Josh Safdie is going through it. The writer-director has been on the grind of a mercilessly packed press tour itinerary, jumping from screening to screening and sometimes continent to continent. With this much motion, calamity is inevitable. “I lost my luggage in Brazil,” Safdie laments. “Had a drug rash. Ran out of underwear, so I’m flipping through the Zara website in Brazil to find some…it’s been an interesting couple of days.”
This is the kind of relentless bad luck that would start to befall a Josh Safdie protagonist around Act 2, before things escalate to life-or-death stakes. Still, Safdie can hardly complain, given what all this movement means for his motion in the zeitgeist sense of the word.
Marty Supreme, his first feature film in six years and the first he’s directed on his own since 2008, is arguably the most hyped movie of the moment. No small feat for a story rooted in the high-stakes drama of…ping pong. But thanks to Safdie’s signature frenetic, enveloping, distinctly New York storytelling and a career-best performance from Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme is an experience on par with the acclaimed crime dramas that made the Safdies household names. On his way to yet another promotional stop, Josh went long on the film’s origins, how he and Chalamet pushed each other, and why this is his most ambitious film to date...