In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
A rabbit out of a hat? How about an apple into a bowl?
That’s the clever little trick the smooth-talking table tennis player Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) aims to pull off to impress a former movie star, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), in this scene from “Marty Supreme,” nominated for nine Academy Awards and directed by Josh Safdie.
Marty is about to compete in the semifinals of the 1952 British Open but takes some time to flirt by phone with Kay, who is staying in the same London hotel as he is. He persuades her to go to her window to look across the courtyard at a room with open curtains and a bowl on a table. Marty tells her that if he is able to make an apple appear in the bowl, she should go see him compete.
Narrating the scene, Safdie said that he wanted to shoot both Marty and Kay’s sides of the conversation at the same time. “They’re talking to each other on period telephones in real time so that I could capture their emotional points of view.”
When Kay decides to attend the match, her entrance into the arena is accented by the grandiosity of Daniel Lopatin’s score, which Safdie said incorporated a Viennese choir to create “this kind of heavenly vibe.”
Safdie said that he and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, looked at newsreels from the championships in 1949 to try to“emulate, the best we could, the glory and awe that we saw” in those clips. And he said that his production designer, Jack Fisk, “covered the entire arena floor in plywood to give it the weight that he thought the sport deserved.”
Safdie said that Chalamet and Geza Rohrig, who plays Marty’s competitor, Bela Kletzki, “spent may hours with Diego Schaaf, the film’s table tennis choreographer, who mined thousands of hours of footage in order to find the perfect points to emulate.”
With one point, Marty encourages Bela to “have a little fun” and the two put on a show, lobbing balls high in the air and even kicking the ball at one moment. Chalamet did play some of these more exhibition-style points with a real ball, and Rohrig did, too, but Safdie said that the “harder part was for them to time doing this with the C.G. ball.”
Read the “Marty Supreme” review.
Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more.
Mekado Murphy writes about the world of movies and produces the Anatomy of a Scene video series.
The post How Timothée Chalamet Makes His Point in ‘Marty Supreme’ appeared first on New York Times.
