longlegs” is to say that the
brothers kept getting sidetracked. When
a producer asked if they would be in-
terested in looking at some old footage
of Lenny Cooke, a legendary New Jer-
sey high-school basketball star who
never quite managed a professional
career, they said yes, and then found
themselves spending years delving into
Cooke’s life. The film they made has
no narration, and it avoids the tempta-
tion to draw any lessons from Cooke’s
thrilling boyhood (we see him scoring
over a fellow-phenomenon, LeBron
James) or his bittersweet adulthood.
Near the end comes an audacious scene,
enabled by special effects, that makes
viewers wonder if anything else was fake.
In those years, Bronstein was work-
ing as a projectionist at Lincoln Cen-
ter, and one day Josh Safdie stopped
by to tell him that he had met an in-
triguing young woman on Forty-seventh
Street: Arielle Holmes, a jeweller’s ap-
prentice who turned out to be part of a
community of homeless young people
battling addiction. Safdie paid Holmes
to write her life story, which she did,
often by using display laptops at a nearby
Apple Store. With Bronstein, the broth-
ers turned her memoir into a movie:
“Heaven Knows What,” an astonishingly
grim film that Benny Safdie once de-
scribed as a “nonfiction drama.” Holmes
played a version of herself, pretending
to use heroin while she was actually
using methadone. (The brothers ar-
ranged for her to go to rehab once film-
ing was done.) Caleb Landry Jones, an
emerging movie star, played her abusive
but somehow mesmerizing part-time
boyfriend, Ilya. The real Ilya was by
all accounts a volatile figure; he died of
an overdose before the film’s première.
Jones disappeared into the role so com-
pletely that people on the street some-
times mistook him for the real Ilya and,
accordingly, tried to either calm him
down or fight him. The Safdies filmed
outside during a brutally cold winter
fortnight, subsisting largely on trail mix
made by a member of the crew; by the
end of the shoot, they looked about as
ragged as the people on the other side
of the camera.
The unvarnished look of “Heaven
Knows What,” which makes most other
films about homeless characters seem
ludicrously contrived, can obscure the
brothers’ sophisticated approach. They
worked with Sean Price Williams, one
of the most celebrated cinematogra-
phers in independent film, who shot
with long lenses, from a distance, so as
not to disturb the actors or alert the au-
thorities (there were no filming permits
involved); the action unfolds in tense,
unsteady closeups. In the film, as in life,Ilya’s musical tastes were extreme: we
see him in a public library, listening
to the black-metal band Burzum on
YouTube. But, for the soundtrack, the
brothers drew heavily on “Snowflakes
Are Dancing,” the 1974 album by the
Japanese electronic musician known as
Tomita, which consists of otherworldly
synthesizer versions of Claude Debussy’s
compositions. The idea was to create a
film that felt romantic, without roman-
ticizing the addiction and the violence
in it. “We know it’s not for everybody,”
Josh Safdie said, around the time of the
film’s release. But he felt confident that
it would find an audience. “I think there’s
eight kids in every high school in Amer-
ica that would freak out over this movie.”
One person who freaked out was
Robert Pattinson, a star of the “Twilight”
movies, who was looking for challeng-
ing new roles. Mesmerized by an image
of Holmes from the film, heavy-lidded
and lit in purples and pinks, he e-mailed
the Safdies to say that he wanted to work
with them. The brothers were still try-
ing to make “Uncut Gems,” and they
knew there was no role in it for a boy-
ish English heartthrob. So they resolved
to create something new for him. With
Bronstein, they started thinking about
a heist film, “Good Time,” in which a
nervy lowlife named Connie tries to
carry off a bank robbery. To balance Pat-
tinson’s character, they gave him a brother
with unspecified intellectual disabilities,
someone to conspire with and also to
take care of. They considered casting an
actor with intellectual disabilities, but
the film had to be emotionally and phys-
ically gruelling, and they worried that
they wouldn’t be able to get the perfor-
mance they wanted without subjecting
the actor to real-life stress. Benny Saf-
die decided to play the role himself.
When the film’s financers expressed skep-
ticism, he made an audition tape in char-
acter as Nick, growing agitated as he
asked the casting director why she was
filming him and what was going on. In
the film, Benny makes Nick intensely
thoughtful, even though we usually can’t
be sure what he’s thinking.
For the Safdies, “Good Time” was a
way of showing the film world that they
could be trusted to make bigger mov-
ies. (Thanks to the marketable presence
of Pattinson, the film had a reported
budget of about four and a half million