"Marty Supreme" Used The "Forrest Gump" Ping-Pong Choreographer

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'Marty Supreme' director Josh Safdie is opening up on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast about how he hired table tennis choreographer Diego Schaaf and his wife Wei Wang, who trained Tom Hanks in 'Forrest Gump'. Safdie was scared of the filming process due to the fast speed of the sport visually.

“That was a real fear. It’s a challenging sport. There’s really only one way to show it, if you’ve watched it professionally: It’s three-quarters from the back to understand the chess-like quality of it.  So I went and searched ‘Forrest Gump choreographer table tennis’ because as a kid that was my favorite parts of that movie. I loved it because it’s about an amazing true story about ping-pong diplomacy, which was inspiring for ‘Marty Supreme', too.”

“I met with Diego. I was like, ‘Well, Timmy’s kind of a basement player. He’s been training now for a couple of years, he’s gotten better, but I don’t know.’ Schaaf said, ‘Don’t worry, we can do this.’ Diego had this incredible library and encyclopedic knowledge of the games, and we had to build these points, Frankenstein them, using real ones. So if you saw the visual script, one point could be from six different games over the course of 50 years. It’s a really beautiful document so that Timmy and Koto [Kawaguchi] could study the choreography and learn how to play those points in real life.”

For stars Timothée Chalamet and Koto Kawaguchi, who plays his opponent Koto Endo, as much as they choreographed, there was a limit on what Safdie wanted them to do without CGI.

“A real point has incredible nuance. It’s improvised. Because the ball can bounce here and Timmy’s not going to know how to respond to it. He might lose the point when he’s supposed to win it. Timmy obviously wanted to play the points for himself: ‘I need to be able to play all the points with the real ball.’ So every time we would entertain [that], we would do it, and it was great because we would use shots where he’s using the real ball, but then to get the proper coverage that I needed to have the precision that would come with placing the ball.”

“It was harder than playing the points for real because the timing has to be perfect: seven frames between hits if you’re going to put a ball in [play]. And I was petrified of it because [Schaaf] told me they can only do one point at a time. To me, it was essential for their performances to be able to play at least three in a row, so they could feel the rhythms, for all the hundreds and hundreds of extras to be able to get into the game, and have the ebbs and flows of the narrative.  I was really afraid of being able to not only cover it in the ways that I wanted to, but I’d have the amount of takes that I’d want for performance, and I’d be able to have a longevity of takes, so I could capture the nuances of the in-between parts, like when a boxer is sitting against the ropes. So I was really afraid of it.”

Do you think Timothée Chalamet could win his first Oscar for 'Marty Supreme'? Comment below with your thoughts.

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Source: IndieWire

Photo Credit: Paramount/A24