To create a postwar New York for Marty Supreme, director Josh Safdie wooed a production designer he hadn’t worked with before: 79-year-old Jack Fisk, a legend who lives far from Hollywood on a rural-Virginia farm he bought in 1978 with his wife, Sissy Spacek. (They met on Badlands, the first of eight films he dreamed up with Terrence Malick.)
Fisk is the industry’s go-to designer for period-specific prestige, re-creating Five Points for Gangs of New York, 1920s oil derricks for There Will Be Blood, and the colors of the luxury cars and fine pottery of the Osage in Killers of the Flower Moon. He is known for poring over fire maps and floor plans, which helps him avoid cliché signposts of earlier eras — and for a kind of “Method building,” like how he designed the earliest iteration of a fort in Jamestown by simply trying to build one himself nearby from natural materials. (The set appeared in Malick’s The New World and “floored” the experts, per the New York Times.) Marty Supreme is chockablock with similarly specific delights, from a delivery truck for the Forward parked outside the paper’s old offices to an armadillo on sale at a pet store — perfectly legal back then!
We spoke about blue-law exceptions on Orchard Street, renting out the $38 million Woolworth mansion, and why no apartments should be able to pass for a tenement in 2025.
How did you go about building Marty’s favorite Ping-Pong club?
Sara Rossein, the producer, had learned about Lawrence’s, which was on 55th Street and seems to be the first Black-owned business in the Times Square area. It was run by a player named Herwald Lawrence, and we were able to find actual floor plans. It was an industrial building, and a business directory showed a car-parts place below and an acting school on another floor. Through written descriptions and a series of black-and-white photographs, we had a pretty good idea of what it looked like. And one of the photos showed old murals on the walls — a landscape with a garden and trees and fog and bushes. It turned out that before it was a Ping-Pong parlor, it was an indoor golf course and people could be in there playing miniature golf and feel like they were outside because of the mural. I imagined when they set up the club, they brought the Ping-Pong tables and the Coke machine, and that was about it. But Josh was not so excited about the mural, so we simplified it.
White letters that spell “Tennis” in all caps on the second floor are evidence of Lawrence’s in a tax photo taken around 1940.
Photo: Courtesy of the Municipal Archives/City of New York
Were you kind of an on-set historian, fact-checking Josh Safdie’s ideas?
We were in sync. Before I even got to New York, we were exchanging photographs. But he grew up in the ’80s, so he has known New York from his childhood and has such a love for the Lower East Side. But his love only goes back to the ’80s. We wanted to make sure everything represented the ’50s. So I had to keep checking. We were going to shoot in a subway station that he wanted and then I started researching and said, “Well, that wasn’t even built until 1964.”
Josh Safdie and Timothée Chalamet in a store Fisk designed to look like a 1950s shoe shop.
Photo: Atsushi Nishijima
So he had some location ideas. I have a particular obsession with 960 Fifth Avenue, and I saw the address show up for the apartment of Gwyneth Paltrow’s character.
Yes, but the address that they’d given me, which was written into the script, was actually different. When I found it, I saw that it was built in 1949, and they said they had just made up the number but they knew they wanted Fifth Avenue. We started looking up there, but people there have enough money that the idea of a film company coming in is more of a hindrance than an excitement. So we were trying to find something away from Fifth Avenue, but the spaces never seemed to have the right level of pizzazz, and the location needed to be over the top to really contrast with where Marty was coming from.
I was open to the aesthetic. I knew an architect who lived in an apartment building from 1949 that was a real beautiful, very contemporary apartment. But you have to get an agreement from everybody in the building, so I knew it wouldn’t work out. But we did find a wonderful building right across from the Met, and it was actually a house built by the Woolworth family.
A listing photo of the Woolworth mansion shows its 35-foot width with three entrances on the street, making it easier to cheat as a high-rise than a typical townhouse.
Photo: Modlin Group
The old Woolworth mansion. It just sold after a long time on the market. I bet they were happy to have you.
They were really generous to us, but we were very careful not to touch anything. We had the art department build structures to hold the lighting rigs so we could light the interior without touching the ceiling, the walls — anything. We used the top three floors, which were exquisitely decorated. We loved it. The set decorator, Adam Willis, and I just went nuts. He’s just as crazy about research as I am, and it’s so much fun. We could never afford to have created it. But for the tenements, we had to build those.
