PASADENA, Calif. — When director Josh Safdie first approached him to assist with “Marty Supreme,” Diego Schaaf genuinely couldn’t “put a face to the title” of the movie’s star, he mentioned.
“Are you aware who Timothée Chalamet is?” Schaaf wrote in a textual content to his 20-year-old niece. “We’re going to be engaged on a film with him.” Her response was simply three letters: “O.M.G.”
Few are prone to choose Schaaf, 71, out of a crowd, both. However since 1993, he and his spouse, Wei Wang, 64, have constructed a reputation for themselves in Hollywood serving to A-list stars like Chalamet turn into desk tennis execs.
The duo, who run Alpha Productions out of Pasadena, work as consultants for movies, exhibits, commercials and music movies involving desk tennis. Their credit embrace “Forrest Gump,” “Associates” and “Balls of Fury,” amongst different initiatives.
A24’s “Marty Supreme,” a buzzy Oscars contender that debuted broadly in North American theaters on Christmas Day, depicts a fictionalized model of the profession of mid-century desk tennis champ Marty Reisman. To remodel into the character Marty Mauser, a U.S. desk tennis star whose dream is to win the world title, Chalamet needed to move as a world-class participant.
Step one: assessing Chalamet’s desk tennis expertise.
Chalamet reportedly spent about seven years coaching; he instructed the BBC that he took his desk tennis desk into the desert whereas he was filming “Dune” and on the set of “Wonka.” He even practiced desk tennis as he discovered guitar for his position in final yr’s Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan biopic, “A Full Unknown.”
Nevertheless it wasn’t till June 2024, simply months earlier than capturing for “Marty Supreme” started in New York Metropolis, that Schaaf and Wang entered the fold.
“We watched [Chalamet] play, and we wished to see how we are able to make a professional participant out of that,” Schaaf mentioned. “Do we now have the arrogance that he has the athletic potential to do it? I noticed him hit for a few minutes. ‘Yeah, he can do it.’”
Schaaf grew up enjoying desk tennis in Switzerland, however by no means ultra-competitively. His actual love was music. He moved to the US in 1979 to pursue a profession as a guitarist and later transitioned to sound engineering and video manufacturing.
His job now focuses totally on choreography and ensuring the general manufacturing on the initiatives he and Wang work on is high-quality. For “Marty Supreme,” Schaaf did every little thing from hiring top-tier gamers for a event scene to discovering gear used solely within the Fifties to crafting storylines.
“The event of factors needed to be proper, and the depth needed to be proper. All of it needed to match the remainder of the story, and [Safdie] had a imaginative and prescient of that,” Schaaf mentioned. “We had numerous conversations going backwards and forwards — what the purpose growth needed to be, which level must be when, when the strain needed to construct — however then additionally not make it like a daily sports activities film. … Present it in a cinematic manner so you are feeling such as you’re in a event. It feels actual.”
Wang, in the meantime, is the hands-on knowledgeable in instructing actors kind and approach. Wang, initially from Beijing, discovered tennis when she was 10 years outdated and ultimately rose to be the No. 5-ranked participant within the nation.
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