Marty Supreme was written and directed by Josh Safdie, co‑written with Ronald Bronstein, and inspired by the real‑life figure Marty Reisman, a flamboyant Jewish‑American table tennis champion of the 1950s. It’s a bold, kinetic portrait of a fast-talking New York City dreamer, hellbent on turning an overlooked sport into his personal springboard to glory.
“Marty is the quintessential dreamer, in that he’s the ultimate romantic and the most relentless optimist,” says writer-director Josh Safdie, “It’s a coming-of-age story, which explores how in youth an uncompromising individuality can be both freeing and restricting. For Marty, his blind faith in his dream leads him in an indirect way to true self-discovery…to real change.”
With his seventh feature film — marking a seventeen-year career that began with his solo directorial debut The Pleasure of Being Robbed, acquired by IFC and premiering in Cannes in 2008 — Safdie brings his signature adrenaline-charged style and emotional heft to this globe-spanning epic. The result,
researched and developed over many years, is a fresh, fun, full-throttle thrill-ride journeying from the Lower East Side to London, Paris, Tokyo and the Great Pyramids and back.
“Marty’s commitment to his dream relies on self-belief, but in the end it’s the belief from others that proves to be the most important,” says Safdie. “His entire life is propped on belief. Those who believe with him are along for the ride and those who are not are simply run over. Marty Supreme follows him through this Sisyphean journey to get to that place.”
Set in 1952 New York, the film follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a brash young hustler who works at his uncle’s shoe store while chasing his dream of becoming a table tennis champion. Marty is arrogant, trash‑talking, and endlessly scheming, convinced that ping‑pong is his life’s calling even though few take the sport seriously. His journey takes him from the Lower East Side tenements to the Ritz in London, and finally to a climactic match in Tokyo against Japanese champion Koto Endo. Along the way, Marty entangles himself with wealthy patrons, criminal figures, and complicated romances, including affairs with Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion) and retired actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow).
Developing the Story
Safdie got hooked on table tennis at a young age, battling against his father and hearing his uncle’s stories about the great misfits of 20th-century New York who gravitated to the game. One afternoon, his wife was sifting through a dollar bin of books at a thrift store when she found a book written by a New York Jewish table tennis prodigy named Marty Reisman. Safdie, busy at the time finishing Uncut Gems, didn’t read it right away— but when he finally did it revealed a world much stranger and more exciting than he’d ever imagined. Soon, he was pressing his uncle for stories about Lawrence’s Table Tennis Club, the legendary hub of New York City’s ping pong scene.
He and his wife (Sara Rossein, Executive Producer and researcher) found themselves deep down the rabbit hole, consuming every story, clip, and scrap of history they could find about the sport and its forgotten characters.
In 1950s NYC, table tennis bred a subculture full of schemers, geniuses, and outcasts — it was a game played in smoky backrooms, penthouse parties, YMCAs, Ivy League dorms, and downtown tenements. It was fast, fierce, and entirely ignored by the mainstream. It was amongst these outsiders, these adult truants, that Safdie and Bronstein found a new outlet for their enduring love of flawed characters and unorthodox world-building. “The people who excelled at table tennis were often people who didn’t fit anywhere else,” says Safdie. “It wasn’t respected, so naturally it attracted weirdos, purists, obsessives. When I read that the sport was filling stadiums in the UK and throughout Europe, I realised that it was entirely plausible for a kid in 1952 to actually believe he could parlay the game into a life of fame and glory.”
A character quickly grew from the research, bursting beyond the boundaries of any real story
Someone guided by blind ambition and rife with contradictions: egotistical and lovable, scrappy and skilled, both rogue and romantic. A kid rebelling against the establishment, who, like everyone around him in the New York City of his era, is hustling to grab his piece of the prize. “We wanted to take the very idea of ambition — the confidence, the hunger, the need to prove yourself on your own terms — and build something bigger,” Safdie says. “Push it to its outer limit.”
Before a single word of dialogue was written, Josh reached out to Timothée, whom he had met and connected with at a party for Good Time in 2017 — just a few months before Call Me By Your Name was released and the young actor’s trajectory was set in motion. Over the years, they stayed in constant touch
and developed a friendship rooted in their shared experience as wide-eyed kids from New York City dreaming of making films: “I knew that he was strapped onto a lightning-bolt dead set on becoming the greatest…but I also knew he could choke on a hot dog laughing at the dumbest practical joke. There
was a unique brand of seriousness to Timmy that felt perfectly aligned with the wide-eyed blunt dreamer that we had started to create.”
“Josh is the kind of director whose door I’ve been knocking on for seven years now,” says Chalamet. “With him, you can’t overplan it. His movies are really off the cuff. Usually a movie of this size is preplanned, but Josh’s strategy is more preplanning everything until it’s chaos.”
In building the Marty Mauser character, Safdie and Bronstein weren’t interested in myth making. They were after something more honest: what it actually looks like to chase a dream no one else shares. The cost of belief. The risks no one sees. The humiliations endured. The personal cost of failure when one’s
entire identity is fused with a pursuit.
“To pursue a dream that society doesn’t respect — doesn’t even pretend to understand — requires a very extreme form of conviction,” says Bronstein. “The ego must evolve into a kind of exoskeleton, to protect itself from being crushed by the weight of collective indifference.”
Safdie and Bronstein were drawn to the idea of using Marty as a vehicle to explore a deeply American ideal: the lone, driven individual pushing forward in the face of history — in this case, the aftermath of the Second World War. Through international competition and his travels abroad, Marty comes face to face
with Koto Endo, a Japanese player and would-be national hero (portrayed by Koto Kawaguchi, real-life winner of the Japanese National Deaf Table Tennis Championships). Endo becomes Marty’s near-spiritual rival, and Marty Supreme becomes, in part, a story about the complex interplay between American triumphalism and rugged individualism and Japan’s postwar quest for self-determined survival and renewal.
“The American Dream is such a powerful story, and after the war, dreaming big became an international sensation along side this new idea that individuals make history and play a crucial role in shaping and reshaping the world,” says Safdie. “Marty represents the confidence, cockiness, and ambition that America expressed in the postwar years.”
But the road to Marty’s dreams — like the country he comes from — is paved with self-delusion, and the journey that unfolds is funny, messy, and unpredictable. Marty is a lightning rod of energy, and the movie hums to his rhythm. For all of his chaos, he’s a charmer; you can’t help but root for him and his relentless determination to succeed.
Josh Safdie – Director/Writer/Producer/Editor
Josh Safdie is a filmmaker whose credits include Uncut Gems, Good Time, Heaven Knows What, and Daddy Longlegs. Safdie recently reunited with Sandler for the Netflix comedy special Adam Sandler: Love You.
Ronald Bronstein – Writer/Producer/Editor
Ronald Bronstein is a director, screenwriter, editor and producing partner at Central Pictures. His debut feature, Frownland, antagonised audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, earning a place in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Criterion Collection. After playing the lead role in the Safdie’s debut Daddy Longlegs, he’s gone on to co-write and co-edit all of their features, including Good Time and Uncut Gems.
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