Josh Safdie on Why He Used 1980s Music for the Film

Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” now in theaters, is filled with ‘80s bangers, including Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch.”

But Safdie’s latest film — starring Timothée Chalamet as a young man from New York’s Lower East Side who dreams big and aspires to conquer the world of table tennis — is set in the 1950s.

It’s an intriguing juxtaposition that totally works because it’s not an ordinary period piece.

Safdie, who also edited the film and wrote the screenplay alongside Ronald Bronstein, was inspired while watching a video of a 1948 British Open table tennis event. “This wiry young guy was bouncing all over the place, couldn’t stand still, cocky, but also totally vain,” he recalls. The guy was much like Marty.

Around the same time, he became obsessed with Gabriel’s 1982 song, which he says he listened to over 1,000 times. “I decided to set the footage to that song, and it just worked. Something was happening there; it felt mythic,” Safdie explains. He adds, “There was a contemporary quality to seeing the anachronistic music paired with the ‘40s or early ‘50s.”

Safdie explains how the new wave-flavored music actually makes sense with the film’s themes. “President Reagan was nostalgically in that first era of postmodernism, actively trying to recall the ‘50s. In the face of defeat from Vietnam, culture was really just starting to redo itself in the vein of the ‘50s. You saw it in style. You saw it in movies. ‘Back to the Future’ is literally going back to the ‘50s. But on a very simple level, what happens when you do that is the past starts to feel like it’s haunting the future, and the future feels like it’s haunting the past.”

At one point, Safdie had written a version of the film where Marty was shown in the 1980s. It was an alternate ending. Safdie says, “He’s at a Tears for Fears concert with his granddaughter, listening to the lyrics of ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ and reflecting on his youth.”

That scene was ultimately removed. But Safdie stayed committed to the 1980s tunes including New Order’s as “propulsive, energetic, and fun” while still exploring the concept of the past and future in conversation.

For the score, Safdie turned to composer Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), who scored both “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems.” Lopatin, known for inventing vaporwave — a genre of electronic music from the 2010s that offers a nostalgic, surreal take on 1980s music — was the perfect choice to tie the film’s needle-drop moments together. Lopatin says there was no real differentiation between the game of table tennis that Marty plays and his spirit. “He’s buoyant and energetic, and no one believes in him. There’s an energy to him, a buoyancy and a lightness that is mirrored in the game itself,” he says.

Lopatin used fast, percussive strikes to keep the score melodic, incorporating mallet strikes to mirror the ping-pong balls. He notes, “Those mallet sounds are also really prominent in new wave music and synth-pop of the ‘80s.”

Lopatin was inspired by the concept of memory and time, as well as that original ending. “The score goes back to, what would it be like to think back on your coming of age in the 1950s while hearing Tears for Fears blasting in your ears, and maybe you’re side by side with your children, but somewhere else in your mind?” The result, in Lopatin’s words, was “an abstraction of that Tears for Fears concert.” He describes it as what happens when the present dissolves, and memory and the present converge. “The score is a kind of abstraction or an undercurrent — a symbolic wave of what was in the script.”

To align with the songs, which also include New Order’s “The Perfect Kiss,” Lopatin used digital synthesizers from the 1980s, including the Yamaha DX7 from 1983. He also incorporated flutes, saxophones, and string arrangements on top.

His score became was an expression of Marty’s youth, energy and ambition. If Marty is a builder and a bridge between worlds — past, present, and future — so too is the score and its accompanying songs. Safdie concludes, “I think all those things coming together in sync with one another — the synchronicity — has that additive effect of like, ‘Oh my god, this movie’s teeming with life.’”