Director Josh Safdie’s new film, “Marty Supreme,” is a semi-fictional sports drama set in 1950s New York, centered on Marty Mauser (played by Timothée Chalamet), a driven Jewish ping-pong hustler dreaming of greatness in a sport no one took seriously. Inspired by real-life Jewish table-tennis legend Marty Reisman, the film traces Marty’s upbringing in the Lower East Side and the intertwined forces of his family identity and fierce ambition that drove him.
This is Safdie’s second solo film without his brother Benny, with whom he previously made 2019’s critical and box office success “Uncut Gems,” which won them the Best Director statue at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Safdie first became fascinated with table tennis as a child, playing against his father and hearing his uncle’s stories about the colorful misfits of 20th-century New York who gravitated to the game. His father, Alberto Safdie, who was born to a Jewish family in Italy and raised in France, used to play tennis professionally all over Europe. After his mother, of Russian Jewish descent, and father got divorced, he and his brother used to split their time between their parents’ houses in Queens and Manhattan.
Growing up in New York influenced their films and the city feels like a character in them, shaping the energy, tension and space of the stories as seen in “Daddy Longlegs” (2009), “Heaven Knows What” (2014), “Good Time” (2017) and “Uncut Gems” (2019).
Coincidentally or not, most of the actors portraying the lead roles in Marty Supreme are Jewish, including Chalamet, Fran Drescher (who plays his mother), Gwyneth Paltrow (who plays his lover) and Odessa A’zion.
“Well, it’s a story about Jewish people so I needed Jewish actors,” joked Safdie at the after party/press conference at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
He learned about Marty’s story through his aunt. She bought a book from a thrift store dollar bin, written by Reisman. Safdie, then finishing “Uncut Gems,” didn’t read it immediately — but when he finally did, it opened a world far stranger and more exciting than he had ever imagined.
“I knew I wanted Timmy even before ‘Call Me By Your Name’” came out (in 2017),” he said. That year, he met Chalamet at a New York party and thought again he would be perfect for the role. Years later, when he was finally ready to offer him the part, Chalamet was all in. He trained for three months to become this phenomenal ping-pong player and watched hundreds of hours of Marty Reisman playing. “The goal wasn’t to fake it, it was to make sure he could actually play these points at half or three-quarter speed,” said Safdie.
The actor, who is turns 30 this month, said he identified with the character’s ambition, very much like his own as he started his career as an actor. “He is very motivated to achieve his goals. I felt like that was what I related to the most with this character,” said Chalamet. “It was this sort of fierce determination and drive to get to where I wanted in my career and not take no for an answer, especially in the film industry, where there’s so much rejection when you come out the gate. And really, the only person believing in yourself is you at the jump.”
Paltrow, however, took some convincing. Safdie wanted her for the role of Kay Stone, an actress who is in a loveless marriage to a wealthy businessman, played by “Shark Tank’s” Kevin O’Leary, aka “Mr. Wonderful.” He was told that the actress was retired and wasn’t taking any roles. Still, he insisted on meeting her to find out if she would be willing to come back from her early retirement.
In recent years, Paltrow has been mainly focused on Goop, her lifestyle and wellness brand. “It was sort of divine intervention,” Paltrow said. “My children were all going off to college, so it was the first time I was going to be living without children in 20 years and I didn’t quite know how to contextualize that for myself, and it felt like a very scary precipice.” She talked with her brother, Jake Paltrow, who is a filmmaker himself and he told her, ‘This movie, you have to do.‘ Josh is so talented, no matter what it is, you have to say yes.”
“My son thinks he’s so cool,” Paltrow said about Chalamet, “and my daughter, when she saw ‘Call Me By Your Name,’ she was like, swooning in the kitchen. My step-kids too. They were less thrilled about the paparazzi pictures of us kissing in the park,” she laughed. “That, I think, was slightly embarrassing to them. Or my son, probably more so.”
The Journal spoke with Josh Safdie. How was it working alone without your brother?
“You spend so many years working next to somebody and then you both decide you want to do something different. He wanted to explore one theme. I wanted to explore another. So of course, it’s different. It was emotionally different. This film was so gargantuan and ambitious that I never really had the luxury of stopping and thinking about, okay, how is directing this time different from my first film in 2008? But it is nice to be able to watch my brother’s film and see how he was expressing himself and how beautiful it is.”
Can you talk about the theme of obsession in sports but also in arts, how it’s destructive, but also pushes you to succeed?
“I think obsessiveness comes from determination and comes from an insulation where you have a very specific thing that your goal is in front of you and perfection, and this idea of supreme. Wanting to be the supreme version of yourself, to be the supreme player, you have to obsess over every detail, and you have to have that intensity again, because if you don’t believe it, no one else will. And this movie is very much about belief and those who do believe and your own belief in that dream and seeing it through.”
What was your dream as a child, and what are your dreams now?
“My dream as a little kid was to live in an alternate reality … I learned very quickly that I could convince people that I was in one if I made up as many details as I could. I think I’m chasing the dream of living in an alternate reality and making that reality fortified and as realistic as possible … I have micro dreams every day.
“I dream of building a building … I think filmmaking is architecture. One day I hope to build a public building that changes everyone’s reality as they move through it … a narrative building … But I think the essential part of dreams is the journey, they exist outside of time.”
The movie is set to be released on December 25.
