Benny Safdie’s favourite movie: “It’s so perfectly put together”
In the contemporary landscape of American cinema, the Safdie brothers have carved out a unique space for themselves on the back of brilliant films such as Good Time and Uncut Gems. However, Benny Safdie, one half of the critically acclaimed duo, has garnered a lot of attention recently for further diversifying his artistic portfolio and branching out into acting roles on high-profile projects like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Since splitting from his brother Josh, the younger of the Safdie siblings has continued his eclectic career on either side of the camera, securing another acting gig in Nolan’s fantasy epic The Odyssey and Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore sequel, as well as co-creating HBO’s The Curse alongside Nathan Fielder.
Working with the highest-paid star in Hollywood on his solo directorial debut might seem like an unusual change of pace, but Dwayne Johnson is entering Safdie’s world by playing a serious dramatic part for the first time in what feels like forever in the A24-backed biographical sports drama The Smashing Machine.
Working with ‘The Rock’ and starring in back-to-back Nolan films is hardly the obvious route for any actor and filmmaker to take, but Safdie has never been beholden to convention. The films he made with his brother were all intimate, introspective, and rooted firmly in character, so it makes sense that his favourite movie of all time would tick those boxes.
When highlighting the pictures he cherishes the most to Rotten Tomatoes, Robert Bresson’s 1956 classic A Man Escaped was at the top. “That has to be my favourite movie of all time,” he said. “Just because it always makes me cry at the end, because I feel like I’ve achieved something that the character achieves.”
“It’s just so perfectly put together,” he continued. “And it’s something where I kind of feel like I’m going along with the escape in a way that’s just done by a master.” However, it’s also a movie that affects him differently the more he watches it, with Safdie getting a completely different experience revisiting it the older he gets.
“What’s weird is I’ve watched it again recently, and I had a totally different feeling of it,” he shared. “Where it was more about society and how people are talking to each other.” The best films often reveal new details on every viewing, and Bresson’s masterpiece fits that bill by recontextualising itself for Safdie on every rewatch.
Based on the memoirs of André Devigny, A Man Escaped follows François Leterrier’s prisoner of war, Fontaine, as he races against time to mount a daring prison break before his scheduled execution. It’s undoubtedly one of Bresson’s finest works, and for Safdie, there’s never been a better motion picture.
