by James Mottram and Chelsea Wick
Following their highly visceral junkie-themed feature Heaven Knows What, comparable to 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park, the Safdie brothers return with crime-drama, Good Time starring Robert Pattinson (The Twilight Saga), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips) and Ben Safdie, already being compared to another Al Pacino in his prime starrer, Dog Day Afternoon.
Attending Cannes for the very first time, the young filmmakers were understandably excited. “I’m still waiting to accept that I’m here,” said Josh. “Everyone tells you to embrace the moment and accept it, to soak it up when you are on the carpet. I was up there and I genuinely thought I was dreaming. I was just thinking that this couldn’t be real.”
“We have been making films since 2008 and whenever we finish a project, it would never line up with Cannes.” said Ben.
While the film premise appears simple, a man fighting to get his brother out of jail while keeping himself out at the same time, there is much more to the film, which is something that the first reviewers out of Cannes have grappled with. “I appreciate [the reviews] and a good piece of writing is as great as anything and it can even deepen your interpretation of your own work,” admits Josh. “I find it really interesting that the ending is understood in different ways. A lot of people see it as a happy, hopeful ending and other people see it as a devastating ending. Well, me and Ronny [Ronald Bronstein] wrote it as a devastating ending because I see the movie from Connie’s [Robert Pattinson] perspective.”
The film touches on several political issues around racism and crime in America using Barkhad Abdi’s character, Dash. “When we were talking about the race and the origin of the character, we really wanted an immigrant, a black immigrant, potentially an African immigrant and Barkhad Abdi is one of the great discoveries of cinema in the past 10 years. He is incredible. He has the innate ability to just say anything and have it feel natural and coming from the heart,” said Josh. “We play with the concept of: if you have two Long Island white cops walking and they see a security guard and a black man on the ground, their racist perceptions are going to play in and they are not going to question anything. But if it was reversed, who knows how things would turn out. Barkhad understood that and also the irony of Somalia being one of the countries that Trump tried to ban from immigrating to America.”
When it came to building the characters, before writing the script, a biography was written for each of them from the day of their birth until the minute the movie begins. “It was harder to write the biographies than the script,” admits Josh. “But what was great about that was that I knew the characters inside out and we could then pull things from them and that’s the big difference from when we made our last film.”
Heaven Knows What was famously based on the actual experiences of its leading lady. “And in this movie, we have Robert Pattinson so we couldn’t do that. It was a great exercise for us, knowing everything about the character before even writing the movie.”
The stars of the film were also committed from the beginning. Rather than seeking out the popular British actor and Hollywood heartthrob, Robert Pattinson, he was the one to reach out after watching Heaven Knows What. “He said, ‘I want to make anything and that whatever you are doing next, I would love to be a part of it’,” says Ben.
Good Time is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival
