The first thing you notice about the Safdie brothers is that they are gung-ho. Formally credited on their various projects as Joshua and Ben Safdie—and gregariously introducing themselves to everyone in the room as Josh and Benny—our GQ shoot has barely begun when Josh hops onto his brother’s shoulders for a series of goofy photos. "He has amazing lower-body strength," laughs Josh as they grin for the camera.
And you can’t help but think: These cheery, friendly young dudes are the filmmakers behind two of the decade’s most harrowing cinematic portraits of New York City? The Safdie brothers are best known for their 2014 drama Heaven Knows What, which was famously derived from the real-life experiences of star Arielle Holmes, a homeless heroin addict whom the Safdie brothers met while working on a still-unreleased passion project about Manhattan’s Diamond District. (They swear it’s their next project.)
The ex-Twilight heartthrob explains how he drove a stake through his career and then resurrected it.
Good Time, the Safdie brothers’ latest, shares Heaven Knows What’s interest in the impoverished side of New York City rarely explored in modern-day cinema. But it trades the gauzy, impressionistic structure of Heaven Knows What for the trappings of a white-knuckle thriller, and casts Robert Pattinson—an honest-to-god movie star—in the lead role. (You can read our GQ cover story with Robert Pattinson here.)
In Good Time, Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a blue-collar criminal grinding it out in New York City. When a bank robbery goes wrong, and his intellectually disabled brother (played by Benny Safdie) ends up in prison, Connie desperately scrambles to scrape together enough money to bust him out. It’s a sympathetic story built around a consistently unsympathetic protagonist, and it’s hard to overstate how good Pattinson is in the role. Imagine a Drive that has no interest in making its violent, amoral protagonist look cool, or a heist movie about how much it sucks to be a criminal.
After several projects together (including the essential sports documentary Lenny Cooke), the Safdie brothers have worked out a brisk, economical division of labor. Josh wrote Good Time with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein. Benny costars. And both Josh and Benny are credited as directors. Conflicts are minimal and easily resolved. "That’s the beauty of working with someone you’ve known literally your whole life. Someone you’ve had bloody fights with," says Josh. "I can be very blunt."
And with their highest-profile to date arriving in theaters on Friday, the Safdie brothers have no interested in slowing down. "I don’t think there’s such a thing as 'work as hard as you can.' I think you can work harder," says Josh. "Always. With this movie, in particular, we worked very hard."
Joshua: Rob Pattinson just reached out to us and said, "Hey—whatever you’re doing next, I want to be a part of it." His initial impetus to reach out to us came from just a photo still, on the internet, from Heaven Knows What. He felt this kind of inner, innate connection to his… purpose.
Ben: He said he would do catering for us. He didn’t say, "I need to be the star of a movie."
Joshua: We met with him. I wasn’t interested in using him as a cameo or a supporting player. He has the face of a star. He doesn’t want to be a star; he just is one. And that’s the best type.
Ben: The goal, for Rob, was to disappear. He said, "I want to disappear. That’s why I want to work with you guys. I don’t want people to watch saying, 'Oh, that’s Rob Pattinson.'" And when people watch the movie, they go, 'Oh, my God. Is that Rob Pattinson?'"
Joshua: [During the opening scene], this movie star comes in and throws the door open—almost like he did to our lives. "Hey. Let’s get moving." And then, literally, the movie doesn’t stop.
Joshua: There’s no good reason to rob a bank. It’s the most romantic idea, to go and rob a bank. And the fact that people do rob banks, in 2017, is an example of life imitating art. In most bank robberies, you see people run away with two or three thousand dollars, because there are policies now: "I’ll give you the money that’s in the till, but that’s it."
Ben: You can be in a bank and not even know it’s being robbed.
Joshua: Banks realize that if they get an insurance policy, they can write off two or three thousand-dollar losses, and it’s much cheaper than getting a full-time armed guard. That’s why you don’t see armed guards in banks anymore.
Ben: Nate Silver did a whole thing: "Is it a viable living to rob banks?" He broke it down, hour-by-hour: Rob a bank, or work at McDonald’s? And in the end, it was basically the same. The math just doesn’t add up.
Joshua: We originally cast Eric Roberts [to play a bail bondsman]. We shot it, and edited it, and realized, "Hey—I don’t think this unbelievably expositional scene can survive the artifice of a movie star." So we cast an actual bail bondsman. And he improvised one line while on the phone. In his mind, he’s getting details from the court, and he goes, "Lovely." There’s no one on the other line! Only an actual bail bondsman could do that part. And that masks the exposition that’s happening.
Ben: When the bondsman dials a number, it needs to look like muscle memory.
Joshua: In Heaven Knows What, Arielle Holmes had a whole life she could pull from at any moment. Her preparation was her life. That’s why people work with nonprofessional actors. With a professional actor, we take that concept—but now we have to build an entire life for you to have within you. Almost trick you into becoming another person. So for Rob specifically, we wrote an insane character biography, starting minute one of birth, and literally minutes before his entrance into the movie.
Josh: Rob was on Howard Stern. He was probably a little flustered. And he put out an impression of us that sounded like insanity. Like he’d been thrown to the Tasmanian Devil. He thinks we induce mania and chaos into our set. We don’t induce anything! I mean, we do… but we don’t want chaos.
Ben: There was one day when we didn’t have a permit to shoot a shot when Rob was running away. We had permits for the street, but not permits to drive in the street, with a car driving alongside him. But we were like, "Ugh, we need this shot."
Josh: And we’re working with union guys who are like, "We can’t do this." But we can.
Ben: So we grab the monitor, and stand in the middle of street, and we’re blocking all the traffic.
Josh: It was like three blocks of traffic just honking their horns.
Ben: And Rob takes off and runs, and we got the shot. We got three shots! We did it, we got it, we moved on, and that was the end of it. Great day! And then we read Rob saying, "God, these guys. They just… block traffic. Risk their lives!"
Josh: We weren’t risking our lives. Nobody was going to hit us. Having 20 cars laying on their horns does actually induce a certain level of chaos. But we were like, we had to get this. No fucking up. All he had to do was run.
Ben: For us, it was a practical thing—but for Rob, it added this energy.
Josh: The way he performed that running… the look on his face… pure fear.
Josh: That was a complete coincidence. We wrote "SpongeBob SquarePants," and Nickelodeon was like, "Get out of here."
Ben: At the time [we filmed Good Time], Pepe was like, a funny meme.
Josh: We had cartoonist friends that knew [Pepe creator] Matt Furie, and he was like, "Yeah, sure, sounds great." And it’s not until we’re editing the movie that the campaign takes hold—and Trump is tweeting out Pepe the Frog. And the ADL is saying that Pepe the Frog is a hate symbol. I wrote to Matt Furie and said, "This is crazy," and he said, "Yeah, it’s destroying me."
Josh: It’s still in the box. I live in a rental. I told my landlord, "Hey, I got this toilet," and had to explain what this toilet was. He was very confused about why I wanted a new toilet, because they recently installed a very nice toilet. So the new toilet is still in the box—conceptually, next to my unopened bottle of Prosecco and my unlit Cuban cigar. Which I’ll celebrate with. When I die.
Ben: He’s going to be buried on the toilet, drinking the Prosecco, smoking the Cuban cigar.
Josh: I’m definitely going out like Elvis. I’ve read entire books on the can. Novellas. The only side effects are hemorrhoids.
Ben: And those are just a pain in the ass.
