Josh Safdie on the Unexpectedly Perfect Soundtrack for “Marty Supreme“

Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” now in theaters, is filled with ’80s bangers, including Tears for Fears’ “everybody Wants to Rule the World” and Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch.”

But Safdie’s latest film – starring timothée Chalamet as a young man from New York’s Lower East Side who dreams big and aspires to conquer the world of table tennis – is set in the 1950s.

It’s an intriguing juxtaposition that totally works because it’s not an ordinary period piece.

Safdie, who also edited the film and wrote the screenplay alongside Ronald bronstein, was inspired while watching a video of a 1948 British Open table tennis event. “This wiry young guy was bouncing all over the place, couldn’t stand still, cocky, but also totally vain,” he recalls. The guy was much like Marty.

Around the same time,he became obsessed with Gabriel’s 1982 song,which he says he listened to over 1,000 times. “I decided to set the footage to that song,and it just worked. something was happening there; it felt mythic,” Safdie explains. He adds, “There was a contemporary quality to seeing the anachronistic music paired with the ’40s or early ’50s.”

Safdie explains how the new wave-flavored music actually makes sense with the film’s themes. “President Reagan was nostalgically in that first era of postmodernism, actively trying to recall the ’50s. In the face of defeat from Vietnam, culture was really just starting to redo itself in the vein of the ’50s.You saw it in style. You saw it in movies. ‘Back to the Future’ is literally going back to the ’50s. But on a very simple level,what happens when you do t