Safdie brothers

Based on Wikipedia: Safdie brothers

The End of a Partnership

In January 2024, Benny Safdie told an interviewer something that sent ripples through the film world: he and his brother Josh would no longer be directing movies together. When pressed about whether they might collaborate again in the future, Benny's answer was blunt. "I don't know," he said.

For anyone who had followed the Safdie brothers over the previous decade, this felt like watching a band break up at the height of their powers. Josh and Benny had spent years building one of the most distinctive filmmaking partnerships in American cinema, creating movies that felt like anxiety attacks set to pulsing electronic scores, films that dropped viewers into the sweaty, desperate world of New York's margins and refused to let them look away.

But to understand why this split matters, you have to understand how the Safdies became the Safdies in the first place.

Children of Divorce, Children of Film

Joshua Henry Safdie was born on April 3, 1984. His younger brother Benjamin arrived almost two years later, on February 24, 1986. They grew up in New York City, but not in the way that phrase usually suggests. Their parents, Amy and Alberto, divorced, and the boys spent their childhood shuttling between two worlds: their father's place in Queens and their mother and stepfather's home in Manhattan.

This constant movement between boroughs, between households, between different versions of family life, would later fuel their filmmaking. The brothers have said that the "turmoil of their youth" became a direct inspiration for their work. You can see it in films like Daddy Longlegs, which they based on their memories of living with their father, a film about a man who loves his children deeply but can't quite manage to take care of them properly.

Their father Alberto was a film enthusiast, and this matters enormously. He didn't just watch movies; he passed on a love of cinema that became the brothers' inheritance. The Safdies didn't stumble into filmmaking as a career choice. They grew up inside it, absorbing movies the way other children absorb sports statistics or video games.

The family's cultural background added layers to their perspective. Alberto is Sephardic Jewish, tracing his ancestry to Syrian Jews. He grew up in France and Italy before settling in New York. The brothers' mother is Ashkenazi Jewish, with Russian roots. This mixture of Mediterranean and Eastern European Jewish heritage, filtered through a distinctly New York upbringing, created the cultural stew that would later inform their storytelling.

There's an interesting architectural footnote in the family tree: their great-uncle is Moshe Safdie, the Israeli-Canadian architect famous for designing Habitat 67 in Montreal, a revolutionary housing complex that looks like a jumble of concrete boxes stacked at impossible angles. Moshe Safdie's son Oren became a playwright. Creative ambition, it seems, runs in the blood.

Learning the Craft

The brothers attended Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in Manhattan, one of the oldest private schools in the city. From there, both went to Boston University, where something crucial happened: they met their collaborators.

At Boston University, the Safdies co-founded a creative collective called Red Bucket Films with Alex Kalman, Sam Lisenco, Brett Jutkiewicz, and Zachary Treitz. This wasn't just a student film club. It was the beginning of a working method that would define their careers. The Safdie brothers have never been auteurs in the traditional sense, artists working in isolation. They've always been collaborators, surrounding themselves with a tight-knit group of co-conspirators who return film after film.

Sam Lisenco, one of those Boston University friends, became their production designer. Ronald Bronstein, whom they met slightly later, became arguably their most essential collaborator. Bronstein has co-written and edited every narrative feature the Safdies have made since their 2009 film Daddy Longlegs. He's also acted in their films. The relationship between the Safdies and Bronstein represents one of the most productive writer-editor partnerships in contemporary American independent film.

Josh graduated from Boston University's College of Communication in 2007. Benny followed in 2008. They were ready to make movies.

The First Films

The Safdies' origin story includes a charming accident. In 2007, Josh was hired by Andy Spade and Anthony Sperduti to create a short promotional film featuring Kate Spade handbags. What they got instead was something stranger and more alive. Josh conceived a story about a kleptomaniac woman and her adventures. Eleonore Hendricks, who also co-wrote the screenplay, played the lead.

The project grew beyond its commercial origins, eventually becoming a feature film called The Pleasure of Being Robbed. It premiered at South by Southwest in 2008, then traveled to the Directors' Fortnight section at Cannes. At the same festival, Benny premiered a short film called The Acquaintances of a Lonely John. The brothers were twenty-four and twenty-two years old, and they were already screening work at the most prestigious film festival in the world.

Their second feature came the following year. Daddy Longlegs, initially titled Go Get Some Rosemary, premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes 2009. The film starred Ronald Bronstein as a father trying and often failing to care for his two young sons during visitation weekends. The material was personal, drawn from the brothers' memories of their own childhood with Alberto.

Bronstein won the Breakthrough Actor Award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, and the film took home the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. The Cassavetes Award is specifically given to the best feature film made for under $500,000. It's a prize that honors scrappy, resourceful filmmaking, and it perfectly captured what the Safdies represented: young directors making ambitious work with minimal resources and maximum imagination.

The Basketball Connection

The Safdie brothers love basketball. This might seem like a trivial biographical detail, but it's not. Their passion for the game, particularly their devotion to the New York Knicks, has shaped their work in ways both obvious and subtle.

They try to watch every Knicks game together. Basketball appears prominently in two of their projects: Lenny Cooke, their first full-length documentary, and Uncut Gems, the film that would become their breakthrough hit.

Lenny Cooke, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013, tells the story of a high school basketball player who was once considered a surer prospect than LeBron James. Cooke was ranked above LeBron in high school. He was the future. And then, through a series of choices and circumstances, he wasn't. The documentary follows Cooke from adolescence into a very different kind of adulthood than anyone had predicted, a meditation on unfulfilled potential and the cruelty of athletic promise.

The Safdies' basketball obsession would later fuel Uncut Gems in a different way, giving them the sports-world setting and gambling culture that drives that film's relentless tension.

Heaven Knows What

In 2014, the brothers made a film that signaled a shift in their ambitions. Heaven Knows What was produced under Elara Pictures, a production company the Safdies had founded that year. The film was based on an unpublished book called Mad Love in New York City, written by Arielle Holmes about her own experiences with heroin addiction and life on the streets of Manhattan.

Holmes starred in the film, essentially playing a version of herself. This was guerrilla filmmaking in the most literal sense: a movie about addicts, starring an addict, shot in the actual locations where the real events had occurred. The result was something raw and uncomfortable, a film that didn't aestheticize its subject matter or offer easy redemption.

Heaven Knows What premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, then traveled to Toronto, New York, and Tokyo. The festival circuit was taking notice. The Safdies were no longer just promising young filmmakers; they were becoming forces in independent cinema.

Good Time

Then came the film that changed everything.

Good Time, released in 2017, starred Robert Pattinson as Connie Nikas, a small-time criminal whose attempt to rob a bank goes catastrophically wrong. Benny Safdie co-starred as Connie's brother Nick, a developmentally disabled man whom Connie drags into the robbery scheme. The film follows one frantic night as Connie tries to spring Nick from custody, making increasingly desperate and destructive choices along the way.

Pattinson was an inspired choice. At the time, he was still fighting to escape the shadow of the Twilight franchise, taking on small roles in art-house films to prove his range. The Safdies recognized something in him: the manic energy, the ability to be simultaneously charming and repellent, the willingness to get sweaty and ugly on screen. Pattinson delivered one of the performances of the decade, a live-wire turn that finally convinced skeptics he was more than a teen heartthrob.

Good Time was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the festival's highest prize. It didn't win, but the nomination itself was a landmark. The Safdies had gone from Directors' Fortnight, a sidebar section for promising work, to the main competition, where they stood alongside the world's most celebrated filmmakers.

The film also established what would become the signature Safdie style: handheld cameras that stay uncomfortably close to characters' faces, a pounding electronic score by Daniel Lopatin, who performs as Oneohtrix Point Never, and a pace so relentless it leaves viewers exhausted. Watching a Safdie brothers film is a physical experience. Your heart rate increases. Your palms sweat. You feel like you've run a marathon by the time the credits roll.

Uncut Gems

If Good Time established the Safdies, Uncut Gems made them famous.

The film stars Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, a jeweler in Manhattan's Diamond District who is also a compulsive gambler drowning in debt. When a rare Ethiopian black opal arrives at his shop, Howard sees his chance to make a score big enough to solve all his problems. What follows is two hours and fifteen minutes of sustained chaos, a film structured like a nightmare about being late for an appointment where the appointment keeps moving further away.