Fisk used interiors in the Woolworth mansion to serve as an apartment owned by the businessman Milton Rockwell (Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary) and his wife, actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow).
Photo: Courtesy of A24
Why? Aren’t there tons of old tenements around?
Well, now there are so many safety features that they don’t look the same. The doorways all have fireproof doors. It was easier to re-create it on a stage. Same with the Bowery Hotel. It was so seedy. And even at places that look run-down, there are so many pipes and cameras and steel doorways that have been changed for building code that they fought against the reality of it. But I love to build.
Sandra Bernhard and Fran Drescher in a crowded tenement hallway.
Photo: Courtesy of A24
Plus no one would let you destroy their building by dropping a tub through the floor —
Of course. And working in a tenement was going to be tough. I lived in a walk-up on Tompkins Square Park on 9th Street in the 1960s, and I remember just going up those stairs every day was treacherous. I also remember a film of coal dust on everything. It would snow and it’d be white, and the next morning you’d look out on your windowsill and it’d be gray or black snow because it’d have a coating of coal dust. I think they started to really clean stuff up in the ’70s, power-washing the buildings.
But you guys did film on the Lower East Side.
Oh yes. Well, we wanted a pathway for Marty to escape and run through. I learned that there were yards behind where kids would play ball, and there were outhouses and alleyways where all the trash would go. Those have kind of been lost over the years — divided up or walled in. So I went on Google Earth and started searching around the backyards of the tenements on the Lower East Side and we found a few. What was more complex was to try to find the owners of each back lot so we could chain ’em together in a sequence. But we did, and that chase scene ends in the back of a Chinese restaurant. I loved that.
A chase sequence through the Lower East Side.
Photo: Courtesy of A24
And you also filmed on the street. I remember neighbors were amused to see the area go back in time.
That was on Orchard Street. In the time of our film, in the ’50s, it was the only place open in New York on Sundays. There were blue laws, but Jewish owners could circumvent that because of their religious holiday on Saturday. So everyone would flock to Orchard Street to shop. There would be thousands of people down there and a lot of excitement. On Orchard, there was an old clothing store, Freedman’s. When you first go in, you search for things that you can use and that look real. They had the old shelves and photos from the ’40s showing the store.
I repainted with the same colors as in the old photographs and changed the signs. I also remembered that when I was a kid, there was a machine in the shoe store where you could look down and see your toes inside your shoes. Our set decorator was able to get one. We had all the shoe boxes built and the labels made.
Darius Khondji and Safdie work out a shot inside the shoe store that Fisk designed.
Photo: Atsushi Nishijima
What about the outside of the store — or the street?
Josh found a wonderful film at the Museum of Modern Art from the 1950s that was shot on Orchard Street, by Ken Jacobs. He had photographed it on his iPhone, so it was kind of a bootleg copy. But later, the museum gave him a copy, and that brought the whole crew together — wardrobe, set decorating, props everybody — to see.
That was probably the key piece of research. It is so much fun to discover. I love history. I love going back in time and finding how much it’s changed. I do like to find things that are unusual, and Josh does, too. There were some things in particular that we decided to go with because they were just so bizarre or seemed bizarre to us.
Like the pet store where Odessa A’zion’s character, Rachel, works.
Yeah. We made a really interesting set where we found a really nice store about three blocks from Orchard. We built the whole exterior — it was just plate glass. That was typical for the whole area; we figured out that they took away a lot of the old wooden frames over the years and put in plate-glass windows. And the shoe-store set — the bones of it were perfect, but right next door to it was a brand-new hotel. So we built a modular system of storefronts and stoops for tenement apartments that we could put together on any street almost instantly. We could just march in pretty much overnight and create the neighborhood.
New awnings and window displays sent Orchard Street back in time on a budget.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
Well, it was very convincing.
There were beautiful photos of Orchard, and a lot of them are black and white. So I took some of our shots of the street and made them black and white. You can’t tell the difference. It’s crazy.
Orchard Street after filming.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan