Josh Safdie on Marty Supreme: ‘One dream has to end for another to begin’

Marty Supreme is not so much a sports film, as one about a dreamer. Or maybe a salesman: someone who knows how to market and pitch his dream to others. In Josh Safdie’s 1950s table tennis epic, Marty Mauser’s (Timothée Chalamet), a wiry, pencil-moustached, 23-year-old Jewish American, is driven by a near-delirious desire to become the best player in the world. That obsession unfolds against a rapidly shifting postwar landscape, where power belongs not to athletes but to pen moguls, and where a single table tennis match can carry the weight of a nation’s success story.  “I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare,” Marty quips to journalists, as traditional notions of ambition collide with the entropic force of the new American Dream.

Loosely inspired by table tennis sensation Marty Reisman, Marty Supreme marks Josh Safdie’s first solo directorial effort since 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed. In the years since, Safdie has become synonymous with the frenetic, hustler-driven cinema he made alongside his brother Benny, from Good Time (2017) to Uncut Gems (2019). Here, stepping out alone, it’s clear that he has materialised as a solo tour-de-force with one of the best films of 2025.

Jumping between multiple registers – the sports picture, screwball comedy, high society satire, romance, and even gangster film – Marty Supreme takes us on a topsy-turvy ride. Marty encounters a smattering of impossible Safdie-esque situations, each threatening to spiral as his get-rich-quick schemes collide with reality. He hustles his way through an orbit of characters drawn from Safdie’s brightest constellation: Abel Ferrera as a ruthless dog-owning gangster in New York; Kevin O’Leary as Marty’s punitive patron; Gwyneth Paltrow as a fading Hollywood starlet who is charmed into bed by Marty’s boyish cockiness; Tyler, the Creator as fellow hustler and most reliable friend; and Odessa A’zion, one of the film’s most exciting newcomers, as Marty’s on-off lover, hustling just as hard for his affection as he is for success.

Below, Josh Safdie talks to Dazed about the film’s focus on dreamers, his critique of the American Dream, his influences and his unique set-ups on set.

Can you talk a bit about the writing process? How do you build upon all your Safdie-esque digressions, then bring it back into its centre?

Josh Safdie: The movie is a dreamer’s journey. Marty’s vessel – his rocket ship to the dream – is table tennis, and that’s his purpose: to become the world’s greatest table tennis player. The irony, of course, is that becoming the world’s best table tennis player doesn’t actually do anything for you. It’s just a feeling of greatness that makes you feel special. I guess that’s the logic of dreams: you live your whole life feeling like you’re nothing, and then suddenly a purpose arrives, and you say, ‘No, I am something. I’m not going to live this predetermined fate that was handed to me before I was born.’ The irony is that he does end up there. But he ends up there on his own terms.

When Ronnie [Bronstein] and I are writing, we need to understand the setting, the time, the locations, and then the characters. We write backstories for all the characters – even those who have one line. Then comes the question, what is this person’s central problem that they are trying to solve?

With this film, we knew we wanted it to end with Marty having a baby. Ultimately, it’s a love story. Love and dreams are the only things that exist outside of time. Through that lens, he just can’t commit to love until he has grappled with himself. He’s a loner, he’s a misfit, he’s an outcast. When Ronnie and I are writing, we know our characters will always do what they want to do – we can’t force them to do anything – so we set up the scenario, and then we deal with the consequences. Marty’s young and brash, so some of his choices create complex scenarios, but I do think that Marty makes the best possible decision he could in every scenario.

The film repeatedly returns to the idea of salesmanship. The final showdown takes place at what is essentially a promotional event for the American pen company Rockwell, and nearly every character operates as a kind of salesman – particularly Marty, who’s constantly selling his own star power and turning ideas into capital. Can you talk a bit about why this is such a prominent element of the film? 

Josh Safdie: The Second World War fundamentally reshaped how individuals imagined their capacity to change the world through the American Dream. You have to sell yourself for your dream – every moment is do-or-die to get people on your side. Capitalism succeeds by tapping into the essence of things and then distilling them into an iconic form. I remember someone once telling me about the best business model. You tell someone, ‘sell me this pen,’ and I’d sell it by saying: ‘I signed my marriage certificate with this pen; I signed three of my biggest contracts with this pen; my entire life turned around because of this pen.’ In other words, you have to create a myth.

So when the film reaches that table-tennis-pen promo near the end, I was thinking about how Americans introduced this new form of individualism into Japan – something utterly unprecedented at the time. The American occupation forces wrote the Japanese Constitution after the war. That moment marked the beginning of a new era of corporate capitalism and a subtler form of colonialism. Milton Rockwell is essentially an American carpetbagger, importing a mode of vampiric domination into Japan. It’s fascinating that table tennis is what helped Japan come out of isolationism, with this huge moment of national pride, after their invention of the so-called ‘atomic paddle’ that obliterated other players.

