Ken Jacobs' Orchard Street is a 1955 avant-garde short documenting real life on the Lower East Side. It had just been restored when Safdie's team found it.
Safdie (speaking on the A24 podcast with Sean Baker): "We had this Ken Jacobs film, Orchard Street, that was like a Bible for us. A real life document of what that street was like."
Production designer Jack Fisk called it "the key piece of research that brought the whole crew together." The production shot on Orchard Street itself, converting a real storefront into the fictional Northridge shoe store.
That's how specific Safdie's references get. Here's every film he and his collaborators named.
The Hustler (1961, dir. Robert Rossen)
The structural and thematic anchor. A cocky, self-destructive prodigy chasing mastery at all costs in a niche subculture, willing to destroy himself for the win.
Timothée Chalamet named it as his primary performance reference. Critics noted the film "recalls the pool halls in The Color of Money."
The Color of Money (1986, dir. Martin Scorsese)
Chalamet cited this alongside The Hustler as the second leg of the "hustler chasing mastery" lineage. Scorsese's film had Paul Newman reprising Fast Eddie Felson 25 years later. The generational echo matters: Marty Supreme is also about what happens when a prodigy hits the limits of his talent and his will.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971, dir. Robert Altman)
Safdie discussed Altman's approach on the A24 podcast. He praised the practice of holding daily on-set screenings for the cast and crew. He talked about Altman requiring actors to stay present for unscripted moments. He described Altman's use of real townspeople as extras as part of a "direct cinema" tradition he deliberately adopted for Marty Supreme.
He shared a detail: Warren Beatty couldn't hear other actors' dialogue on the set of McCabe because Altman had designed the sound to overlap and decay naturally. Safdie framed this as an example of directorial commitment he admired.
The Moment of Truth (1965, dir. Francesco Rosi)
This one is technical but important.
Safdie and cinematographer Darius Khondji tracked a rare 360mm anamorphic Cinemascope lens at Panavision that had not been used in years. They traced it back to Rosi's bullfighting film. Safdie told the A24 podcast directly: "It was used on Rosi's The Moment of Truth, the bullfighting."
Khondji (speaking to Hammer to Nail): "It came from a movie we watched from a great Italian director, Francesco Rosi, who had this cinematographer, Gianni Di Venanzo."
The goal was to shoot the table tennis sequences "as if the film was shot like it was in the 1950s, the early days of Cinemascope."
Delicatessen (1991, dir. Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
This is how Safdie found his cinematographer.
From the ASC article on Marty Supreme, Safdie's quote: "I first became aware of him in high school when I saw Delicatessen, and then later, his other work, and those movies shaped the way I looked at film. Those movies were so clearly filled with a passion and love for the medium, and that's something I look for when hiring somebody."
Darius Khondji shot Delicatessen. That film led to Se7en, Evita, and now Marty Supreme.
The French Connection (1971, dir. William Friedkin)
Khondji's reference for the Orchard Street chase sequence. He called it "one of our guardian angels" specifically for that scene: a chaotic, crowded street chase requiring the gritty, hand-held authenticity Friedkin brought to the same era.
Barry Lyndon (1975, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Safdie drew a specific parallel between Kubrick's quest for NASA-developed lenses for Barry Lyndon and his own team's hunt for the rare 360mm Panavision lens. Two productions, 50 years apart, both refusing to accept what was easily available in favor of historically appropriate optics.
George Bellows' Paintings as Lighting Reference
This is not a film, but Khondji explicitly named Bellows. The 19th-century American painter's boxing paintings, with their overhead warm light and faces lit dramatically from below, directly informed the lighting design for the table tennis match sequences. Khondji: "Honoré Daumier and Georges Bellows provided the most valuable inspiration for the table tennis, both for the iconic faces and the warm way they were lit from the bottom."
The Score: Hauntology and Peter Gabriel
The film is set in the 1950s. The score sounds like the 1980s. This is not a mistake.
Safdie explained it using philosopher Mark Fisher's concept of hauntology: since the 1980s, culture under capitalism has been "constantly returning to the past." He listened to Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch" over 1,000 times while writing the script. The score by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) draws from New Order, Tears for Fears, and the Rocky franchise.
The temporal mismatch is the point.
The Bottom Line
Timothée Chalamet won the SAG Award for Best Actor for this film. He's at around 35% to win the Oscar. Marty Supreme is tracking at roughly 3% for Best Picture.
Track live odds at waitingforamacguffin.com.
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