Marty Supreme could have had a very different ending, according to director Josh Safdie.
READ MORE: ‘Marty Supreme’ review: Timothée Chalamet’s audacious masterpiece about ping-pong
The Golden Globe-winning movie stars Timothée Chalamet as table tennis professional and shoe salesman Marty Mauser. The comedy drama is set in 1952, and ends with Mauser flying back to the US from Japan, where he was playing a match, and meeting his newborn son.
However, Safdie told Sean Baker in a new episode of the A24 Podcast that an early draft took Mauser all the way through to the late 1980s, viewers seeing him as a successful business owner.
In the film’s final moment, pen magnate Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) would “take a bite out of his neck,” in reference to an earlier moment in the film in which Rockwell refers to himself as a vampire.
Days after the film was released, a fan on Reddit picked up on the vampire line, in which Rockwell says he was born in 1601 and has “met many Marty Mausers over the years”, and asked if it was meant to be taken literally.
Another Redditor replied: “I think he was just expressing how powerful he is, like he’s seen everything there is to see so Marty’s essentially irrelevant to him. But the movie was so bonkers and that line was so Safdie that it didn’t even phase me, so who knows.”
Safdie’s explanation on the podcast was as follows: “He turns that [shoe store] into the most successful shop on Orchard Street. He changes it to Marty Mauser’s Shoes. Franchises, franchises again, leaves New York State, becomes a very rich man. All the metrics of success are there. His family grows, he leaves the city, has this beautiful house, and it ends with him at a concert for Tears For Fears with his granddaughter. They’re great seats, up front, and he’s watching it.
“And he’s thinking about ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ and youth, and what does it mean, and he has this success, but he’s not doing the thing that he believed he was born on the planet to do.”
Safdie then revealed the final moment: “You’re on his eyes, we built the prosthetics for Timmy and everything, and Mr. Wonderful shows up behind him and takes a bite out of his neck, and that was the last image. And he hasn’t aged.”
It never came to fruition, of course, with Safdie admitting that, when A24 read the ending, bosses asked him if it was a mistake.
O’Leary, meanwhile, said that he was on board with the alternate ending, explaining that it would “be the right punishment”, given that his own character gets “fucked over” while Mauser and his family get a “kumbaya ending”, suggesting that Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), the mother of Mauser’s child, could have died in childbirth as an alternate ending.
NME gave Marty Supreme a five-star review, calling it an “audacious masterpiece” and adding: “This is a story about living a great life, however you may define that. It is a film about living fully and without fear, a cynicism-free zone where, for all their fast-talking, people love each other so much it makes your heart feel like it’s about to burst. Talk about a smash.”
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