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We Cordially Invite You To Meet Uncut Gems’ Non-Actors - Vulture

We Cordially Invite You To Meet Uncut Gems’ Non-Actors - Vulture

We Cordially Invite You To Meet Uncut Gems’ Non-Actors - Vulture
May 25, 2020 5 mins, 58 secs

He just looks like a guy from a movie.

When he shows up as an antagonist in Uncut Gems, the Safdie brothers’ crime drama from 2019, his presence sets its own expectation: Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), the loudmouth Diamond District gambling addict, might not make it out of this one intact.

Uncut Gems uses — and subverts — it’s résuméd stars’ appeal, but the movie is built on a handful of first-time actors: Kevin Garnett and Julia Fox, among them.

Over the course of a couple days in 2012, Sandler’s Howard runs around 47th Street making money and losing it.

In honor of Uncut Gems’ Netflix debut — a moment months in the making — Vulture spoke to the best of the movie’s civilians, about how they ended up in an indie film about the chaos and magic of their hometown.

Early in the movie, Celtics power forward Kevin Garnett and his posse visit Howard’s showroom and are immediately entranced by an uncut gem he’s just received from Ethiopia.

In real life, the Greenbergs have worked on the street for 40 years; Sandler and the Uncut Gems directors spotted the Greenbergs while scouting the district and asked them to be in the film.

I didn’t know if I wanted to do it or not and what was involved, and so I got to know them and what the part would be and what the movie was about, which I looked into.” (His brother’s version of the story: “All of the sudden Josh and Benny came in with Adam and they see my brother, and within one second they say to Marshall, ‘You have to be in the movie.’ The idea of using the twins, and they’re two brothers who have the same kind of symbiotic relationship, we just hit it off instantly. I felt like they were like my spouse from another generation.”).

When Howard is his lowest, and most in need of quick cash, Marshall is the only person in the movie to ask him if he’s okay.

I’m a film buff, historian.

I studied film, so for me it was like a dream come true to be in a movie about 47th Street.” When he and his brother met Josh and Benny, he says he had a hard time believing the encounter was real.

Ronald describes Howard, or “Howie,” as the “kind of good-hearted but despicable, complex, schizoid type.” In scenes with Sandler, this empathy for his character shows; even as Ronald and Marshall are doing a deal with Howard, they’re concerned for him, scared for what he’s greedy enough to do.

Like much of the movie, the brothers’ scene was ad-libbed, and the Safdies let them use their real experience on the street to make the exchange feel authentic.

The Wenigs, another set of brothers the Safdies pulled into the movie, trail Howard throughout the movie, trying to collect on an unrelated bet.

Here’s a tease of one of the songs from Stuart (and to some@extent Mitch) Wenig’s UNCUT GEMS full 10 track album made for the film...

For Uncut Gems, the Safdies asked Mitchell to come back and bring his brother Stewart to audition too, a musician who recorded original songs for the movie that didn’t make it into the final cut.

“I wrote about ten songs for the movie, and I gave [the Safdies] a CD of the songs.

I wrote a song with the title “Uncut Gems.” And the Safdie brothers liked the songs and they like, know how they go and stuff,” he said.

Uncut Gems’ real antagonist is Howard himself, the way he’s willing to walk every tightrope — twice — for the chance at a big score.

So, I just went [to the audition].

There was a backstory to their relationship that didn’t make it explicitly into the movie, that the pair met in NA when Arno expressed his troubles with his brother-in-law Howard.

“And now I get to know him, he actually starts to be like a friend.

I ask him if he thinks he’s as intimidating as he comes across onscreen.

So, there’s just a lot I can tap into,” he says.

At the Uncut Gems Diamond District popup in January, he says, fans were nervous to approach him.

“People come and go, and sometimes they wanna steal your kidney, sometimes they’re nice people, and sometimes you just don’t know who they are,” he says.

I see Sebo and I think he’s bringing down the guy who’s gonna hold me down while he’s stealing my kidneys.

We’re sort of chatting up, and it’s around 3 or so and I’m like, ‘Guys, I’m cashing out.

I convinced him to be in the film — see the time stamp on my first text to him — and he was perfect.

“How often do you respond to a text with just one check-mark emoji?” I ask him.

We’re talking over coffee, and he’s gesturing wildly as he recalls his almost acting career, punctuating his sentences with Cheshire cat grins.

I don’t know how to read emails.

The Safdies first cast him in a music video after that Spotted Pig meeting, and they called him again for a role in Uncut Gems’ closing bits.

In Uncut Gems, the steel-gray-haired Diamond — his skin a few shades darker than Bradley Cooper’s Star Is Born bronze — ends up playing the “Handsome Older Gentleman” that Howard’s girlfriend, Julia De Fiore (played by Julia Fox), encounters at Mohegan Sun as she’s cashing in on the bet Howard placed.

(Diamond says that a couple scenes of his were cut, including an extended sequence in a helicopter: “It was freezing in this fucking $6,000 helicopter that we’re in. A piece of shit that looked like it was gonna crash any second, and I got some guy’s feet in my fucking neck!”) The shoot was fast and loose: “Let’s put it this way,” he says, “it’s not like I’m doing Mamet where I have to know every fucking line exactly.

I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing anymore.

All I did was drink and have fun at The Box.” He doesn’t have a direct connection to the Diamond District, but he’s a character perfectly suited to the Safdies’ style: loud, talkative, freaky, fun.

There’s now way to show how he talks — how quickly his brain catapults from topic to topic, the way a conversation about the movie can just lead to him having fun and talking shit — than to just show you:.

Vulture: I almost had a feeling that Howard loved winning, but he almost loved losing just as much. .

He’s walking around in a suit like, “Who the fuck are you?” I mean, give me a break.

I don’t like suits.

But, the kind of parlay [Howard is] playing, nobody’s gonna bet on this.

Uncut Gems was snubbed in every category

I don’t like old fucking people

Uncut Gems was a masterpiece, he says, and Sandler deserves every Oscar

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