Benny and Josh Make Movies, Part Two

Watch an excerpt from the Safdies’ Buttons above.

As Josh Safdie tells it, the first time the Safdie brothers came to Boston, they were lured on the long car ride with the promise of playing in a tree house in the Cambridge yard of their great-uncle, the architect Moshe Safdie.

“I think about what he did at his age, and it’s incredible,” says Josh (COM’07), referring to his uncle’s design of Habitat 67, a multifamily housing project that was built for the Montreal Expo. “He was 23 when he designed Habitat. That’s how old I am now.”

The comparison is intended to posit the relatively modest success of the Safdies’ films against the inspired creation of one of the world’s acclaimed architects, but the implication is clear: in the Safdie family, the bar has been set high.

Josh and Ben (COM’08) were raised in Manhattan, attended Columbia Grammar and Prep School — the kind of place, says Josh, that did its best to eliminate students with quirky personalities. “They tried to get rid of me too,” he says. “But they didn’t.”

At Boston University, the brothers discovered a new kind of learning experience, Josh says, one that gave them the tools and freedom to reach, in their own way, for the lofty Safdie bar. The brothers studied what they wanted to study, which, according to their professors, happened to be practically every course that was offered by the film department.

Ray Carney, a COM professor of film and television, famous for his eccentric taste in film, says the brothers shared an uncommon certainty about what they wanted to learn. Benny, says Carney, took every course Carney taught, either for credit, or not. Josh, on the other hand, showed up in only one of Carney’s courses and dropped it after the third class.

“He told me he couldn’t stand what I was doing to the films,” says Carney, who has high regard for the Safdies’ work, especially for the clarity of their point of view. “If they were writers,” he says, “you would call it a voice.”

“To the extent that I was a teacher,” recalls Merzbacher, “it was really just my job to let them run with their ideas. They were all working on multiple projects all the time. And they were always talking to everyone about their films. They were very open to listening to other people — a faculty member, a student, a custodian in the hall. It didn’t matter. They’d be up for it.”

Merzbacher attributes much of the Safdies’ enthusiasm to their conviction, unusual among students, that they could make a film about anything.

“They had been making movies of one sort or another long before they got to BU,” he says. “Their father was a compulsive video guy, and when they were kids they took the camera from him and started making movies. They understood that films didn’t have to be these lofty epic undertakings. Films could be part of their lives.”

Slamdance Festival contender The Back of Her Head, for instance, was inspired by the late-night rantings of someone in the street below Josh’s Boylston Street apartment when he was a student at BU. Leaning out his window to see what all the commotion was about, he noticed a neighbor in an apartment below doing the same thing.

“I couldn’t see his face,” recalls Josh, “but it was an amazing moment. We were both quietly observing this person for, like, a minute and a half. It made me see this weird relationship that doesn’t normally exist between people.”

And then the questions started coming: what if the neighbor had been a woman? And what if he fell in love with her — or rather, with the back of her head, because that’s all he saw when there was a commotion in the alley?

“I became more obsessed with what was going on outside my apartment than what was going on inside,” he says. “I started imagining a lot of things that could happen with four people living above one another.”

“All of our films tend to come from things we witness rather than from conventions of film,” he continues. “At the very least, they are a hybrid of things you witness and things you wish you’d witnessed. For me, it’s the idea that certain things resonate. I’ll come back with something I’ve shot and I’ll say to Benny, ‘Check this out. This is what I just saw.’ And it will be a guy on the subway who’s singing to a woman next to him. Alex and Benny and I collected all these very short pieces and put them in a project called Buttons. It’s 170 movies in 45 minutes — all observations. The longest one is probably a minute and the shortest ones are three or four seconds.”

Buttons, says Josh, was recently chosen as a centerpiece for the Disposable Film Festival, a traveling show of short films made on nonprofessional devices such as one-time-use video cameras, cell phones, point-and-shoot cameras, and webcams.

At BU, the Safdies say, they found more than course work and camaraderie: they found models that inspired them. There was the work of Ronnie Bronstein, creator of the 2007 film Frownland. There were the films of Azazel Jacobs, who made Momma’s Man, and there was Andrew Bujalski, creator of Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation, who taught at BU for a semester.

“When I saw Mutual Appreciation,” says Josh, “I realized there was actually a film movement alive in America. And when I met Bujalski, it was like, hmm, this guy is doing something interesting. He’s doing something that I’ve seen in some older films. We kept in touch, sending films back and forth. Then we made We’re Going to the Zoo, which for me really put us out there and showed the world the kind of movies we want to make. It was me finding the way I wanted to express myself.”

The way the Safdies want to express themselves is not universally admired. Reviews have run hot and not so hot. Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir awarded The Pleasure of Being Robbed honorable mention in his list of the 10 best indie films of 2008. New York Times film critic Laura Kern called the same film “a technically deficient bore with little on its agenda.”

That less-than-enthusiastic opinion, however, did not dissuade fashion editors at the New York Times Magazine from exploiting another asset that the Safdies enjoy: the large-caliber cult status of hot indie filmmakers. Last August, the magazine dolled up several of the Bucketeers in clothes by the likes of Yves Saint Laurent and Yohji Yamamoto, and played them across an elaborate six-page spread. Josh and Benny, dressed in outfits from Ralph Lauren, Adam Kimmel, Brooks Brothers, and Paul Smith, were photographed on the fire escape of the loft.

In the pages of the Times Magazine we see Josh, looking slightly bewildered in a black bow tie and brown Paul Smith suit. And there is Benny, in white suspenders and too-shiny shoes, arm tossed over Josh’s shoulder, a wide smile stretched beneath oversize eyeglasses: two of the hottest filmmakers in New York City in outfits that retail for more than the cost of some of their best work.

The vision was strange enough to appear, fleetingly, in one of the Safdie brothers’ films, where Charles Merzbacher would appreciate its whimsy and understand it to be a distancing device.

Inside the loft, the Safdies know they should get back to work, but they can’t stop talking, at the moment about influences on their films — Nikolai Gogol, Ernest Hemingway, and so many still photographers they can hardly begin to name them. They have never had much trouble figuring out what they like, and they have no trouble defining success.

“Success,” says Josh, “is not having a day job.”

Benny looks out the window past the empty fire escape where he last wore white suspenders and nods in agreement.

Missed part one?

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

Photo by Joshua Paul. 

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