Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie are American filmmakers whose recent work includes Heaven Knows What (2015) and Good Time (2017). Their latest film, Uncut Gems (2019), which opens in Boston on December 25, features Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, a shop owner in New York City’s “diamond district” circa 2012 (more specifically during the Eastern Conference Semifinals series between the Celtics and the 76ers in May). Kevin Garnett, playing himself, arrives at Howard’s shop via a third party, Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), who is seeking a commission; arriving at the same time is an opal, first smuggled into the country and and now into Howard’s office, that the jeweler hopes will serve as the solution to his mounting, gambling-induced debts.

It should be noted that Uncut Gems is co-written and co-edited by Ronald Bronstein, who has been a primary collaborator on all of the feature-length narrative films that Josh and Benny Safdie have directed together. 

At a few points during the film, the frame travels into the opal itself, revealing what’s described in the final script as “a shifting melange of abstract shapes and patterns.” Those particular sequences are the first thing discussed in the following interview, which was conducted at the Boston Harbour Hotel last week prior to a screening of Uncut Gems at the ArcLight Cinemas Boston. There was a limited amount of time available for the interview, so while this transcript has been lightly edited, it still pretty much represents the conversation in its entirety. As a result, I’ve left in certain digressions and exchanges that, under different circumstances, I might’ve cut out. You’ve been warned. 

First I want to speak about the “Journey Through the Gem” sequence. Can you tell me where the actual specific design of it comes from: Was it research into physical objects, was it visual references to experimental films, was it something else?

JS: A huge inspiration, always, in life and thinking and philosophy and filmmaking, is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But it’s tough because, obviously, we built that with a VFX company. And when it came time to actually build it… a lot of VFX companies in America function in a very simple way—they function on mimicry. They can only do what’s been done before, or maybe they can do a twist on it. But [what we wanted to do] had never been done before. And it’s not like you can say to someone, let me show you some pictures of some opals, then imagine what it’s like to be inside one of them. Because I can imagine that, but I can’t guarantee that a VFX artist will.

Luckily I found this photographer from the 1950s, Eduard Gübelin, who was the first person to photograph the interior of gemstones. And there was another guy in Los Angeles, Danny J. Sánchez, who is more contemporary. So I had to build this document [Josh, using his phone, begins to show me images of documents that contain storyboard-esque layouts of various pre-existing photographs] … That’s the real gem… And the exterior of the gem, by the way, took us months and months and months and months to figure out, because it consists of many different small opal faces, and over $100,000 worth of gemstones, so it was a real prop… [Josh is still flipping through the documents on his phone] Sometimes I was using nebula imagery that NASA compiled… There’s some more nebula… nebula… but a lot of it is a combination of those two photographers that I mentioned. 

And it does look quite aquatic when you get close up. Just like the great Charles and Ray Eames’ film Powers of Ten (1968/77), the more microscopic you get, the more macroscopic it looks. So the cosmic element—there is the universe inside something like this. I love Jordan Belson’s work, too; I sent them some of his films as well.

You had to be very, very detailed with these [instructions or citations]… It got to a point where I wasn’t even sure if it was gonna happen. We had to brace ourselves for the backup—just cutting it. But it was very important that you do have this interconnectivity.

BS: At first we were going to build something! We were going to build something and have a camera go through it. 

What’s amazing about this company… the way they went about building that landscape was insane, because they literally constructed a physical world in the computer. And the light and the gas inside of it were manifestations of that physical environment. So Josh would be like, I want some light here, or we want more of a rock face here. And they’d say, well, we can’t have the light exactly where you want it to be, but we can mess with the environment inside to see if a light will shine through… It was so strange to not be able to place something exactly “there,” because [for example] the gas would only flow within that space in a certain way, which meant that you couldn’t have a cloud thick enough.
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