(deep bass beats)
- [Josh Safdie] Sandler himself is a romantic.
And he's a romantic in the sense that
feeling is kind of superior to
fact or
reality.
- [Benny Safdie] And he loves loving.
- And he loves loving, but he also has rage in him
and that's also kind of similar to Sandler.
Sandler's not a rageaholic, but he has a fervour in him
for that feeling, that romantic feeling,
which is very unique.
- I heard you've resurfaced your f***ing swimming pool.
You know how that makes me feel?
- I never resurfaced anything. - You think your life
is more important than my life?
- I don't know who said that.
- Whatever movie he is in, these amazing comedies
which are so dense, here he is at the centre
and he somehow grounds them
that you totally believe that everything is happening to him
no matter what's going on.
He has this incredible ability to internalize problems
and make you feel like they're his own.
And you care about him when he does that
and that was so important for Howard
that you could kind of have to care about his problems.
He was this kind of fake person with real problems.
- Will somebody get the kid a Happy Meal?
You son of a b*tch ball,
why didn't you just go home?
(laughing) Shut up!
- With Howard, that was something
that was very important early on,
that there was this man who at the centre
who is a partner guy.
He wants to take people. He wants to build up with people.
He's a big ship pulling into a port
rising up all the other ships.
And I think that Sandler's kind of mania in him
that we saw in his output was definitely
very linked up nicely with Howard.
- KG, it's game night. You should be stretching out.
- What is he, your coach?
- Nah, he's just some f***ing crazy-a** Jew.
- The script was long for "Gems".
There was a lot of dialogue in it
and we pride ourselves on the dialogue that we write.
And we were writing the morning of,
sometimes the night before.
And constantly just trying to give
as much ammunition to the actors as possible.
One of the greatest lines in the whole movie
Lakeith Stanfield improvised.
It's when he says "Black Jew" to Sandler.
- Black Jew power!
- He felt that he had the agency
and that's kinda what you just want.
You just want actors to feel
like they can take a buoy out to a little island
and come back to the main mast.
- Well, I'll tell you what I know:
It's the dumbest f***ing bet I ever heard of.
- I disagree.
I disagree, guy.
- Adam Sandler did 49 nights of his stand-up
before he did "Gems,"
and that was, like, the greatest thing
that we could have ever asked for.
Because he was so oiled,
he could go out and do three and a half hours
of material but also know maybe the crowd
wasn't feeling something to change it up
and maybe go out on a limb.
And we were able to benefit off of that.
- I'm having very serious second thoughts.
- Are you serious right now?
- I know I f***ed up.
I'm done. It means nothing. It meant nothing.
Please, give me another shot.
- You try to create a world that people are in
and then you kind of seamlessly
slip into the dialogue of the scene
and that's what was great is you can get
to a communication level with certain actors in the scenes
who can get it started and then
other actors pick up on the cue.
- You having a good time?
- Yes.
- [Kevin] Garnett said something cool about how he was
when he was acting with Sandler,
he had this whole—
a lot of pages to memorize.
He had it all memorized—
- And one scene in particular.
- Yeah, and towards the end, Garnett was mentioning, he's like,
"I realized I messed something up,
but Sandler took it, internalized it,
threw it back at me. And then I realized: okay,
it's a conversation."
And then they just went back through the—
it was like he didn't get disrupted from the scene.
They kept going and they—
- That I think also helps add to it all,
is that I think we can direct through certain actors.
I could direct through Julia, I could do it with Lakeith.
And you have these private relationships
with all these different actors
and then you see how it actually—
how the chemistry unfolds on camera
when you put all those private relationships on camera.
- (laughing) Yeah, and we also don't have
any playbacks so when we do something there's no time
to stop, watch, reflect. We just go onto the next thing.
Because it's like we'll just do it again
and then we'll make sure we have it
'cause then we'll get something else—
- And there's no marking.There's no marks—
- And to the point, at any moment we always wanted everybody
to act as if it was their close-up.
So if you don't know when it's your close-up,
you're always on
and everybody knew that and they brought it.