![]() ![]() ![]() The brothers still didn’t have the budget for Uncut Gems, so they made Good Time, a nervy and exhilarating one-night odyssey scripted specifically for Pattinson. Heaven Knows What made the Safdies a known entity, attracting attention from Martin Scorsese (who executive produced Uncut Gems) and Robert Pattinson, who emailed the Safdies, enthusiastic to collaborate. “It’s still in Gems, but it was a lot bigger before,” says Benny. The toxic relationships in Heaven Knows What were initially intended to be a plot thread in Uncut Gems, between Howard and the two women in his life. “The addiction aspect deepens your knowledge of what it means to get lost in a cycle and not be able to see through to the other side.” “We couldn’t make Uncut Gems at that time, so we made a film about her life,” says Benny, adding that Heaven Knows What’s addiction theme influenced Howard’s self-destructive behaviour. She became both Heaven Knows What’s inspiration and star. After that, Josh went to the Diamond District to do research and met Arielle Holmes, a recovering heroin addict who was interning with a jeweller. The Safdies spent four years on Lenny Cooke, which informed the way they wrote Garnett’s role in Uncut Gems. “Once you can’t make something, your interests move to what’s in the script because you want to deepen your knowledge,” explains Benny during a joint phone interview with Josh. A decade ago, the Safdies couldn’t raise the budget required to make Gems, much less land a meeting with Adam Sandler, their first choice to play the lead. They wrote the first draft of the screenplay immediately after finishing another film inspired by their father, 2009’s Daddy Longlegs, starring frequent collaborator Ronald Bronstein. Uncut Gems is inspired from stories told by the Safdies’ father, who worked as a runner and salesman in the Diamond District. He places complicated bets on basketball games using loan money plans to auction off an Ethiopian black opal he believes is worth millions even though he has a ready customer in NBA star Kevin Garnett (playing himself) and navigates tumultuous relationships with his fed-up wife Dinah (Idina Menzel) and his younger girlfriend Julia (scene-stealer Julia Fox). Set in 2012, replete with period-appropriate iPhones, Uncut Gems stars Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, a jeweller in New York City’s Diamond District who is addicted to risk. Together they laid the groundwork for Uncut Gems, a nerve-racking black comedy that connects the major themes from all their films: addiction, capitalism, toxic relationships, exploited labour and race relations. In the past decade, the New York-based sibling filmmakers directed the basketball documentary Lenny Cooke (2013), the addiction drama Heaven Knows What (2014) and the grimy crime thriller Good Time (2017). Josh and Benny Safdie are on a blistering film streak. Co-writer and Safdie collaborator Ronnie Bronstein told Complex that it was after "Good Time" that "Uncut Gems" began to look like the film it eventually became: "Literally the day after we finished 'Good Time,' we were able to just dismantle the script, finally get rid of all these outmoded vestiges and rebuild it using the muscles that we developed.UNCUT GEMS (Josh and Benny Safdie). " Good Time" was great practice for the team in terms of focusing on pace and plot. Telling stories in their films "Heaven Knows What" and "Daddy Longlegs" got some elements "out of their system," as Benny Safdie said, allowing them to whittle away at the story (via Complex). With each project, the Safdies learned something new and improved upon their craft. Eventually, they pared it back down to focus on their main character, Howard.Īll of these rewrites took place over several years, with stops and starts in between as other projects came up. Then, they expanded it to explore more people within the Diamond District ("At one point, the story was so sprawling we had people encouraging us to make it a TV show," Josh Safdie told Complex). The Safdies took the screenplay through many iterations, the first of which was essentially an adaptation of their father's stories. ![]()
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