Benny and Josh Make Movies, Part One

They sneak cameras into the opera. They film strangers in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They hide sound equipment in paper bags and smuggle it into the Central Park Zoo. They shoot private moments at random times in strange places: an old man playing a violin in a subway car, a woman watching as a beach umbrella tumbles off in a gust of wind, a bee struggling to take flight from the windshield of a moving car.

Later, in a dark corner of a fifth-floor Soho studio, the stolen moments are sewn into narratives born of little more than a single haunting memory — a child lost on a crowded beach. And before the Safdie brothers, Josh (COM’07) and Ben (COM’08), are done thinking about that memory and those moments, they will have created a film that asks some unexpected questions.

“What is imagination?” asks Josh, citing one puzzle presented in their short film Yeah, Get on My Shoulders. “Why does imagination exist? Why do lies exist?”

Like most of the Safdie brothers’ films, Yeah, Get on My Shoulders doesn’t exactly answer the unexpected questions. Instead, it sends the audience on a scavenger hunt to seemingly random places, where the clues lurk in the corners of ordinary lives.

Charles Merzbacher, a College of Communication associate professor and chair of the department of film and television, who is close to the Safdies, says their films “lull you into thinking that you are watching the classic mirror held up to nature, and then something will appear in the background that is a complete break with reality.”

“It’s a distancing device,” says Merzbacher. “People look at their films and see the French New Wave, but what they don’t see is that they are bringing something completely new: there is whimsy there.”

Also like most Safdie films, Yeah, Get on My Shoulders is a collaborative work, written in this case with help from Brett Jutkiewicz (COM’06) and produced with much support from other members of the tight-knit crew at Red Bucket Films, a BU-bred clutch of filmmakers that includes Sam Lisenco (COM’06), Zachary Treitz (COM’07), and the Safdies’ high school friend and first collaborator, Alex Kalman. The chemistry of what is known as the Red Bucket brigade has been good for the Safdies, and according to many people, good for the indie film scene. Josh’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, a 71-minute chronicle of the wanderings of a beautiful young kleptomaniac, was the only American-made feature shown in last year’s Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight, which helped launch the careers of Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, and Sofia Coppola. The Acquaintances of a Lonely John, a short film written by Benny Safdie, was also shown at the Directors’ Fortnight.

The Cannes coup capped a streak of festival successes that started three years ago at BU, when Josh’s short film We’re Going to the Zoo — the story of a brother and sister who pick up a hitchhiker on their way to the zoo — took top honors at the 2006 Redstone Film Festival. The event, which is sponsored by Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone (Hon.’94), showcases work by graduate and undergraduate Boston University students. Since then, Josh’s 21-minute The Back of Her Head, which was made for an advanced film production course at BU, was one of 73 short films chosen from more than 2,000 submissions to the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and The Pleasure of Being Robbed, which was recently made available on IFC’s Festival Direct cable-TV platform, also screened at South by Southwest in Austin, Tex.

Bending the rules a little
Sam Lisenco swings open the great steel shutter that separates the street noise of Soho from the 40-by-50-foot loft space where the Bucketeers gather most days around noon. Lisenco winces. The shutter is heavy, and his rib, fractured two weeks ago during an impromptu wrestling match with fellow Bucketeer Alex Kalman, is tender.

“Sam and Alex have been wrestling every day,” says Josh, climbing down from the raised editing space Sam helped the Safdies build in one corner of their workspace. “I’ve been giving a prize to the winner. He gets a sandwich.”

At first glance, the Red Bucket lair offers little evidence of adult habitation. There is a 30-year-old television set, a bicycle, a dartboard, a museum-worthy manual typewriter, and, leaning out from a plywood shelf, a stuffed polar bear that fans will recognize from the fantasy scene in The Pleasure of Being Robbed. A diminutive table and chairs, intended for use in the lower grades of an elementary school, squats before a well-worn couch.

Josh pulls up a chair and apologizes for his tardiness. With their latest project, Go Get Some Rosemary, in the final stages of editing, there is little time for anything but work; the Safdies’ customary 12-hour workdays have expanded to 16 hours. The night before, he says, they hadn’t lifted their eyes from their editing screens until four in the morning.

The project, the brothers confess, has had a difficult birth. “It started as a kind of amassment of four years of thoughts and scenes that we had scribbled in notebooks,” says Josh. “We knew there was a project called Go Get Some Rosemary, and we knew there was this guy and these two kids, and maybe there was this love that was on and off.”

After trying and failing to write a script in Soho, the brothers tried plan B. “We went upstate and rented a little room and just copied down every relevant note,” Josh says. “We had what would have been 12 or 13 hours of movies, and we edited it right on the page. We never did write a script — we just had a 40-page story with dialogue.”

“We had to bend the rules a little,” Benny says.

“I actually think things would have gone better if we did have a script,” admits Josh. “But I still think this movie has been a great success.”

At least, he says, it will be, after a few more late nights and some ideas about where to trim the film’s 90 minutes. But already, says Benny, Go Get Some Rosemary has broken new ground. It’s the first project the Bucketeers have made with funding from outside investors — one of the rewards of their recognition at Cannes. Still, the brothers say, their daily existence depends on occasional commercial film jobs and services for barter. To complete Go Get Some Rosemary, for instance, they will trade editing services — sharpening the focus of a film made by a pharmaceutical company — for some high-tech design help with graphics.

“We do things cheaply,” says Benny. “But even if there was money, the things we do would look the same. Whatever we do, we do the way we want to do it.”

Check back tomorrow for part two, and learn about the role of Boston — and Boston University — in the filmmaking careers of the Safdie brothers.

Art Jahnke can be reached at jahnke@bu.edu.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Bostonia.