Benny Safdie on making Robert Pattinson crime drama Good Time

There are plenty of talented sibling filmmakers out there: the Wachowskis, the Coens, the Dardennes, the Russos. A pair of New York-based brothers, Joshua and Benny Safdie, should be added to this list. While they’ve been making eye-catching indie films for a decade now, including 2009’s Daddy Longlegs and 2014’s Heaven Knows What, their new feature looks set to bring them to a much wider audience.

That new work is blistering crime picture Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson. The former Twilight star’s presence on the poster will no doubt help catapult the brothers' film towards a more mainstream audience, but make no mistake, Good Time is true to its indie credentials, proving to be a breathless, heart-pounding thriller, complete with a thumping score from Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never.

Good Time follows Connie Nikas (Pattinson), who’s recently been released from prison and is trying to make a living by any means possible. He's also responsible for the care of his mentally handicapped brother, Nick, played by Ben Safdie, who also co-directs with his brother Josh from a script by their regular collaborator Ronald Bronstein.

We speak to Benny Safdie down the phone from New York ahead of Good Time’s UK release (his brother Josh is buried deep in the editing room somewhere else in the city working on a music video project). His speech is quick, rich with a Queens lilt, mixing local idioms with eloquent explanations of characterisation and plot. We begin with the first challenge: how did he find both starring in and directing the film?

“I had done it before, but this time I could go deeper because the production scale was much larger,” he explains, referencing John’s Gone, a short film he and his brother made back in 2010. “I was able to do a trust fall into Josh when I could go deeper into the character.” Nick is a challenging role. He’s at the beck and call of Connie, who both protects and controls him, but he often is unable to process his emotions and the situations around him. “I could almost direct from within, and in the meantime let Josh worry about the more technical side of the filming,” Safdie adds. “It was very hectic, and there were times when I couldn’t break character and I would direct in character. I think Rob mentioned this once, where I would slip out of character for 20% of the time, then go straight back in.”

The challenge of remaining in character and directing was tough for Safdie, mainly because he didn’t want to allow the sympathy he had for Nick to influence his performance. “I didn’t want to bring my baggage to the character,” he explains. “If I felt bad about the situation that Nick was in, I wasn’t going to let that bleed into the performance. There were times when I would get very upset about it and we would have to do another take.”

As you might have guessed, the theme of brotherly love is central to Good Time, and it is echoed in the filmmaking process; the casting of Robert Pattinson allowed for a surrogate third brother to be thrown into the mix, says Safdie. “Obviously, Josh is my brother, and he is protective on his end, but Rob [Pattinson] also allowed a lot of time off the screen to develop this brotherly relationship.”

“Rob had this fear, this sense of being on the run, which comes from his level of fame” – Benny Safdie

Pattinson came to the project with a lot of passion for what the brothers were trying to achieve. “He was like a dog with lockjaw and he had latched on to these ideas, and he wanted to understand them to their fullest,” says the director. He was very conscious, however, of the level of fame Pattinson reached at a young age thanks to fandom surrounding The Twilight Saga.

Despite having thrown himself into less commercial projects in the last few years – working with directors ranging from David Cronenberg (on Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars) to James Gray (Lost City of Z) – fame has continued to chase Pattinson's heels. But the brothers felt this brought something to his performance as Connie. Like the character, “Rob also had this fear, this sense of being on the run, which comes from his level of fame,” suggests Safdie. The combination of real life experience of feeling chased, and his passion for the ideas in the film was a winning combination. “I think he really wanted to disappear into this character, and we could see that this level of commitment wasn’t just a verbal one. We could see that he really just wanted to go for it.”

One aspect of Good Time that Safdie is particularly satisfied with, and which many critics have noted as well, is how seamlessly Pattinson dissolves into his character, and not just because of the tatty hoodie and bleach blonde hair he wears. “I don’t feel Rob entering the film, I felt Connie entering the film. I am very proud that, together, we were all able to do that.”

We move on to the ideas in the film that Pattinson was so passionate about. Connie is a complex character: he’s a crook, but he’s also a hustler that you can, on some level, sympathise with and it is unsurprising Pattinson was so eager to play him. “Connie can’t keep up with the obstacles that life is throwing at him,” says Safdie. “He oozes the idea that he has control, but as that starts to slip, you know it isn’t going to end well. Connie is pushing against society and society is pushing back very hard.”

Since it debuted in Cannes, a lot of ink has been spilled about the political nature of Good Time and how it handles the subject of race. Nick, in his pursuit to help out his brother, will metaphorically throw anyone under the bus in order to survive, and the film is peppered with incidents where Nick uses his white privilege to set up or betray black characters, two of whom are played by Barkhad Abdi and Taliah Webster.

“The racial politics were a response to Rob’s character,” says Safdie. “In a way, being exposed to that knowledge he sees how he can take advantage of society to his benefit.” This includes when Nick drugs a security guard and steals his uniform to avoid being arrested by the police. “Connie knows the police won’t even question it. This is massively problematic as a reflection of society.”

Yet the character Abdi plays is one of the few aspirational ones in the film, given that he can hold down a job and home (something that the Nikas brothers struggle to maintain). Safdie is keen to stress that the movie isn’t setting out to be overtly political and is very much a genre film, yet he can’t deny that avoiding racial stereotypes was important to them. “Sometimes we don’t like having a mirror held up to our society, but when it is shown to you, you can’t ignore it.”

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Good Time screens at Summerhall, Edinburgh, Wed 18 May, 8:45pm, part of The Cineskinny Film Club – tickets here