{"id":401094,"date":"2026-01-09T03:08:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T03:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/401094\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T03:08:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T03:08:08","slug":"josh-safdie-and-chloe-zhao-on-casting-timothee-chalamet-in-marty-supreme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/401094\/","title":{"rendered":"Josh Safdie and Chlo\u00e9 Zhao on Casting Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet in ‘Marty Supreme’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOn the surface, Chlo\u00e9 Zhao<\/a> and Josh Safdie<\/a> are not similar filmmakers. But together, in a one-on-one conversation, the directors bond over the importance of achieving a frequency while on set \u2014 whether that\u2019s the contemplative hum of 300 extras meditating outside a replica of the Globe Theatre in \u201cHamnet\u201d or the cast of \u201cMarty Supreme\u201d riding the rattle of an urban jungle, playing hustlers and operators.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u00a0With \u201cHamnet,\u201d starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Zhao peels back the legend of William Shakespeare and reveals a domestic tragedy that shaped his art. She examines how a seemingly happy family is shattered by the death of one its members, in a style that is melancholic and dreamlike. And with the propulsive \u201cMarty Supreme,\u201d Safdie lights a fuse that sends Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet, as table-tennis striver Marty Mauser, bouncing across New York, London and Tokyo. At each stop, he spreads chaos and sprints away from trouble, all while narrowing in on his dream to become a superstar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe two acclaimed films have put the directors in the middle of the Oscar race. Zhao, who seems Zen in person, and Safdie, who radiates nervous intensity, meet up in New York to discuss their passion for cinema and their surprisingly simpatico approaches to moviemaking. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCHLO\u00c9 ZHAO: There\u2019s a kind of a paradox of emotions that weaves through your films.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJOSH SAFDIE: I like to think of my movies as about happiness and trying to chase it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: But that\u2019s the saddest thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: A hundred percent. Happiness is a very sad thing, which is a strange thing to say. It\u2019s so haunted and fleeting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: I\u2019ve seen many of your films, including the earlier ones. And there is a running away from self, like the fear of staying still.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhy did you cast Timoth\u00e9e? \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: I met him before \u201cCall Me by Your Name\u201d came out. He was just this kid who had this supreme vision for himself. He felt like a dreamer \u2014 an intense one. And the dreaming was almost pathologized. I could tell he was trying to control where he was going.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: You capture that so well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBenedict Evans for Variety<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: I was watching him in other films, and I was like, no one\u2019s exploring that. He did great in those other films, but I was like, \u201cOh wow \u2014 this side is still kind of untapped.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe played Bob Dylan and Marty in the same year, and he had about four months in between. So when he wrapped, that day, he came to my office. He was still in Dylan\u2019s voice \u2014 he was still acting like Dylan. [That\u2019s when] I gave him 300 pages of images and research and the script.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe apex of \u201cHamnet\u201d is being in touch with nature. All your other films are about nature in many ways. But this one was psychedelic almost.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: I think both of our films are pretty good to watch on psychedelics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: Oh, really? I can\u2019t. My relationship with drugs is such a bad one. When I would smoke weed a while ago, it was a self-punishing experience. I would do it to inspect all of the things that I hated about myself and then put them in a category to study.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: [That\u2019s] your inner dialogue with all your shadows. But what I love about your films is that, like Shakespeare\u2019s plays, they\u2019re not afraid of the shadows. It\u2019s hard for me to get my characters to the places you get your characters to, storywise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: What do you mean by that?<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: The situations they\u2019re in; allowing their shadows to come up. And to let these compulsions grab them completely, and then they do things that are almost unthinkable and sometimes unforgivable. And yet, [you] still give them humanity. That\u2019s what a lot of characters in Shakespeare\u2019s plays are like. He was swimming with his shadows nightly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: Your films feel very free.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: I find that being on set, working with the actors, trying to go, \u201cCan you hold the tension between knowing and not knowing? Because I need you to have a container for the character, but I also need you to let go to the mystery.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: You\u2019re having that exact conversation with them?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBenedict Evans for Variety<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: Well, I asked them at the beginning, I said, \u201cHold it.\u201d That means coming in, having some intention, but not knowing where the scene\u2019s going to go; they don\u2019t practice where it\u2019s heading, so we\u2019ll just see how it goes. If I come in every day knowing what\u2019s going to happen, then [the film] is just mine, and that\u2019s pretty small. There\u2019s something so much bigger. But if you don\u2019t have a container for it, then it\u2019s just chaos. It\u2019s not going to be a film. So how do we find that balance \u2014 to be half of the time a container, half the time a channel for whatever comes through?