In a desire to keep it real, filmmakers Benny Safdie and Ronnie Bronstein aim 'to remove all direct signs of control and craft from the process' in editing 'Uncut Gems.'
The Safdie brothers needed to set ‘Uncut Gems’ precisely in 2012. They also needed Adam Sandler to get on board.“I was working as a projectionist at the Museum of the Moving Image,” Bronstein says, “and [Josh] came and just accosted me and told me that I had to star in this movie he was writing with his brother.” That film turned into 2010’s “Daddy Longlegs,” in which Bronstein plays a divorced Lower Manhattan projectionist who treats parenthood as a high-wire act.
“It didn’t make a lot of sense,” Bronstein says. “I had never acted before, and I haven’t acted since. But through a war of attrition, they wore me down, and I agreed to do it on the condition that I would have some control over what fell out of my mouth. So organically I started writing with them.” Though Bronstein and the Safdies spent years as micro-budget indie upstarts, “this was the first movie where we were professionally paid to only do our actual jobs,” Bronstein says. “In the past, I was working as a projectionist and doing all the editing in the projection booth, and Benny was editing all his scenes in his apartment.”
They would divide up the scenes based on their respective strengths. Bronstein said he sees human exchanges as “little existential medieval jousts,” so he handled most of the shot/reverse-shot scenes between two people. Benny was always the action person, taking on “any scene that involves lots of movement and energy.” WithBronstein says, “we’ve now worked together long enough that we’ve merged sensibilities.
Benny says he mentally separates his on-set work as director from the postproduction process of editing. “Once you sit down to edit, you’re starting from zero. You’re watching every take and seeing how the movie unfolded from that point on. There’s a freshness to it. You want every part of the process to be alive, and you don’t want to be beholden to certain decisions made before.”
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