And that was immediately symbolic, the trappings of consumerism. It's this idea of taking pop culture and canonizing it with wealth. They come from Russian immigrants sitting in closed Plexiglas rooms building the molds out and then encrusting them with diamonds. There was a fun quality to the pieces that were made. When I first started getting into research in the diamond district, the first thing I was taken aback by was the portraiture of culture through the objects that were made.
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One of my favorite objects in the movie is the diamond-studded Furbies. But I recognize that it's a problem for me, and I deposit back that urge and feeling into other avenues. Josh, has gambling ever presented actual problems for you?
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I say, "Josh, what are you playing?" He says, "Give me a second." And the woman is actually teaching him how to play the game he's playing.
And as I get to the table, the woman says, "You just lost," and she takes all of the chips away. And I see him on the opposite side of the casino, sitting at a table, and he's just kind of nodding along. I'll meet you outside." So I leave, but then I can't find Josh. And there was one time where we got into the casino and we made a good amount. And we would find the casino, find the campgrounds nearby, drive to the casino, gamble, and then go back to the tent, which was a very sad thing. And as we were driving, Josh would clock all of the casinos that were there. When Daddy Longlegs came out, we were doing a self-created press tour for it where we got out to Seattle and then we were going to drive down to Los Angeles, doing Q&As and stuff along the way. So I can relate to putting everything on the line.īut in the sense of actual gambling, Josh is a heavy gambler. And if that one fails, hey, you're screwed. Are you guys gamblers?īenny: Both of us are gamblers in the sense that with every movie we've put everything we have into the movie and parlayed it onto the next movie. Sandler’s character, Howard, is a compulsive gambler. And it was the only version of the movie that I think could've worked. It's a tense thriller, and it needs his comedic timing in order to add these bits of comic relief. And from a very early stage, we knew that Sandler's lovability and his humor were paramount to the success of the movie on a creative level. It was in the tradition of these heroic 20th-century Jews that we idolized. And the character was very emotional and very moody. But then his movies came out and were these absurdist stories with these heroes at the center that were anti-capitalist in a weird way.
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And it starts to break free from the actual stiltedness of a comedy record. And they just keep fucking with him and fucking with him and fucking with him. Josh: There's a track on one of his first records where Sandler plays a guy who's messing with his friend. “We joked that we would be 70 years old when this movie eventually got made,” Benny says. But they were all, at least partially, in the service of their dream. The movies they made were, on their own, some of the best of the decade. They developed a distinctive fast-and-close, dizzying New York style, and a reputation for tapping into what’s left of the city’s underworld. Hell, they turned Robert Pattinson into a grimy, always-moving con artist. They made short films they adapted Arielle Holmes’s junkie journals they made a documentary about the flameout basketball phenom Lenny Cooke. But the Safdies had a vision for the way they would make the movie-how big it needed to be, the style they’d shoot it in, the story they wanted to tell-and when it came to their vision, they wouldn’t compromise.Īnd so, for a while, the dream remained a dream.
When Amar’e Stoudemire didn’t pan out, they turned to Kevin Garnett, and they locked the film in 2012. The year the movie was set would be dictated by the basketball player they got. When Sandler initially turned the Safdies down, they considered Jonah Hill or Sacha Baron Cohen as their protagonist, Howard Ratner. The details were subject to modification over the years. And they dreamed of him laying everything on the line-money and his family’s future, but also actual life and death-with that gem and Amar’e Stoudemire’s performance in a single basketball game. They dreamed of him holding a big, beautiful Ethiopian opal. They dreamed of him scampering around 47th Street with both the swagger of someone who owns the place and also the glancing-over-the-shoulder anxiety of someone who could be eaten alive at any moment. For the past ten years, Uncut Gems filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie have dreamed of Adam Sandler with a nervous overbite, teeny drill-mount glasses, and twinkling diamond-stud earrings. Some people dream of riches, others fame, and others love.
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