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: Time is kind of a container in general.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: For sure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: There are a few things that exist outside of time. Love exists outside of time. I remember Einstein once tried to explain relativity to somebody and said, \u201cEveryone knows that an hour with your hand on a stove is an eternity. An hour with the person you love is over in a second.\u201d And I\u2019m pretty sure Einstein said that in kind of layman\u2019s terms to try to explain relativity. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI try to find meaning in the micro. I believe in psychoanalysis. I believe in the development of a brain, early childhood trauma. I try to give all the actors that, so that they can have some semblance of internal monologue, which is some version of \u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: That is absolutely a container.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: Yeah. When I\u2019m on set, sometimes I\u2019m chasing something. I spend all this time writing the scripts \u2014 six years with this one \u2014 and in the scenes, I\u2019m chasing. I\u2019m somehow always trying to transcend the situations \u2014 trying to get the actor to transcend \u2014 but you can only do it so much. And I would rely on being on set with the performer and seeing them attach themselves to a moment, and all of a sudden, it transcends past the page \u2014 the camera even. You push the actors to that place, and the best way to do it is by throwing stimuli at them so it catches them off guard.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: Give me examples. Because clearly you brought things out of a lot of your actors that we haven\u2019t seen them do before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: It\u2019s a huge moment in the movie, so small though. Tyler, the Creator \u2014 Tyler Okonma \u2014 plays Wally, [Marty\u2019s] friend who doesn\u2019t have the luxury to dream. And there\u2019s a frustration there. They\u2019re doing this hustle at the bowling alley, and Marty\u2019s playing the heel and Wally\u2019s playing the victim, and he\u2019s getting everybody to rally behind him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd I told Tyler to really push it in his anger at Marty. And one take, he really pushed it: He threw his hand into Timmy and pushed his glasses into his face. And in that moment, you\u2019re seeing all the extras \u2014 I had extras throwing lines in all the time to catch Timmy off guard, so he\u2019s constantly having to interact with them. And in that moment, you\u2019re seeing Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet kind of be like, \u201cOh my God, this guy just pushed me in my face in front of all these people.\u201d And there\u2019s a humility in that moment, but it\u2019s underneath the performance. It\u2019s one of the most moving moments in the film. And I always tell Timmy that, and I thank Tyler for being able to go there. Those are the moments where you\u2019re seeing your actor transcend and kind of fuse with themself.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: So satisfying.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: It really is. I felt that at the end of \u201cHamnet,\u201d the beautiful moment when everyone\u2019s reaching their hand out; you really can feel. It\u2019s the faces, it\u2019s the costumes, the beautiful way the film is shot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: It\u2019s also the energy of the people there. There was a synchronization. There\u2019s an energy that builds, builds, builds, and it comes through on-screen. We worked with this amazing woman, Kim Gillingham; she\u2019s a dreamwork coach who comes from a Jungian tradition. So before I even wrote the script, Jessie and I were doing dreamwork together. Our dreams had already started mingling. By the time we got to the Globe, the cast and crew all went through dreamwork. She would be on the stage, and she would drop 300 people into a somatic meditation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: Everyone went through them?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: Oh, yeah. They\u2019re all in a collective dream. There\u2019s something about harmonizing the vibration of people, because we are made of vibrating particles from the universe. Once they vibrated at the same pace, it\u2019s incredible how little I needed to do, because then they\u2019re moving as one organism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: I saw your film in the theater, and I could feel the energy around me during that final scene. There were some older women who were completely hysterical, inconsolable, to the point where I\u2019m like, \u201cOh no!\u201d But it added to the moment. It speaks to the power of a theatrical experience. I\u2019ve seen some of my favorite films on my 10-inch television at the foot of my bed, but then you go and revisit them when they\u2019re in theaters, and all of a sudden you\u2019re feeling some sort of collective energy. Time doesn\u2019t exist anymore. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDoes seeing films in theaters matter to you?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tZHAO: It does matter to me. But I spent time on a reservation in South Dakota for many, many years. And the fact that your film \u201cDaddy Longlegs\u201d can be seen by a kid there, who may have had similar experiences to what you did, is because they can access it online. The accessibility aspect [of streaming] is great.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSAFDIE: You\u2019re pointing out the right thing. They\u2019re two completely different experiences and they\u2019re both incredibly meaningful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the surface, Chlo\u00e9 Zhao and Josh Safdie are not similar filmmakers. But together, in a one-on-one conversation,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,77398,213274,134,52395,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-401094","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-chlou00e9-zhao","11":"tag-directors-on-directors","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-josh-safdie","14":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}