“I’m guessing you don’t get angry very often,” the film director Josh Safdie was saying to me on Zoom, about 18 months ago. We’d never met or spoken, but he’d seen me onscreen.
“That’s probably true,” I replied. I was sitting in a tiny hotel room in Paris on a warm summer evening.
“Great! Well, I want you to be angry at every moment. Enraged! You’re going to get Timmy Chalamet in a headlock.”
This wasn’t what is often said to a retiring writer in his 60s who lives in an obscure suburb in Japan. But only a few days after an email arrived in July 2024 — the subject line read: “Pico Iyer/Feature Film Opportunity”— I was being contacted by a moviemaker famous for casting nonactors.
“I’ve never acted in my life,” I protested, even as I remembered how the professional basketball player Kevin Garnett shone in Josh’s “Uncut Gems.”
“Not even in high school. Not in a student movie.”
Josh had no doubt of that. But he’d watched a TED Talk I’d delivered on Ping-Pong as a guide to life and come away thinking that no one might be better suited to playing a humorless, uptight, domineering British table tennis official in 1952, trying to contain a feisty and impudent upstart from New York based on the Ping-Pong legend Marty Reisman.
I can’t say he was wrong. My talk had explained how, playing Ping-Pong in Japan three times a week for 21 years, I’ve seen the sport I first learned in the United States completely upended. We only ever play doubles here in Nara, and we change partners every five minutes, using playing cards to choose teams at random. This means that nobody ever loses — or wins — for long, all the more so since we engage in best-of-two games, and matches often end in a tie.
Nothing could be more different from the furious, flamboyant, winner-takes-all spirit of Reisman, whose wild individualism I’d heard about while playing the sport as a boy.
Josh’s offer was intriguing to me because it sounded like an invitation to a very foreign country, a film set. Acting for the first time wouldn’t be comfortable or easy, I knew, but it would take me places I’d never been before. I’ve been lucky enough, as a traveler, to visit Yemen, Antarctica and North Korea; now I could go on a fresh kind of adventure, to a land with its own language, laws and intricate codes.
I’ve always felt that writing is acting by another name; even in nonfiction, I’m trying to get into a foreigner’s soul by finding the corner in me that rhymes with something in him. Now I’d get to see movies, which I’d always loved from a different angle, on the far side of a camera. A few years earlier, a casting director had approached me about a big part in a Hollywood movie (never made) due to star Kristen Wiig, but that would have involved playing a cartoon version of myself. The role in “Marty Supreme,” appealingly, would mean venturing into some of the emotions I seldom get to explore.
Yet my calendar was packed — speaking engagements would be taking me to New Hampshire, Pittsburgh, Dubai and Kyoto in the next few weeks — and shooting was due to start soon. Somehow, miraculously, Josh and his endlessly resourceful casting director, Jennifer Venditti, found a way to make the stars align, and, not long after our Zoom call, I was sitting alone in an empty room along a tunnel in the bowels of a huge sporting arena in New Jersey, waiting to shout at Timothée Chalamet’s Marty.
Our star hadn’t wanted to meet me off-camera, so I waited and waited until, late one evening, I was hurried upstairs to what looked to be a crowded office and started staring into the camera of Darius Khondji, the legendary cinematographer, as the heartthrob of millions stormed in to yell at me.
I’d spent weeks trying to learn my lines, alone at home, but now I was hearing completely different sentences shooting out as Marty and I began swapping insults on the fly. I’d never realized how hard it might be to keep a straight face as a man with a hand-held camera circled me like a panther.
My own cinematic tastes, I’ll confess, run mostly toward Terrence Malick and other ethereal and contemplative films: One drop of water falls from an icy roof, and then another. My wife can’t stop teasing me for my love of “inaction movies.”
Yet part of the magic of journeying to this distant land was that wizards work with every kind of master; in the long hours of waiting, I could talk to them all. Some days I’d find myself in the empty stands chatting with Jack Fisk, the gentle maestro who put together the astonishing sets for most of Malick’s movies, as well as “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Another evening I was exchanging notes with Geza Rohrig, the intense Hungarian poet whose acting had carried the Holocaust film “Son of Saul” to an Academy Award and who would be playing Jesus in the next Malick project.
Day after day, I returned to my empty room to sit in a boxy suit and suspenders before abruptly being summoned late at night to shout at our young star. Sometimes the nights went on so long that we didn’t have time to shoot the lengthy speech I’d prepared; other times I was hustled into a small room and had to improvise a commentary on the spot.
Josh and his brother, Benny, are known for the jittery energy and panic-attack fury of their films, but Josh on set himself seemed never put out or at a loss. At 4 in the morning, he’d still be buzzing around, relaxed and good-natured, working as calmly with this nonactor as with the seasoned professionals.
Two months later, days after I’d completed a monthlong American book tour — babbling on the power of silence — the crew landed in Tokyo for some final scenes.
Now my job was to stand onstage in the February cold as a huge pig appeared nearby and smiling Japanese dancers performed some elaborate choreography when not shivering in the winter sun. In New Jersey everything had seemed vast and anonymous; now my “trailer” was a dark room in a nearby karaoke parlor and Japanese colleagues were scurrying around, handing everyone blankets and delectable snacks.
It was easy, as one day gave way to another, to wonder why I’d forsaken the warmth and comfort of my desk for a world as strange to me as Easter Island. But if ever I were feeling out of sorts, I had only to look at our director, our star, our costume designer — even my poor stand-in — to see that they were working twice as long and hard, with never a word of complaint. Indeed, Marty was in the midst of a frenetic awards-season campaign back in the United States, thanks to his startling incarnation of Bob Dylan in the movie “A Complete Unknown.”
I still don’t know how any of my scenes fit into the larger picture; I don’t even know whether its ending is a happy or a sad one. The film doesn’t arrive in Japan until March. The scene of Marty and me furiously pushing and pulling at each other — the promised headlock went through many iterations — probably ended up on the cutting-room floor. But as soon as our last scene wrapped, our star raced across the stage and threw his arms around me, signaling that we no longer had to keep shouting in each other’s faces.
Hours later, he was dressing up to greet hundreds of screaming fans at a red-carpet premiere for “A Complete Unknown” in Tokyo, then flying across the Pacific to honor his role as Dylan, the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. I was on the train back to the two-room apartment my wife and I have shared for 33 years, eager, after weeks of watching Ping-Pong on set — but never getting to play — to do nothing more than flex my backhand topspin with my neighbors once again.
Pico Iyer’s latest book is “Aflame,” and his new TED Talk, on silence, went online this week.
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