Josh Safdie, Alone at Last: Marty Supreme and the Oscars It Didn’t Win

Josh Safdie

Photo: RealTVfilms / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 3, 1984 New York City, United States
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	Uncut Gems, Good Time, Marty Supreme
Awards	Independent Spirit (shared) · Independent Spirit · Emmy · New York Film Critics Circle

For most of his working life, the name on the poster was a plural. “The Safdie brothers” stood for a specific kind of New York panic: lenses jammed against sweating faces and men talking faster than their luck could carry them. Then the brothers stopped directing together, and Josh Safdie had to answer a question critics had been too polite to ask out loud. Which of the two was driving? His reply was Marty Supreme, a table-tennis hustler epic with Timothée Chalamet that became the biggest North American earner in its studio’s history, drew nine Academy Award nominations and won none of them.

That result is the whole puzzle of Safdie in miniature. He makes films that refuse to sit still, about people who refuse to lose, and the industry keeps rewarding him with attention rather than closure.

The restlessness has a geography. After his parents divorced, Joshua Safdie and his younger brother Benny grew up shuttling between their father’s place in Queens and their mother and stepfather’s apartment in Manhattan. The family tree runs well beyond the boroughs: his father, Alberto, was born in Italy and raised in France, of Syrian-Jewish descent; his mother, Amy, is of Russian-Jewish descent; the architect Moshe Safdie is a great-uncle. New York City is where it starts, on April 3, 1984, and where nearly every film he has made returns. He studied at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School and graduated from Boston University’s College of Communication in 2007.

The first feature followed almost at once. The Pleasure of Being Robbed was entirely his: he wrote, directed, produced and edited it, played a small part, and took it from South by Southwest to the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. The next one belonged to two people. Daddy Longlegs, made with Benny and first shown in the Fortnight under the title Go Get Some Rosemary, won the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. Its lead was Ronald Bronstein, who would become the brothers’ co-writer and editor, and the third pair of hands on almost everything that followed.

The films got rougher before they got bigger. Lenny Cooke, a documentary about a high-school basketball prospect, premiered at Tribeca. Heaven Knows What, drawn from Arielle Holmes’s then-unpublished memoir Mad Love in New York City and starring Holmes herself, went to Venice. Around the same time the brothers founded Elara Pictures, the company that would carry their name into the mainstream.

Then came the two films that turned the style into a brand. Good Time, which Josh wrote with Bronstein, put Robert Pattinson in competition at Cannes as a bank robber trying to spring his brother, played by Benny, over one long New York night. Uncut Gems premiered at Telluride and handed Adam Sandler the role of a New York jeweler gambling his way toward ruin, with Kevin Garnett playing himself. It earned the brothers the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director and made the Safdie rhythm, all overlapping dialogue and rising dread, recognizable to audiences who had never heard of the Directors’ Fortnight.

The partnership ended without a fight anyone could see. In January 2024 Benny said the two would stop directing together, calling it a natural progression of what each wanted to explore. Josh had already widened his producing slate: executive producer on The Curse, the series Nathan Fielder created with Benny; director of the Netflix special Adam Sandler: Love You; executive producer of Pee-wee as Himself, which won him a Primetime Emmy. He also founded a new company, Central Pictures, with Bronstein and Eli Bush.

Marty Supreme began years earlier, when his wife, the producer Sara Rossein, bought the rights to Marty Reisman’s 1974 memoir The Money Player. Safdie and Bronstein turned it into something freer than a biopic: a 1952 New York story about Marty Mauser, a shoe salesman who wants to win the British Open and then the world. Chalamet led a cast that mixed Gwyneth Paltrow and Odessa A’zion with Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara and Fran Drescher. Darius Khondji shot it mostly on 35mm, Jack Fisk designed it, and its budget of $60 million to $70 million made it the most expensive film A24 had ever made. After a secret screening at the New York Film Festival, it opened on Christmas Day 2025, became A24’s highest-grossing release in the United States and Canada, and won Chalamet a Golden Globe and a Critics’ Choice Award.

The triumph is easier to narrate than it was to live. Safdie held four nominations of his own at the 98th Academy Awards, his first, including Best Picture and Best Director, and lost every one. Some critics thought the film’s final stretch turned arbitrary. The tidy reading of the split, that Josh was the engine all along, does not survive the calendar either: months before Marty Supreme opened, Benny won the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice with The Smashing Machine. The brand had two drivers. The awards season also dragged an older story back into view. In 2023 Variety reported that Sebastian Bear-McClard, then a producer at Elara, had contacted a 17-year-old on Instagram who went on to shoot a scene for Good Time that never reached the final cut; a spokesperson for the Safdies said Elara learned of his behavior in July 2022 and fired him. The company’s future has been uncertain since.

Safdie has spent 2026 working at several speeds. Central Pictures sits behind Neighbors, an HBO late-night series. In June, after the Knicks ended a 53-year wait for an NBA title, the lifelong fan wrote and directed Nike’s “Sleep Well, NY,” a celebration spot set to Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.” In August, reports said he had joined Ramy Youssef’s new A24 feature, working title Martha, as co-writer and producer, with Youssef directing.

Safdie is married to Rossein, his producer on Marty Supreme; they have two children. The next confirmed step is Martha, set to start shooting in New York this October. The next film Josh Safdie directs himself has not been announced, and for a filmmaker whose first solo feature in seventeen years ended in an empty-handed Oscar night, that silence is its own kind of suspense.