To create a postwar New York for Marty Supreme, director Josh Safdie wooed a production designer he hadn’t worked with before: 79-year-old Jack Fisk, a legend who lives far from Hollywood on a rural-Virginia farm he bought in 1978 with his wife, Sissy Spacek. (They met on Badlands, the first of eight films he dreamed up with Terrence Malick.)
Fisk is the industry’s go-to designer for period-specific prestige, re-creating Five Points for Gangs of New York, 1920s oil derricks for There Will Be Blood, and the colors of the luxury cars and fine pottery of the Osage in Killers of the Flower Moon. He is known for poring over fire maps and floor plans, which helps him avoid cliché signposts of earlier eras — and for a kind of “Method building,” like how he designed the earliest iteration of a fort in Jamestown by simply trying to build one himself nearby from natural materials. (The set appeared in Malick’s The New World and “floored” the experts, per the New York Times.) Marty Supreme is chockablock with similarly specific delights, from a delivery truck for the Forward parked outside the paper’s old offices to an armadillo on sale at a pet store — perfectly legal back then!