The Diamond District setting came from the brothers' own family history. Their father Alberto had worked in that world, among the Hasidic Jewish traders and the desperate dreamers who circle the diamond shops hoping to get rich. Howard Ratner is, in some sense, a version of Alberto, or at least a version of a certain New York Jewish archetype: the hustler, the schemer, the man who always has an angle and can never stop working it.

Casting Adam Sandler was a gamble. Sandler was best known for broad comedies like Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison, films that played to his childlike goofiness. He had shown dramatic range in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, but that was fifteen years earlier, and his career since then had been dominated by lazy Netflix comedies that critics dismissed as cynical cash grabs.

The Safdies saw what others had missed. Sandler's comedy had always contained an edge of rage, a barely suppressed fury that could flip into violence with startling speed. Howard Ratner needed that quality: he's a man who smiles when he's terrified, who jokes when he should be apologizing, who cannot stop himself from making things worse even as he's trying to make them better.

Sandler delivered a performance that many critics called career-defining. He was overlooked for an Oscar nomination, a snub that provoked genuine outrage in film circles. The Academy's failure to recognize his work became one of the most discussed controversies of that awards season.

Uncut Gems premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2019, then opened theatrically that December. It received near-universal critical acclaim and became one of the highest-grossing releases ever for A24, the independent studio that had become synonymous with prestige horror and cerebral dramas. The Safdies had created that rarest of things: an uncompromising art film that also worked as popular entertainment.

Martin Scorsese served as an executive producer on the film, a passing of the torch from the master of New York street cinema to his most obvious heirs.

The Collaborators

To understand the Safdie brothers, you have to understand their team. They've never worked like traditional Hollywood directors, handing off responsibilities to department heads. Instead, they do everything: writing, directing, acting, editing, shooting, mixing sound, producing. Their films are handmade objects, crafted by a small group of people who understand each other's instincts.

Ronald Bronstein remains essential. He has co-written and edited every narrative feature since Daddy Longlegs, and his influence on the films' rhythms, on their feeling of controlled chaos, cannot be overstated. A Safdie brothers film is also, in many ways, a Ronald Bronstein film.

Daniel Lopatin, performing as Oneohtrix Point Never, has composed scores that define the Safdie aesthetic. His electronic music doesn't underscore the action so much as amplify it, turning already tense scenes into experiences of almost unbearable pressure.

Sean Price Williams, the cinematographer, brings the handheld intensity that makes the films feel like documentaries of disasters unfolding in real time. Sam Lisenco, the production designer from those Boston University days, creates the grimy, lived-in environments where the stories take place.

These collaborations matter because they represent a model of filmmaking that Hollywood has largely abandoned: the permanent ensemble, the artistic family that returns project after project. The Safdies make films the way bands make albums, with the same people playing the same instruments, developing a shared language that deepens over time.

Projects Abandoned and Realized

Not everything the Safdies touched turned to gold. In December 2017, The Hollywood Reporter announced that they would direct a remake of 48 Hrs., the 1982 action comedy that paired Nick Nolte with Eddie Murphy. Josh Safdie was writing the script with Ronald Bronstein and comedian Jerrod Carmichael.

Two years later, the brothers explained that the project had evolved. What they'd written wasn't really a remake anymore. "Re-shifted into something original," they called it. By 2025, Josh confirmed the project was dead. "We wrote a remake of 48 Hrs. for Paramount," he said, "and they read it, and they were like, 'This isn't a remake, what is this? This is an original film.' We're like, 'Sorry, we tried.'"

There was another project that stalled: a film about baseball card memorabilia, set to reunite them with Adam Sandler. Megan Thee Stallion, Ben Affleck, Steve Harvey, and Gael Garcia Bernal were reportedly in talks to co-star. Then the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes shut down production across the industry. By the time the strikes ended, the project had changed shape. Benny decided he wouldn't co-direct.

That decision foreshadowed the bigger announcement to come.

The Split

In January 2024, Benny revealed that the brothers were going their separate ways as directors. They would no longer collaborate on films together. When asked if they might work together again in the future, Benny offered no comfort to fans hoping for a reunion. "I don't know," he said.

The split was formalized through the creation of separate production companies. Josh founded Central Pictures in 2024 with Ronald Bronstein and producer Eli Bush. Through Central, Josh has produced films including If I Had Legs I'd Kick You and Marty Supreme, with The Land of Nod in development.

