‘Marty Supreme’ Almost Ended in the 1980s, But Tears for Fears Stayed on the Soundtrack Anyway

Josh Safdie's new film "Marty Supreme," currently in theaters, presents a fascinating auditory clash. Set in the 1950s, the story follows Timothée Chalamet as a dream-driven table tennis prodigy from New York's Lower East Side, yet its soundtrack pulses with iconic 1980s hits like Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch." This deliberate anachronism, far from being a distraction, is central to the film's unique energy. Safdie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bronstein and served as editor, found his inspiration in two distinct places: archival footage of a frenetic, vain young player from the 1948 British Open—a clear prototype for Marty—and an obsessive, thousand-playlist run of Gabriel's 1982 track. "Setting that old footage to that song just worked," Safdie explains. "It felt mythic, and the anachronism gave it a contemporary quality."

The director, one half of the Safdie Brothers filmmaking duo known for intense, gritty dramas like "Uncut Gems," argues the musical choice is thematically coherent. He points to the 1980s as a period of nostalgic postmodernism, where culture, reeling from events like the Vietnam War, actively revisited and reimagined the 1950s. "You saw it in style and movies—'Back to the Future' literally goes back to the '50s," Safdie notes. "On a simple level, when you do that, the past starts to feel like it's haunting the future, and the future haunts the past." This concept was once made literal in a scrapped alternate ending where an older Marty attends a Tears for Fears concert with his granddaughter, reflecting on his youth. Though cut, the scene cemented Safdie's commitment to using propulsive 80s music to explore this temporal dialogue.

To weave these needle-drops into a cohesive whole, Safdie turned to composer Daniel Lopatin, also known as Oneohtrix Point Never. Lopatin, who scored Safdie's previous films "Good Time" and "Uncut Gems," is a pivotal figure in electronic music, having pioneered the nostalgic, sample-based genre of vaporwave in the early 2010s. He was the ideal artist to bridge the decades. For Lopatin, Marty's spirit and the game of table tennis were inseparable. "He's buoyant and energetic... a lightness that is mirrored in the game itself," he says. His score uses fast, percussive mallet strikes to mimic ping-pong balls, a sound he notes is also prominent in 80s synth-pop, creating a melodic throughline.

Lopatin's composition was deeply inspired by memory and the film's original concert ending. "The score goes back to, what would it be like to think back on your coming of age in the 1950s while hearing Tears for Fears blasting in your ears?" he muses. The result is what he describes as "an abstraction of that Tears for Fears concert," a place where the present dissolves and memory converges with now. To sonically align with the era of the featured songs, including New Order's "The Perfect Kiss," Lopatin utilized period-specific digital synthesizers like the iconic Yamaha DX7—first released in 1983 and ubiquitous in 80s pop—layering them with flutes, saxophones, and strings.

Ultimately, both the curated soundtrack and the original score function as a bridge between worlds, much like Marty himself. They express his youth, energy, and ambition while physically melding the past, present, and future. As Josh Safdie concludes, the synchronicity of all these elements creates an additive effect. "It has that feeling of, 'Oh my god, this movie's teeming with life.'" This innovative approach challenges the conventions of the period piece, suggesting that the spirit of an era can sometimes be best captured through the lens of another.