The Treat: Josh Safdie

0:00It's The Treat. I'm Elvis Mitchell. Writer-director Josh Safdie makes movies about people who think that they're loners, coming to realize they need other people. that's evident in his film Marty Supreme, which is nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. For The Treat, Safdie remembers a classic film that touched on that theme and had a special resonance in his home.

0:30I'm Josh Safdie, and this is The Treat.

0:38I don't remember the age that my brother and I were, but at some point, you know, my mom was coming back into the picture. My parents were separated since a very early age. Kind of a crazy, traumatic thing happened at a very, very young age. And I was living with my dad for a while. And he was trying to prepare me and Benny for the experience of seeing our mother and being with her for a little bit of time. So he decided, like he did with most of our big experiences in life, to prepare us through movies. Show us a film. And he decided in that moment that he was going to show us Kramer vs. Kramer.

1:13And he said, I'm Dustin Hoffman. Your mom is on the street. Watch. Ted, I'm leaving you. Ted. Keys. Here are my keys. Here's my American Express card. Here's my Bloomingdale's credit card. Here's my checkbook. I've taken$2 ,000 out of our savings account because that's what I had in the bank when we first got married. Was this some kind of joke? Here's the cleaning, here's the laundry ticket. You can pick them both up on Saturday. You. You have to pick them up on Saturday. I paid the rent, I paid the con-ed bill, and I paid the... I was like eight years old, and I'm watching this movie, and, you know, for as progressive as that movie was in giving women the freedom to leave, That was usually given to the father in most stories.

2:00Meryl Streep is kind of the bad guy in that movie, you know, emotionally. And that scene when the kid runs to see her in Central Park really messed me up. And it was a moment where I kind of saw life through fiction. They were the same thing. There was no difference. I didn't watch that movie thinking these are, you know, this is a fake story, you know. So when we saw our mom, we were very angry with her. and we were saying, started referencing this movie and she was Libby. It's too much coffee. No, no, no, no, I like it strong. Mommy always makes it too weak. Can I have some orange juice? Orange juice, right.

2:37Right, one of OJ coming up. What a kid. Daddy, it's burning, it's burning. What? It's burning. Oh, God damn her! I mean, the performances that are out of control, the wine glass that Dustin Hoffman throws at that burger joint, the performance of the kid, the burning of the eggs or the waffle or something, the running on the street when he's carrying the kid, bleeding from his mouth. Rest your head. Watch it!

3:17Rest your head. We're almost there. Let me see. Let me see. Where's the emergency room? I remember a while ago reading Dustin Hoffman talked about divorce and separation. And he said the problem with separating, and this is why I have courage, you know, it takes courage to break something off. He said when you break something off with somebody, it's never actually dead. He gave the analogy of going up to a tree and trying to break a branch off. and if it's not dead, you bend it. We can all imagine you bend it and you bend it and you bend it and you bend it and you bend it a million times and eventually maybe you get to a place where you can rip it off, but it never actually wants to fully break.

4:02And he said that was what divorce was and that's what he wanted to bring to the character and that's always stuck with me. I get up in the morning and we eat breakfast and he talks to me and then we go to school and at night we have dinner together and we talked in and I read to him and we built a life together and we love each other.

4:31If you destroy that, it may be irreparable. When you have, you know, different households, there's propaganda in those households and you're just a kid and you're like a little sponge and you'll take it up. So that was an incredibly formative moment for me. And I didn't know, you know, you become a filmmaker later, but I started to, you know, I saw movies as something much more powerful than just a story. They were a thing to understand life through. I watched fiction for reality. You know, I watch more fictional movies for reality than I do documentary.

5:21Marty Supreme, writer-director Josh Safdie, on journalist-turned-filmmaker Robert Benton's Oscar-winning film adaptation of Kramer vs. Kramer. The Treat is produced by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilchrist. It's The Treat. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

5:47Thank you.