Benny launched Out of The Count Productions in 2024. His company has produced The Smashing Machine and is developing an adaptation of the children's book Lizard Music.

The brothers' shared production company, Elara Pictures, faces an uncertain future. Beyond the split between Josh and Benny, Elara was tainted by sexual misconduct allegations against Sebastian Bear-McClard, who had been involved with the company. The combination of personal and professional ruptures left the future of their shared enterprise unclear.

Elara had produced some remarkable work during its existence: Heaven Knows What, Good Time, Uncut Gems, Owen Kline's directorial debut Funny Pages, and the Showtime television series The Curse.

The Curse

The Curse represents a different direction for the Safdies, or at least for Benny. In February 2020, Showtime ordered a pilot for a series about the making of an HGTV-style reality show. Nathan Fielder, the comedian known for the cringe-inducing hidden-camera show Nathan for You, co-created and co-wrote the series with Benny. Emma Stone starred alongside Fielder and Benny himself.

The Curse is not a Safdie brothers project in the traditional sense. It's a Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder project, a collaboration that pointed toward Benny's future as a solo creative voice rather than half of a directing duo.

The Influences

Every filmmaker comes from somewhere, and the Safdies have been open about their inspirations. John Cassavetes, the godfather of American independent cinema, looms largest. Cassavetes pioneered a style of intimate, improvisational filmmaking in the 1960s and '70s that valued emotional authenticity over technical polish. His films like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence influenced generations of directors who wanted to make movies that felt real, messy, and human.

Martin Scorsese, unsurprisingly, matters to them. Scorsese's New York crime films, particularly Mean Streets and Goodfellas, established a template for kinetic urban storytelling that the Safdies have extended into the 21st century. Having Scorsese serve as executive producer on Uncut Gems was a meaningful endorsement, the old master recognizing his successors.

Quentin Tarantino's influence is perhaps less obvious but equally present. Tarantino brought a love of disreputable genre filmmaking into the art-house world, proving that movies could be violent, profane, and deeply unserious while still being works of genuine artistry.

Beyond cinema, the brothers cite underground comic artist Robert Crumb and novelist Irvine Welsh as influences. Crumb's grotesque, sexually explicit comics depicted American life with savage honesty, refusing to prettify the bodies and desires of his characters. Welsh, the Scottish author of Trainspotting, writes about addiction and working-class desperation with dark humor and unflinching detail. Both artists share with the Safdies a willingness to immerse themselves in uncomfortable worlds without judgment or sentimentality.

When asked about their single favorite films, the brothers gave answers that illuminate their sensibilities. Benny named A Man Escaped by Robert Bresson, the French master known for films of extreme austerity and spiritual intensity. A Man Escaped follows a French Resistance fighter attempting to break out of a Nazi prison, told with almost unbearable suspense despite, or because of, Bresson's minimalist approach.

Josh chose Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica, the 1948 Italian neorealist masterpiece about a poor man searching Rome for his stolen bicycle, which he needs to keep his job. De Sica shot the film on location with non-professional actors, creating a portrait of postwar poverty that remains devastating seventy-five years later.

Both choices reveal directors drawn to films about desperate people in desperate circumstances, stories told with technical restraint but enormous emotional impact.

What They Leave Behind

The Safdie brothers, working together, made a particular kind of American film. Their movies were loud, fast, sweaty, and anxious. They dropped viewers into worlds populated by con men and addicts, dreamers and losers, people making terrible decisions and suffering the consequences. The films felt dangerous, as if anything could happen, as if the camera might capture something too raw for cinema.

They also made films that were deeply, specifically New York. Not the New York of romantic comedies or prestige dramas, but the New York of outer-borough hustlers and diamond district schemers, of people trying to catch a break in a city that eats the unlucky. Their New York was Jewish, working-class, immigrant, and always moving.

Now Josh and Benny work separately. Whether they'll ever collaborate again, even Benny doesn't know. What they built together, though, has already influenced a generation of filmmakers learning that American independent cinema can be both artistically ambitious and viscerally exciting, that you don't have to choose between making a movie that matters and making a movie that moves.

The partnership is over. The films remain.