Josh Safdie

“It’s a shared psychiatric experience where a thought can lead to a recollection of something from the past — something neither of us has thought of since the day it happened — and then we’ll give the floor for that person to ruminate on it, which will lead to an idea,”

“One person may think that it’s a good idea, and then it’s time for it to be interrogated in such an intense way that sometimes you forget that you’re fighting for it. You’re trying to find the weaknesses, almost like it’s a courtroom.”

“In my past films, I had the luxury of being able to just step out and steal shots in the streets,”

“I can’t live with the idea of things not feeling like I’m stealing them.”

“I told Ronnie [Bronstein], my co-writer, ‘I think I want to be an architect. I don’t know if I want to do this anymore,’”

“Ronnie and I were working together every day. There was no vaccine. It was a scary time. We’d sit in our office — in the beginning sat 10 feet apart — talking about our lives and we would wonder why we were thinking about them in the context of these characters,”

“I sent him a video of a player playing, set to Peter Gabriel’s ‘I Have The Touch’. That was the energy I wanted. I said, ‘I want to do period, but with this timeless feeling.’”

“All these misfits, guys with high IQs who did terribly at school or were dropouts; super serious dreamers who would bet on who could throw a peach pit higher on Broadway and 52nd Street,”

“No one in this film is spared from humility. This film is about control and no one has control of their own lives. They’re all being led by this invisible force. And I think that makes the characters malleable in a sense of relatability.”

“In the casting process you’re looking to align the character with the essence of that person. Kevin is the epitome of the American dream. He’s almost the performative sense of the American dream. He represents cold, corporate, cruel capitalism,”

“I showed it to Timmy because he and I were talking at the very beginning of all of this. I said to him, ‘I want to do a movie in this world. Check out what this player looks like.’ He’s like, ‘Holy shit, that looks like me.’”

“I had been like, ‘Wow, this guy’s trying to be this big actor, showing up at this party tripping on acid.’ But he played it so well — I believed it. It was really good acting. And so I was like, ‘OK, this is a weird dude.’”