{"id":392575,"date":"2026-01-06T21:56:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T21:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/392575\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T21:56:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T21:56:07","slug":"the-cut-ending-scene-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/392575\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cut Ending Scene, Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Safdie <\/a>really didn\u2019t want to make a period film<\/a>. The \u201cMarty Supreme<\/a>\u201d co-writer\/director, telling IndieWire, while on the Toolkit podcast<\/a>, he \u201chad a slight repulsion towards doing period.\u201d Part of what drew him to tell a story of the \u201crugged individualism\u201d of post-World War II America was that it didn\u2019t feel old.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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\u2019s victory and glory after the war,\u201d said Safdie on the podcast. \u201cThe way they tell a story, if they\u2019re a good raconteur, they tell you the story, and you\u2019re in it emotionally, and it feels contemporary, and it feels very relatable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Renate<\/a> \"'The<\/a> <\/p>\n

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 \u201940s and early \u201950s, including the table tennis matches of Marty Reisman, the real-life inspiration for his fictional Marty Mauser character (played by Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet<\/a>). The archival footage brought the history of the sport to life, but it was also frustrating \u200a\u201cbecause I couldn\u2019t go and do this research and I couldn\u2019t be contemporary about it,\u201d explained Safdie.<\/p>\n

Research has always been a big part of Safdie\u2019s 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 \u2014 \u201cI hate, hate, hate that.\u201d In addition to not knowing how to stage and shoot the ping pong scenes<\/a>, the biggest open question Safdie would have to figure out to make \u201cMarty Supreme<\/a>\u201d was how he could bridge his instincts as a filmmaker and storyteller with making a period film.<\/p>\n

He points to one particular moment as a breakthrough, recalled Safdie, \u201cWhen 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 \u2014 I listen to a song a thousand times, and I\u2019ll get my Spotify wrap, and it\u2019s literally like I\u2019m a psychopath.\u201d The opening lyrics of that Gabriel song \u201cI Have the Touch,\u201d in particular resonated.<\/p>\n

The time I like is the rush hour
\u2018Cause I like the rush
The pushing of the people
I like it all so much<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt matched the energy of these like wiry young guys,\u201d said Safdie of watching the ping pong footage with the song playing. \u201c[It] just worked, I can\u2019t say anything [about why], except it just worked, and it added a mythic legendary quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instinctively, Safdie then googled 1940s NYC subways and discovered a 1949 industrial \u201cRapid Transit,\u201d 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 \u2014 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<\/a> (\u201cThe French Connection,\u201d \u201cThe Taking of Pelham One Two Three.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s unbelievable, the best New York cinematographer of all time, right? And his father was doing the same thing with no glory,\u201d said Safdie, who at that moment felt the universe was talking to him. He quickly did a rudimentary mash-up of \u201cI Have the Touch\u201d and \u201cRapid Transit\u201d on his iPhone, and for the first time, he understood how he could make a period film. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over time, as he started to work out the concept for \u201cMarty Supreme,\u201d Safdie said he was able to better understand why the \u201980s music and his \u201950s setting worked in the context of Marty\u2019s seemingly boundless ambition to achieve an outsized version of the American Dream through ping pong.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m no historian, but in my research I saw in the \u201980s [there was] this rebirth of the American Dream, in almost air quotes,\u201d said Safdie. \u201cI was just thinking, \u2018OK, what was happening in the \u201980s? The birth of postmodernism, the first era where they were redoing the \u201950s, \u200aliterally in music and fashion, and you have [President] Reagan, who was trying to follow defeat by chasing the prosperity of victory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Safdie said he began to intellectually understand these connections as he wrote all but one of the \u201980s needle drops into the script (only The Korgi\u2019s track \u201cEverybody\u2019s Got to Learn Sometime\u201d would come later). In addition to the Gabriel track, Tears for Fears\u2019 \u201cEverybody Wants to Rule the World,\u201d Alphaville\u2019s \u201cForever Young,\u201d New Order\u2019s \u201cThe Perfect Kiss,\u201d and Public Image Ltd\u2019s \u201cThe Order of Death\u201d brought out \u201cthis mythic legendary quality to youth\u201d that Safdie went on to explain was a crucial aspect of \u201cMarty Supreme.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt one point, it was in the script that the movie should be told from a point of view looking back at your youth,\u201d said Safdie. \u201cSo the movie really is from Marty\u2019s point of view in the \u201980s when he\u2019s at a Tears for Fears\u2019 concert with his granddaughter, and he\u2019s hearing the lyrics, \u2018Everybody Wants to Rule the World,\u2019 and he\u2019s thinking about the confidence of youth, the lack of understanding of consequences of youth, the individualist wave that youth can jolt into you. \u200aSo that really was the foundation of the sonic landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea that Marty\u2019s 1950s story was his character\u2019s 1980s flashback faded away over time, but it does explain the deleted ending scene Chalamet described to IndieWire<\/a>, in which he was aged decades. Some sliver of the original concept survived through production, only to be cut in post-production.<\/p>\n

\"TimothéeTimoth\u00e9e Chalamet and Josh Safdie<\/a> on the set of \u2018Marty Supreme\u2019A24<\/p>\n

Yet, as Safdie indicated, the big tangible connection between the \u201950s and \u201980s is the music, and his \u201cGood Time\u201d and \u201cUncut Gems\u201d composer Daniel Lopatin <\/a>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 \u201cEccojams.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe took \u201980s radio tracks and almost in a Steve Reich-ian way remixed them, and it had a very haunted quality,\u201d Safdie said. \u201cAnd I wanted the past to haunt the future, and the future to haunt the past, with this movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a concept that sounded good, but didn\u2019t work practically once Lopatin and Safdie started work on the music. Instead, Lopatin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd 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 \u2014 [King] Crimson from the \u201980s with [drummer Bill] Bruford \u2014 and he was like, \u2018This is what the thing sounds like,\u201d said Safdie. In essence, Lopatin\u2019s process was not unlike what Safdie was doing with his mash-up of Gabriel\u2019s song and the 1940s footage. The director described the score much like he does his movie: \u201cWe\u2019re going to have a conversation with the past and link up with some of the needle drops \u2014 we\u2019re using New Order\u2019s drum pattern for one of the cues later in the movie. So they\u2019re all talking to one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

To hear Josh Safdie\u2019s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast<\/a> on\u00a0Apple<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>, or your favorite podcast platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Josh Safdie really didn\u2019t want to make a period film. The \u201cMarty Supreme\u201d co-writer\/director, telling IndieWire, while on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,1554,31810,43423,43424,337,166305],"class_list":{"0":"post-392575","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-filmmaker-toolkit-podcast","13":"tag-josh-safdie","14":"tag-marty-supreme","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-timotheu00e9-chalamet"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}