Kevin Garnett Gets the Rock
The Safdie brothers’ latest film, ‘Uncut Gems,’ is, in many ways, a basketball movie. Here’s how the directors, two die-hard Knicks fans, landed KG, built a story around him, and made what can be described as an NBA fan’s fever dream.Kevin Garnett Gets the Rock
The Safdie brothers’ latest film, ‘Uncut Gems,’ is, in many ways, a basketball movie. Here’s how the directors, two die-hard Knicks fans, landed KG, built a story around him, and made what can be described as an NBA fan’s fever dream.
Editor’s note, May 25, 2020: This story was originally published during Uncut Gems’ theatrical run. We’re resurfacing it now as the film begins streaming on Netflix.
Deep into shooting Josh and Benny Safdie’s film Uncut Gems, it became clear that for Kevin Garnett, old habits die hard. “He called Josh ‘Coach’ at one point,” Benny says. “Which is kind of incredible.”
“You realize how hard he worked in acting—he must’ve worked three times as hard on the court,” producer Sebastian Bear-McClard says. “And that’s what’s really fucking special about him. He was on set sweating like it was the fourth quarter of a playoff game. Like profusely. Patrick Ewing levels of fuckin’ sweat. Between Take 1 and Take 5, you’d be like, ‘Ohhh shit, is this gonna match? Because he is a sweaty fuckin’ mess.’ It was incredible.” To Garnett, the Safdies were Doc Rivers, and Uncut Gems was Game 6 of the NBA Finals.
In Uncut Gems, the follow-up to the Safdie brothers’ frenetic 2017 caper flick Good Time, Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a New York jeweler on a path of self-destruction. Howard is a schmuck, forever cursed by his own thirst, recklessness, and inability to say “when.” Moving at a blinding speed, the movie is a tale of one man’s endless descent. But beyond that, it is also a rumination on family, gambling, faith, and, most of all, basketball.
It’s fitting that the Safdies, who grew up in Queens and Manhattan, would make such a deeply bittersweet cinematic love letter to their favorite sport. After all, they’re lifelong New York Knicks fans—big ones. “The other day Josh went to a fuckin’ Knicks game on his own,” says Bear-McClard, who’s known the brothers since high school. “By himself. You know what kind of sick fuck would go to a Knicks game by themselves?”
“There’s a strong correlation between Judaism and Knicks basketball,” Josh says. “And it has to do with suffering and trying to understand your life.”
However, in Gems, Howard’s existential anxiety revolves not around the Knicks but rather the Boston Celtics. Garnett costars as a younger version of himself in the film, which focuses on Boston’s 2011-12 Eastern Conference semifinal against the Philadelphia 76ers. While visiting Howie’s shop early on in the playoff series, KG becomes obsessed with a rare black opal that was smuggled in from Ethiopia. The stone grabs hold of the former MVP—it speaks to him—after which Howard, always looking for an excuse to gamble, decides to go all in on backing KG.
What follows is a hardcore NBA fan’s fever dream. Uncut Gems contains actual game footage, real players, and one of the best acting performances by an athlete ever. But bringing such a uniquely specific, sports-soaked story to the big screen was a nearly decade-long odyssey.
When the now 30-something Safdie brothers were kids, they had an NBA team that was actually fun to root for. At Madison Square Garden one evening back in the early 1990s, they went autograph hunting. After Knicks legend/broadcaster Walt “Clyde” Frazier signed their basketball, the Safdies spotted Doc Rivers on the court. The then-injured point guard, who was wearing street clothes after badly injuring his knee in December 1993, was walking toward the tunnel to the locker room when Josh and Benny’s father, Alberto, attempted to get Rivers’s attention.
“Our dad just threw a basketball at him as hard as he could and Doc just instinctively just grabbed it and caught it and looks at him like he was a psycho,” says Josh, who remembers Alberto then tossing Rivers a pen. “He said, ‘Sign it for my son.’ So I had a Doc Rivers and Walt Frazier basketball for a very long time.”
A decade and a half later, the Safdies were young filmmakers who somehow hadn’t renounced their favorite team. And like countless desperate Knicks fans in that era, they were smitten with Amar’e Stoudemire. Early in the 2010-11 season, the newly arrived All-Star forward set a franchise record by scoring at least 30 points in nine straight games, the first eight of which were Knicks victories.
Stoudemire’s run was perfect Safdie script fodder. It also didn’t hurt that he’d just begun to embrace Judaism. In the original script for Gems, Stoudemire’s acquisition of an Ethiopian Jewish tribe’s black opal was going to spur his string of 30-point games. “We had Amar’e come to a table read,” Bear-McClard says. But then development on the project stalled and the Safdies moved on to other things, including Lenny Cooke, a 2013 documentary about the former high school basketball phenom who at one time in the early 2000s was a higher-ranked prospect than LeBron James.
