去采些迷迭香

Growing Up With Dad, Distilled With Bite

By Dennis Lim

May 13, 2010

IN making an autobiographical film, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie had the advantage of a well-documented childhood. On a recent afternoon in their office on lower Broadway, the Safdies sifted through boxes of videotapes and photographs preserved in scrapbooks, all of it emotional raw material for their new fiction feature “Daddy Longlegs.”

One photo was of a scene that they recreated in the film: a “paper tornado,” as Josh put it, a sheaf of paper blown several stories high by the wind, as a woman and two boys reach for the scattering sheets.

“It makes perfect sense that our dad was taking the photo, and our mom was helping with the paper,” Benny said.

New York natives and children of divorce, Josh was 2 and Benny 6 months old when their parents separated. They eventually ended up with their mother but lived first with their father, Albert, a compulsive videographer who recorded more than 300 hours’ worth of home movies.

“There were a lot of times we were angry with him for filming all the time,” Josh said of their father. “But he planted in us this seed of reflection, and for that we’re really grateful.”

The brothers’ mixed feelings are at the heart of “Daddy Longlegs,” which had its premiere in Cannes last year (under the title “Go Get Some Rosemary”) and is now playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan and on cable through video on demand. The film unfolds during the two weeks of the year that Lenny, a perpetually frazzled film projectionist who lives in a cramped Midtown apartment, has custody of his two young boys.

More playmate than parent, Lenny endeavors to keep the kids entertained while trying to prevent his already chaotic existence from falling apart. The movie walks a fine line between censure and compassion, expressing fondness, resentment and amused horror at a father who may have the best intentions but whose actions sometimes warrant the intervention of social services.

“We condensed our childhood into those two weeks,” Benny said, and there was some exaggeration for dramatic effect. At one point in “Daddy Longlegs,” Lenny, in need of a sitter, improvises a pharmacological solution. That pivotal scene, Benny said, “was about putting every bad feeling we experienced with our father into this terrible decision.”

In reimagining their childhood, Josh said, “I think we were able to understand what was at play in those years and what was in our dad’s head.” The Safdie brothers are now 26 and 24; their father was in his mid-20s when they were born. “We were kids,” Josh said, “and to him we were this extension of his youth,” not a reminder of adult responsibility.

To embody the agitated goofball Lenny, the Safdies cast not a professional actor but a fellow filmmaker, Ronald Bronstein, the director of “Frownland,” a simultaneously tender and squirm-inducing portrait of a social maladroit. Josh met Mr. Bronstein at the South by Southwest Festival in 2007, and recalled being struck both by Mr. Bronstein’s appearance (“He looked like a silent-movie actor”) and by their mutual interests in documentarylike fictions and in filmmaking as a behavioral experiment.

If the film was personal to the Safdies for obvious reasons, it also held a private resonance for Mr. Bronstein, who described himself as having long been “stuck in a state of abject self-doubt.” “For me the goal of acting, and maybe the goal of life too, is to eliminate that debilitating time lag between impulse and action,” he said. “It was a gift for me to be put into a position where I received so much stimuli that I’m able to disappear entirely, and I’m invisible to myself.”

The Safdies spent long days holed up in a diner with Mr. Bronstein, going over the story scene by scene. In the process Lenny became a full-fledged character, not just a stand-in for the Safdies’ father. They made Lenny a projectionist, like Mr. Bronstein, whose own jaundiced worldview seeped in. “There was never a territorial battle,” Mr. Bronstein said, “but I would say it’s an angrier film as a result of their casting decision.”

Summing up his character, Mr. Bronstein said: “The two traits in his personality are selfishness and a kind of overcompensatory guilt for that selfishness. He puts an incredible amount of attention into making sure the kids are having fun, but he’s not having fun, so there’s something joyless and anxiety fueled about it.”

Josh described Lenny as someone who “lives in the moment but not in a blissful or meditative way.” He added, “He’s scared of the past and devastatingly freaked out by the uncertainty of the future.”

The Safdies worked on “Daddy Longlegs” as they did on “The Pleasure of Being Robbed,” Josh’s 2008 feature about an enigmatic kleptomaniac with members of what they call the Red Bucket collective, many of them collaborators from their time at Boston University. The Safdies seem to be constantly working, whether on commercial assignments (they are making a film for Benetton’s fall campaign) or personal projects. There is, Josh acknowledged, a manic aspect to their productivity. Red Bucket’s Web site (redbucketfilms.com) houses a trove of short films; several episodes of a public-access-style talk show, complete with live band; and dozens of so-called “buttons,” observational micro-vignettes shot on city streets with pocket-sized cameras.

Much of the Safdies’ short work, which prizes spontaneity and an engagement with the real world, could be thought of as street poetry. Or street theater, in the case of “There Is Nothing You Can Do,” a 2008 short for which the Red Bucket crew got on a crowded New York City bus and staged a heated argument.

There is a guerrilla quality even to the Safdies’ narrative features, which are shot largely without permits. Exteriors are typically filmed from a distance and with wireless microphones. “We want to be embedded in the fabric of the streets,” Josh said. “I hate it when they shut down streets for movies.”

The Safdies tend to work with nonprofessional actors, whom they often find by approaching strangers who look the part. “It’s tricky with women and kids,” Josh said. “I come across as a real creep.” But it’s how he found Sage and Frey Ranaldo, the brothers who play the Safdies’ alter egos in “Daddy Longlegs.” Sage and Frey’s mother, Leah Singer, an artist, plays the mother in the film. (The boys’ father is Lee Ranaldo, the guitarist of Sonic Youth.)

With nonactors, Josh said: “We have to perform for them. They force you to direct in a way that I find beneficial.” Benny added, “It’s the idea of transferring enthusiasm over to them.”

This was particularly true for the children in “Daddy Longlegs,” who were essentially directed by Mr. Bronstein. In character as Lenny, he picked them up from school and walked them over to the apartment, steering the conversation according to the demands of the script.

For the Safdies it was disorienting to watch these father-son interactions. “We see ourselves in Ronnie and we see the dad as a peer, but I also had a hard time separating ourselves from the kids,” Josh said. “When I was filming, I was literally crying or laughing. Maybe that explains some of the jerkiness.”

Their parents have now seen “Daddy Longlegs” a few times. Their mother, Josh and Benny said, considers the movie a vindication. “She said, ‘Now you understand what I’ve been telling you all these years,’” Josh said. Their father also approved. “He started apologizing,” Benny said, “but then he also said, ‘You understand I was trying my hardest,’ and that really touched him.”

The Safdies are drawing again on personal recollections for their next feature, titled “Uncut Gems” and loosely inspired by their father’s time working in Manhattan’s diamond district. Not that the brothers expect any further excavation of childhood to be cathartic.

“The whole point” of “Daddy Longlegs,” Benny said, “was to relive our childhood, but it kills it at the same time.” He added: “We thought the film would allow us to have a closer relationship with our dad, but it sort of didn’t. We focused so closely on everything that now it’s like everything he does is under a microscope.”

The fictional Lenny looms over and is inseparable from the Safdies’ memories. “When I see him now,” Josh said of their father, “it’s almost like he’s a figment of my imagination.”

And sometimes, when the brothers talk about their father, “we’ll actually say, ‘That’s such a Lenny thing he did,’” Benny said. “So now we say our dad is behaving like Lenny.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2010, Section AR, Page 16of the New York edition with the headline: Growing Up With Dad, Distilled With Bite.