A24's Marty Supreme stars Timothée Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, a bold, fast-talking dreamer in 1952 New York City, who has aspirations of becoming the world's top table-tennis player. He's currently stuck selling shoes in his uncle's Lower East Side store, and has very little support from family or friends. Still, he is hellbent on turning the overlooked sport into his personal springboard to glory.
In addition to Chalamet, the film features Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler Okonma, Kevin O’Leary, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher, Emory Cohen and Odessa A’zion.
Director Josh Safdie co-wrote the original feature with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein. The project was shot on 35mm film by Darius Khondji, who used Arriflex cameras and vintage anamorphic lenses. Khondji previously worked with Safdie on Uncut Gems. Also reuniting with the filmmaker was composer Daniel Lopatin, who scored Safdie's Good Time and
Uncut Gems. Both Safdie and Bronstein partnered to complete the edit.
Skip Lievsay (pictured) worked with Safdie on Uncut Gems and came onboard as
Marty Supreme's re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor. Lievsay, who will be honored by the Cinema Audio Society with its 2026 Career Achievement Award on March 7th, says the feature has similarities to both an action film and a documentary. Here, he shares insight into the film's soundtrack, its tight deadline and some of the challenges that it presented.
Hi Skip! You served as both re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor. Tell us about your responsibilities on Marty Supreme.
“Well, it's actually kind of campaign, basically. I have a co-supervising sound editor, Paul Urmson, who is also my co-re-recording mixer. We basically divide it up and have a lot we had a lot of tasks to do. A lot of things to record. A lot of sound effects and voices. And the way we divide it up is just by sheer volume of stuff. He deals with all the sound effects and Foley, as well as production sound effects - things recorded on location. And I deal with dialog, ADR, and then during the mix, I mix dialog and music, and Paul mixes all of his sound effects.”
Where is audio post taking place?
“We've been working at Warner Bros. in New York for about 13 or so year – 14 years maybe. This is my editing room. We edit on Pro Tools. We also mix in a Pro Tools studio. We do the theatrical mix here. It's a pretty big room. It's one of the biggest rooms in New York. And we prefer to mix the theatrical mix first, and then all the smaller mixes. We keep crashing it down to smaller and smaller, until finally we have stereo mix. [It’s] the last thing we do. And we do the foreign as well, so we have to do theatrical Atmos foreign, and then we keep crashing that down and make all the versions of the foreign mix as well.”
How did you get involved in this project?
“Well, in this case, I was lucky enough to meet Josh (Safdie) on Uncut Gems.”
Marty is a fast talker, and this film has a lot going on in terms of dialog. Was that a challenge?
“Yes. It's kind of like an action movie with dialog, instead of gunshots. It's rapid fire. Dialog, conversations, there's a lot of material. A lot of things are happening in Marty's life, and he is he's a man on a mission. He's not always equipped with gear and money and what they call ‘agency’ to get where he wants to go. He's just kind of desperate to stay on his track and a lot of that is expressed with dialog. Of course in the big scenes, there's a lot of crowd sounds, and there's various languages, especially at the end when we're in Japan. We have all this a Japanese crowd to create and articulate. And the announcer throughout that whole sequence - to make it sound like he's there, but also to not make it so harsh and distracting from the action. We want to make sure that the announcer's sort of more in the background.”
“(He) keeps the rhythm going and keeps reminding us where we are and how this is a such a pinnacle for Marty. It's very busy, and it also is quite loud. A lot of places, there's a lot of stuff going on. There's a lot of great music happening. And there's a lot of important and informative dialog. So it's really an action film with talking and music.”
There are a few scenes that come to mind. You mention the competition, but the restaurant scene is pretty intense too.
“I think the filmmaker, Josh, he likes to be able to have his exposition. He likes to be able to direct the audience which way they're looking. And he likes to tell a story. But at the same time, he wants to remind everyone where we are. That this is a reality, basically. This is happening in a place. It's almost like a documentary in many cases. And he likes to have the surrounding information surrounding the storytelling so that it feels real. He doesn't want to make a documentary, but he wants the feel of a documentary, where things are happening. Unexpected sounds are bursting in here and there. And I think he's just keen on the sounds and the rhythms of New York City. He likes to capture that and imbue the process with that kind of feeling.”
What was your timeframe to work on this?
“I think we started about three months ago. And we finished about one month ago.”
That doesn't sound like a long time for a big film like this?
“No, we didn't have that much time. And it's not a bad thing. There's a pressure-cooker aspect to it, and the movie is like that. The movie's a pressure cooker. Things are compacted and compressed, and the storytelling is torrid. The pace of it is really blazing. And in a way, it's sort of appropriate that our filmmaking process is kind of torrid and blazing.”
Were you working on the film from beginning to end or on pieces at a time?
“My crew is working very hard, and they're not attached to the timeline. They do whatever's the most important thing at the moment. A lot of it has to do with who's available to record tomorrow, who's can't do it until next week. There's kind of a calendar. There's a lot of people on that calendar, including filmmakers and us, as well and studio availability. (There are) so many tasks. If you can't do one thing, there's another thing that needs to be done. It is pretty nonlinear until we start mixing…Once we start mixing, especially the final mix, we're working linearly. We had a stopwatch and a deadline we had to meet. We mixed the movie in three weeks basically. We have a crew. We've got two or three people working on dialog. In this case we had Paul Urmson and Chris Chae working on sound design, and Wyatt Sprague and a bunch of other people working on sound editing.”
Is there a lot of ADR in in this film, and what determines the need for dialogue replacement?
“Most of the filmmakers that I work with, the ADR is a is a tool that we use to make the story more understandable. Occasionally we're doing ADR to change a line, or connect two lines together that don't really sound like they're the same person. But most of the ADR we're doing is about noise, being off mic. Maybe a line starts on mic and then the actor turns away or the something happens technically. We have those kind of technical demands…We have a long process that we go through, which is very labor intensive, where we go back to all the original audio. And the original audio I mean original audio being the location recordings. Those are usually pretty deep. There can be 10 or 15 recordings from for every take. Once you start digging back in you can go pretty deep. Something that sounds really bad as a composite of all those sounds - because what they do is from the set, they make a composite mix, and they use that to edit. Oftentimes you have a one or two booms and a bunch of radios all mixed together because you don't want to make that decision until you're editing. Then you can go back and say, ‘Out of all of these, I'm going to go with the best capture. The clearest one. Sometimes it's very clear and it sounds fine.”
What's next for you?
“I'm working on The Devil Wears Prada 2. There's a Robert DeNiro movie, called
(The) Whisper Man, which I was supposed to be working on now, but it's been delayed a bit.”