Brotherly love
GOOD TIME I Robert Pattinson has a night from hell in the Safdie brothers’ crime yarn…
Court reports, docs, TV shows, novels… Good Time comes from “a handful of obsessions”, says Josh Safdie. A story of two brothers, Nick and Connie Nikas, Josh Safdie and his co-scribe Ronald Bronstein were writing the script when a real-life drama went down in June 2015, when convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat broke out of prison in upstate New York. “These guys were terrible people. They killed cops. But everyone was rooting for them!”
Inevitably, it fed into the development of Nick and Connie in Good Time, two deadbeats in their most desperate hours. Played by Josh’s brother and co-director Benny Safdie, Nick is hearing impaired and has a developmental disability, which leaves Connie (Robert Pattinson) thinking for both of them. After a bank robbery goes badly wrong, Connie needs to get his brother to safety and off the freezing streets of Queens.
The Sweat-Matt story wasn’t the only inspiration, with Jon Alpert’s 1989 documentary One Year In A Life In Crime, which filmed petty criminals with hidden cameras, also influential. In the case of Good Time, scored with Daniel Lopatin’s heart-pounding music, the Safdies compressed such adventures into one night-long nightmare – a journey that includes an illegal stop-off in an amusement park and a bottle of highly potent LSD.
With everything from TV doc Cops to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and Jack Abbott’s In The Belly Of The Beast feeding the Safdies’ creativity, Pattinson unexpectedly reached out. “He said, ‘I want to make anything,’” says Benny. “He immediately made it clear he was willing to do whatever it takes,” adds Josh. “A lot of people say that, but he really did.”
With R-Pattz still shooting The Lost City Of Z, the characters of Nick and Connie began to evolve through email exchanges. “He had an annoying amount of questions,” laughs Josh, who then tried to befriend the re-apprehended David Sweat. “I tried to buy one of his paintings. I get like that. I want to be friends with these people,” he says. “I want to get to the primary source, always.”
ETA | 3 NOVEMBER / GOOD TIME OPENS LATER THIS YEAR.