Josh Safdie''Marty Supreme“, which is now in theaters, is full of '80s gangsters, including Tears from fears“Everybody wants to rule the world” and Peter Gabriel“I have touch.”
But the Safdies' latest film, in which Timothée Chalamet plays a young man from New York's Lower East Side with big dreams and aspirations to conquer the world of table tennis, is set in the 1950s.
It's an intriguing juxtaposition that totally works because this is no ordinary historical item.
Safdie, who also edited the film and wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bronstein, was inspired by watching video of the 1948 British Open table tennis tournament. “This wiry young guy was jumping all over the place, couldn’t stand still, cocky, but at the same time completely vain,” he recalls. This guy looked a lot like Marty.
Around the same time, he became obsessed with Gabriel's 1982 song, which he said he listened to more than 1,000 times. “I decided to record this song and it worked. There was something going on there; it felt mythical,” explains Safdie. He adds: “There was something modern about seeing anachronistic music combined with the '40s or early '50s.”
Safdie explains how the new wave-influenced music actually fits with the film's themes. “President Reagan was nostalgic for that first postmodern era, actively trying to remember the '50s. In the face of defeat at the hands of Vietnam, the culture was really just beginning to remake itself in the spirit of the '50s. You saw it in style. You saw it in the movies. 'Back to the Future' literally goes back to the '50s. But on a very simple level, when you do that, the past starts to feel like it's haunting the future. And the future feels like it's haunting the past.”
At one point, Safdie wrote a film version that featured Marty in the 1980s. This was an alternate ending. Safdie says, “He's at a Tears for Fears concert with his granddaughter, listening to the lyrics to 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' and reflecting on his youth.”
This scene was ultimately removed. But Safdie stayed true to the tunes of the 1980s, including New Order, as “propulsive, energetic and fun”, while continuing to explore concepts of past and future in conversation.
To create the score, Safdie turned to composer Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), who wrote the music for both “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems.” Known for inventing vaporwave, a 2010s electronic music genre that offers a nostalgic, surreal take on 1980s music, Lopatin was the perfect choice to tie together the film's most exciting moments. Lopatin says there was no real difference between the table tennis game Marty plays and his spirit. “He's cheerful and energetic and no one believes in him. He has an energy, a buoyancy and a lightness about him that reflects in the game itself,” he says.
Lopatin used fast, percussive strokes to keep the score melodic, including hammer strikes that echoed ping-pong balls. He notes, “Those hammer sounds are also very prominent in new wave music and '80s synth-pop.”
Lopatin was inspired by the concept of memory and time, as well as the original ending. “The story goes back to what it would have been like to remember growing up in the 1950s, hearing 'Tears of Fear' thundering in your ears, and maybe being side by side with your children, but somewhere else in your head?” The result, according to Lopatin, was “an abstraction of that Tears for Fears concert.” He describes it as what happens when the present dissolves and memory and the present converge. “The soundtrack is a kind of abstraction or undercurrent—a symbolic wave of what was in the script.”
To match the songs, which also included New Order's “The Perfect Kiss,” Lopatin used 1980s digital synthesizers, including a 1983 Yamaha DX7. He also included flutes, saxophones and string arrangements.
His music became an expression of Marty's youth, energy and ambition. If Marty is a builder and a bridge between worlds—past, present and future—the same applies to the score and its accompanying songs. Safdie concludes: “I think all of these things put together in sync with each other—the synchronicity—has this additive effect of, 'Oh my God, this movie is full of life.'