Endo and Marty are both individuals with dreams, while also carrying an entire nation on their backs. Because they’re both doing that, it breaks down the illusion that there are divides between people. At the end of the day, they’re just two people striving for greatness – and for the Japanese, for Endo, it’s even more powerful because, as the newsreel says, he has 85 million souls behind him. Marty’s got nobody. He has one person behind him: Rachel. That’s such a loud expression of American individualism. It’s all about you. And if you don’t believe in it, no one’s going to believe in it. 

The ending of the film is a really complicated moment. Making it was like putting a very fine thread through a needle. I wanted to show the triumph and honour the dream, but there’s also a sense of, ‘Is that it?’ When I finished the film, someone asked me, ‘What’s next?’ and I just burst into tears, because a dream is always about having a purpose, but then you are alone after. You know, dreams are for the lonely. You have to ask yourself: do you want to be alone for the rest of your life? And then you start to think about who believed in this dream, and how one dream has to end for another to begin.

When I finished the film, someone asked me, ‘What’s next?’ and I just burst into tears, because a dream is always about having a purpose, but then you are alone after

Your films often feel chaotic and full of surprises. How do you bring that energy onto set, and what does your process look like when working with actors?

Josh Safdie: The sense of shock or surprise in my work comes from my interest in capturing a certain verisimilitude with the real world, with all the imperfections that life actually brings – I was thinking of how to make the trash look real – against capturing the real essence of someone’s energy. The first time I saw Timmy speak, he couldn’t keep still, and I was just thinking about that energy. To combine all those things, I have to go above and beyond with casting and timing. In scenes, I’ll often have lots of extras who are actually speaking – and sometimes that means speaking to the actors even when they’re not prepared for it. The actors have to be completely present and in the moment because something unscripted might happen at any time.

In the scene where Gwyneth Paltrow’s character comes back into the party, there were about 150 extras all talking and having normal conversations. When she did the first take, she was shocked. She found it liberating. She’s so used to playing in scenes where everyone has to pretend to talk, and you feel like everyone is eavesdropping on you. It’s really uncomfortable, as someone who has acted in a few things myself, I hate feeling like I’m being watched. Sometimes, when I’m directing a scene, I’ll throw myself behind the couch. I want to feel like I’m there but not there, so the actors don’t feel like I’m watching them.

What inspirations were you drawing from to create this period piece? 

Josh Safdie: I was speaking to a lot of people who lived in New York during that time, especially my great uncle, who played with some of these players.  My wife, who is a producer in the movie, also ran the research department. We found that incredible avant-garde Ken Jacobs film, Orchard Street, which showed the energy of the Lower East Side. He actually does something in the middle of it, where he films himself making out with a girl, in the middle of a real environment. The romanticism of the city in that period is so perfectly distilled. So that was really, really inspiring for all of us to try to tap into.

The photography of Ernst Haas was very inspiring because he was using Ektachrome reversal film in the time period which is so bright and vivid. Irving Penn had a series called Small Trades where he would just pull real people off the street and photograph them. It's an incredible series. For New York in particular, Weegee’s work was really important.

Time feels very present in your films — there’s always a ticking clock pressing down on the characters, from Good Time to Uncut Gems. But here, there’s also a strange sense of anachronism, especially with the use of 1980s music in a 1950s setting. How do you think about time in your work?

Josh Safdie: I was specifically interested in the 1980s as the Reagan period, in which he was trying to resuscitate the American Dream, after the defeat in Vietnam and an economic depression. Reagan brought in the first post-modern, capitalist moment. It feels like time is on a loop, in the sense of Mark Fisher’s hauntology, since the 1980s, after capitalism won, you’re constantly returning to the past. You hear 1980s music all the time. I was listening to Peter Gabriel’s ‘I Have the Touch’ while watching a 1940s newsreel of a table tennis tournament, and my instinct was, I love the rush of this pop music, this feeling that anything is possible, and I was thinking of my daughter who always speaks about having this ‘big feeling’, and I was like, ‘how can I hold onto this feeling?’

Another reason is that Marty was ahead of his time. Part of me believes that the movie is being told from his perspective as a 60-year-old man who is at a Tears for Fears concert with his granddaughter. I also believe that youth is a state of mind. My production designer Jack Fisk is the youngest person I know, and he’s 78. 

Marty Supreme is released in UK cinemas on December 26