Safdie Brothers Screen Latest Film Tonight at Brattle Theatre

Benny Safdie (COM’08) (left) and Josh Safdie (COM’07), the directors of Heaven Knows What. Photo by Joshua Paul

Heaven Knows What, the newest film by the Safdie brothers, is a gruelingly realistic drama about the lives of homeless young heroin addicts on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, played mainly by nonactors, some addicts themselves. The scenes reveal a grim cycle of stealing and panhandling, scoring and shooting up, lives coming unraveled.

Released this summer, the film is a departure in both style and substance for New York–based filmmakers Josh Safdie (COM’07) and Benny Safdie (COM’08). It earned its R rating for what the New York Times describes as “drug use throughout, pervasive strong language, disturbing and violent images, sexuality, and graphic nudity.” Tonight, the brothers will screen the film at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square and answer questions, part of this year’s College of Communication Cinematheque series, which brings accomplished filmmakers to BU to screen and discuss their work.

Heaven Knows What is the story of Harley, a washed-out blond of 19, played by Arielle Holmes, who is hopelessly in love with the handsome but nasty Ilya, played by Caleb Landry Jones. As the movie opens, Harley is working up the nerve to comply with Ilya’s sneering suggestion that she kill herself. The script is closely based on the life of Holmes, who really did try to kill herself, while the life of the model for the Ilya character is even more tragic: he died of an overdose this past April.

“That was hard for all of us, and as you can imagine, especially hard for Arielle,” says Josh Safdie, who cowrote the film with partner Ronald Bronstein and directed it with Benny Safdie.

The filmmakers say the most important thing about making the movie was that Holmes was satisfied with the way they told her story. “This was really her movie,” Josh says. “We ran everything by her, every casting decision, every art department decision.”

After the shoot, the filmmakers paid for Holmes to complete rehab.

The Safdies found critical success with two films that premiered in the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight sidebar: The Pleasure of Being Robbed in 2008 and Daddy Longlegs in 2009, and with the documentary Lenny Cooke, which was first shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013.

The Safdies made Heaven Knows What after spending the better part of three years researching and writing for a film called Uncut Gems, about New York City’s Diamond District. It “was going to be our big movie,” Josh says, but it wound up being put aside for a variety of reasons.

“About a year into it, when I was doing research in the Diamond District, I met Arielle. I thought she was incredible. I saw her going into the subway, and she wasn’t like a homeless girl at all; she was dressed very nicely,” he says. “And I said, ‘I would love to find a role for you in this movie.’ I didn’t realize she was going to her methadone clinic.”

When he met up with her a week later, he says, “all the truths and details of her life came out almost immediately. I just kind of became her friend.” He’d see her about once a week, and after a couple of months he got her a job. One day she didn’t show up for work, and he found out she had been hospitalized after attempting suicide.

Josh had a hard time getting Benny and Bronstein interested in making the film. “I was like, ‘I’m telling you, there’s something unique about this girl, the way she carries herself, the way she speaks, the way she is.’” He commissioned Arielle to write about her life, paying her per page, and that turned into a manuscript that they then turned into a movie, casting her as the lead. The filmmakers essentially re-created 18 months of her life, compressing it into about a 3-month span. “It’s not 100 percent real life,” Josh says. “We were basing it off of people and mixing things for drama’s sake.”

Josh says he’s still unsure why he was so drawn to Arielle’s world, why he wanted to get so close to it. “I just felt that burning desire to share this story, the fact that it was so romantic and so unbelievably horrific. I recently came to this realization that romance and horror are hitting the same beats, just one of them is usually more excusable than the other. It was this world that exposed that to me.”

The COM Cinematheque series presents An Evening with Josh and Benny Safdie tonight, Wednesday, September 23, at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge, at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. The Safdies will speak after a screening of their film Heaven Knows What.