Josh Safdie breaks down the table‑tennis scene in ‘Marty Supreme’

Josh Safdie, director of Marty Supreme, discusses a key table‑tennis scene featuring Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser and Gwyneth Paltrow as Kay Stone in an Anatomy of a Scene video published Jan. 30, 2026. The film, set around Marty’s 1952 British Open semifinal in London, is nominated for nine Academy Awards.

Safdie describes a small magic trick at the center of the sequence: Marty persuades Kay, who is staying in the same London hotel, to look across the courtyard at a room with open curtains and a bowl on a table and tells her that if he can make an apple appear in the bowl she should come to his match.

He said he wanted to shoot both Marty and Kay’s sides of the conversation at the same time, because “they’re talking to each other on period telephones in real time so that I could capture their emotional points of view.” Safdie said Daniel Lopatin’s score incorporated a Viennese choir to create “this kind of heavenly vibe.” He and cinematographer Darius Khondji studied newsreels from the 1949 championships to try to “emulate, the best we could, the glory and awe that we saw,” and production designer Jack Fisk covered the entire arena floor in plywood to give the sport weight.

Safdie said Chalamet and Geza Rohrig, who plays Marty’s competitor Bela Kletzki, spent hours with Diego Schaaf, the film’s table‑tennis choreographer, who mined thousands of hours of footage.

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