In directors Josh and Benny Safdie‘s electric crime thriller “Uncut Gems,” Adam Sandler does what many of us love to see him do: play radically against type. Taking a page from the “Punch Drunk Love” playbook of delivering a Sandler totally unlike Sandler, the comedian plays Howard Ratner, a jewelry store owner in New York’s diamond district who’s also a compulsive, self-destructive adrenaline junkie and gambler, always looking for the next big score. Like “Good Time” before it, the Safdie’s hectic, nerve-wracking drama, part comedy, part collision-course-with-fate, with Jewish allusions to the comic-tragedies of writers like Philip Roth, is insane. And like “Good Time” before it, the anxious, throbbing aural soundscape that keeps “Uncut Gems” pulsing forward is composed by experimental musician Oneohtrix Point Never, aka Daniel Lopatin.
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“Uncut Gems” is simply vertiginous and frenetically motivating, an anxiety-inducing film that never lets up. And Lopatin’s ethereal, vibrating music is the kind of fuel the movie runs on, non-stop.
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Lopatin was happy to get the call to work with the Safdies again, and it sounds like that collaboration won’t stop anytime soon. Following their success with “Good Time,” a similarly relentless roller coaster of sweat, the trio just kept on “tumbling,” as Lopatin describes it. Their collaboration works based on a shared love for movies, and their mutual willingness to push the envelope is only becoming more daring.
His relationship with the Safdies hasn’t really changed and he likens it to running on a creative treadmill. The Safdies assemble a temporary audio cut for the composer that’s often stitched together by disparate pieces of records. “They cut it up so finely that it totally destroys the linearity of the original song, and they’re really just using it to show you beats, and spikes, and dynamics,” Lopatin said. “Their direction provides a conduit to deliver the color and texture for the film, tethering that color to a sense of character. The apotheosis moment of a collaboration between myself and the Safdie Brothers is when we’re in the studio, and they’re reacting to a particular sound, not a melody, not any musical progression, but a texture of feeling, a sound that they want me to write with. It’s about finding those tools, those colors, and presenting those colors to see if they perk up.”
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The composer is always looking to coax different feelings out of his synthesizers. Sometimes, that involves looking back at history, and letting go of the futurist elements to his music. With less than two weeks until Christmas, we sat down with Lopatin on The Fourth Wall’s fifteenth episode.
Apart from talk about all things Safdies and “Uncut Gems,” the musician also told us a great story about watching the underrated hitman movie “Murder By Contract,” (one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite pictures) with Josh and Benny.
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“Uncut Gems” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. The Fourth Wall is hosted by Griffin Schiller, but this interview was conducted by Andrew Bundy. Take a listen.