Josh Safdie really didn’t want to make a period film. The “Marty Supreme” co-writer/director, telling IndieWire, while on the Toolkit podcast, he “had a slight repulsion towards doing period.” Part of what drew him to tell a story of the “rugged individualism” of post-World War II America was that it didn’t feel old.
“When I would talk to these people who were around living as teenagers, the Silent Generation folks who were too young to fight in the war, they were riding on the fumes of America’s victory and glory after the war,” said Safdie on the podcast. “The way they tell a story, if they’re a good raconteur, they tell you the story, and you’re in it emotionally, and it feels contemporary, and it feels very relatable.”
That push-and-pull of wanting-and-not-wanting to make a movie set in 1952 was in full effect when Safdie found footage of the English Open from the late ’40s and early ’50s, including the table tennis matches of Marty Reisman, the real-life inspiration for his fictional Marty Mauser character (played by Timothée Chalamet). The archival footage brought the history of the sport to life, but it was also frustrating “because I couldn’t go and do this research and I couldn’t be contemporary about it,” explained Safdie.
Research has always been a big part of Safdie’s process, but in his previous films it came in the form of immersing himself in the world of his contemporary characters. He can also be obsessive, getting stuck on the smallest detail when watching a period film. For example, the way glass, in everything from windows to spectacles, can look modern in a period film sets Safdie off — “I hate, hate, hate that.” In addition to not knowing how to stage and shoot the ping pong scenes, the biggest open question Safdie would have to figure out to make “Marty Supreme” was how he could bridge his instincts as a filmmaker and storyteller with making a period film.
He points to one particular moment as a breakthrough, recalled Safdie, “When I saw [the British Open archival footage], I was listening to Peter Gabriel at the time, this one song in particular, on repeat, which my wife hates — I listen to a song a thousand times, and I’ll get my Spotify wrap, and it’s literally like I’m a psychopath.” The opening lyrics of that Gabriel song “I Have the Touch,” in particular resonated.
The time I like is the rush hour
‘Cause I like the rush
The pushing of the people
I like it all so much
“It matched the energy of these like wiry young guys,” said Safdie of watching the ping pong footage with the song playing. “[It] just worked, I can’t say anything [about why], except it just worked, and it added a mythic legendary quality.”
Instinctively, Safdie then googled 1940s NYC subways and discovered a 1949 industrial “Rapid Transit,” which featured incredible footage that reminded Safdie of some of his favorite NYC films from the 1970s. He noted it was shot by a Sol Roizman — the name seemed like too much of a coincidence, so another google search revealed Sol was in fact the father of legendary cinematographer Owen Roizman (“The French Connection,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”)
“It’s unbelievable, the best New York cinematographer of all time, right? And his father was doing the same thing with no glory,” said Safdie, who at that moment felt the universe was talking to him. He quickly did a rudimentary mash-up of “I Have the Touch” and “Rapid Transit” on his iPhone, and for the first time, he understood how he could make a period film. “I was so moved by how urgent and how current these stories made me feel, so once I realized I could approach the story as a current one, that was very liberating.”
Over time, as he started to work out the concept for “Marty Supreme,” Safdie said he was able to better understand why the ’80s music and his ’50s setting worked in the context of Marty’s seemingly boundless ambition to achieve an outsized version of the American Dream through ping pong.
“I’m no historian, but in my research I saw in the ’80s [there was] this rebirth of the American Dream, in almost air quotes,” said Safdie. “I was just thinking, ‘OK, what was happening in the ’80s? The birth of postmodernism, the first era where they were redoing the ’50s, literally in music and fashion, and you have [President] Reagan, who was trying to follow defeat by chasing the prosperity of victory.”
Safdie said he began to intellectually understand these connections as he wrote all but one of the ’80s needle drops into the script (only The Korgi’s track “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” would come later). In addition to the Gabriel track, Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” New Order’s “The Perfect Kiss,” and Public Image Ltd’s “The Order of Death” brought out “this mythic legendary quality to youth” that Safdie went on to explain was a crucial aspect of “Marty Supreme.”
“At one point, it was in the script that the movie should be told from a point of view looking back at your youth,” said Safdie. “So the movie really is from Marty’s point of view in the ’80s when he’s at a Tears for Fears’ concert with his granddaughter, and he’s hearing the lyrics, ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ and he’s thinking about the confidence of youth, the lack of understanding of consequences of youth, the individualist wave that youth can jolt into you. So that really was the foundation of the sonic landscape.”
The idea that Marty’s 1950s story was his character’s 1980s flashback faded away over time, but it does explain the deleted ending scene Chalamet described to IndieWire, in which he was aged decades. Some sliver of the original concept survived through production, only to be cut in post-production.
Timothée Chalamet and Josh Safdie on the set of ‘Marty Supreme’A24
Yet, as Safdie indicated, the big tangible connection between the ’50s and ’80s is the music, and his “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” composer Daniel Lopatin was the perfect collaborator for the job, having, under the pseudonym Chuck Person, created remixes of 1980s tracks with reverb, process effects, and pitch shifting that became known as the “Eccojams.”
“He took ’80s radio tracks and almost in a Steve Reich-ian way remixed them, and it had a very haunted quality,” Safdie said. “And I wanted the past to haunt the future, and the future to haunt the past, with this movie.”
It was a concept that sounded good, but didn’t work practically once Lopatin and Safdie started work on the music. Instead, Lopatin’s score would be a broader mash-up of techniques and influences to get the same desired effects, bringing a Czechoslovakian orchestra, a choir, a flutist, and instruments from around the world.
“And then Dan would mix that with synth patches. He had this idea when he was listening to the pop music of that era, there was a lot of synthesized mallets — [King] Crimson from the ’80s with [drummer Bill] Bruford — and he was like, ‘This is what the thing sounds like,” said Safdie. In essence, Lopatin’s process was not unlike what Safdie was doing with his mash-up of Gabriel’s song and the 1940s footage. The director described the score much like he does his movie: “We’re going to have a conversation with the past and link up with some of the needle drops — we’re using New Order’s drum pattern for one of the cues later in the movie. So they’re all talking to one another.”
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