Why The Safdie Brothers Made Separate Films After Uncut Gems

It’s been six years now since Benny and Josh Safdie unleashed Uncut Gems on the world. Their ultra-stressful thriller – following Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner as he makes possibly disastrous financial decisions around the procurement of a precious diamond – was a hugely acclaimed cinematic adrenaline-shot, following up their previous hit Good Time. In the meantime, the brothers have been working on separate projects. Not only has Benny starred in the likes of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, but he’s been challenging at work on The Smashing Machine, his biopic of MMA fighter Mark Kerr starring Dwayne Johnson, while Josh has been directing his fictional ping-pong champion movie Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet.

For audiences, it means a double-whammy of Safdie projects arriving in the upcoming months. And while fans have relished Benny and Josh’s work together, they’re equally used to working apart and together, as Benny tells Empire. “We had started out making movies separately, in college,” he explains in The Running Man issue, talking the making of The Smashing Machine. “And then we were always working towards something, and when we reached that place it was almost like, ‘Oh, well, what now?’” With no immediate road-map for another film together, they simply followed their passions in separate directions. “Then it was like, ‘I’m interested in this,’ and, ‘I’m interested in this,’ and then you want to figure that out,” says Benny. “It just felt like a continuation of a process.”

That passion is significant. When you make a movie like the Safdie brothers – either one of them – there are no half-measures. “I had a therapist a while ago who said to me, ‘The way they treat cancer is they take the blood out of the body, run it through this machine that blasts it with radiation, and then it goes back in your body — and that’s what we’re doing here. We’re taking all of your thoughts and feelings and putting it out on the table. We’re looking at it, seeing things, acknowledging things, and then we’re putting it right back in.’ I was like,‘That’s a pretty good description of what movies do,’” says Benny. “‘You look at everything, you notice things, and then it just gets put right back inside your head.’” Get ready for two pure uncut Safdie gems in the near future.

Read Empire’s full The Smashing Machine feature – talking to Benny Safdie about his long-awaited directorial comeback – in The Running Man issue, out now. Order a copy online here. The Smashing Machine comes to UK cinemas from 3 October.