There’s a strong correlation between Judaism and Knicks basketball. And it has to do with suffering and trying to understand your life.Josh Safdie
By 2015, Josh recalls, “there was this urgency to cast that part up to get a bigger budget.” William Morris Endeavor, which represented the Safdies, recommended its new client: Kobe Bryant. From there, the siblings and coscreenwriter Ronald Bronstein moved to structure the movie around the Lakers great dropping 61 points on the Knicks at MSG in 2009. “The gem became kind of like a youth elixir,” Josh says. But by the time the Safdies reworked the script, WME informed them that Bryant wasn’t interested in acting, only directing.
“I was like, ‘Thanks a lot. That was a waste of my time,’” Josh says. “And then we were like, ‘Now that we have the surgery tools out, who do we want to play this part? We’re not making a 2010 period piece.’” Around the same time, the Safdies had made friends with the Weeknd and gotten him to agree to play himself in the movie. That provided them with even more script fodder. “The earliest we could go is 2012,” Josh says, since that was the year the Weeknd first toured the United States.
With the requirements clarified, the Safdies began seeking out more contemporary NBA superstars. Sixers center Joel Embiid expressed interest, but when production was pushed to the fall of 2018, he dropped out because the season was about to start. The Safdies circled back to Stoudemire, but there was one problem: Stoudemire wasn’t willing to shave his dreadlocks to match his 2010 look.
At that point, the codirectors began talking to other retired NBA stars whose personalities they thought might translate to onscreen charisma. Garnett was on their list, and they set up a phone call. “Because I’m a fuckin’ disgusting, sick Knick fan, my instinct when I saw Kevin’s name was, ‘I hate him. I don’t want him anywhere near my movie,’” Josh says. “And we talked with him and I told him that I hated him and I realized eventually that the reason why I hated him is because he’s an incredible performer.”
That first discussion alone was revelatory. “It was so different than everybody else we’d spoken to,” Josh continues. “He was so passionate about everything. He also said right away, ‘I understand the challenge that you guys are giving me and I appreciate that.’ Nobody else had said anything close to that. It was a deep-level, like, ‘I want to conquer something new.’”
The phone call led to a meeting at a midtown Manhattan hotel. Bear-McClard recalls that Garnett, a fan of the Safdies’ Lenny Cooke doc, spent the get-together telling engrossing stories tales about Doc Rivers, Jacob the Jeweler, and his high school basketball teammate Ronnie Fields, who Garnett once saw dunk in a neck brace soon after being severely injured in a car crash.
It was clear to the Safdies that Garnett was a gifted performer even off the court. “When we met him in person it was just like, ‘His personality comes out of every part of his body,’” Josh says. “He’s incredible. He tells stories in a way that’s so engaging. And it’s so three-dimensional in a weird way. He’ll set up where everybody was sitting, what was happening. Then he shifts the stories based on who’s paying attention. He’ll give it a shape. It’s like, ‘OK, this guy can act. That’s acting.’”
The tradition of pro athletes becoming high-profile actors dates back nearly a century. But basketball players were relatively late to the party. In 1979, Julius Erving starred alongside a handful of other players in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. A year later, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar made a cameo in Airplane! And in 1984, Wilt Chamberlain towered over Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Destroyer.
In the ’90s, the NBA-to-acting trend reached a peak. Longtime pros Marques Johnson and Freeman Williams appeared in 1992 streetball comedy White Men Can’t Jump; Shaquille O’Neal and Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway headlined 1994 college basketball drama Blue Chips; two years after that there was the Michael Jordan–Bugs Bunny vehicle Space Jam, a big hit that spawned a long-gestating sequel that’ll star LeBron James and anyone else he can manage to convince to costar; in 1998, Ray Allen played Brooklyn phenom Jesus Shuttlesworth in Spike Lee’s He Got Game, an understated performance that remains a benchmark.
For pro athletes, the transition to acting is often eased by the fact that they’ve built their primary careers on obsessively rehearsing for high-pressure moments. “Athletes spend most of their time prepping for something that doesn’t take very long—a game,” says Ron Shelton, a former minor league baseball player who directed Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump. “All the prep becomes part of the subconscious once the game starts. Actors prep as well—though not nearly as much as athletes—but once the director calls ‘Action’ or the curtain goes up, it’s very much like the game is now on. Athletes don’t mind doing the same thing over and over—it’s what they’ve done since they [were] kids. ‘Do it again, do it again,’ is the mantra whether fielding ground balls or shooting jump shots or hitting a golf ball.”
Penny Hardaway agrees: “You have to get pumped up to get in character and get your mind set on what to do and get locked in. The same thing as an athlete.” While filming Blue Chips, Hardaway was struck by how time-consuming it was to make a movie. “It did get exhausting. Because they told us to be in the set at 7 a.m. just to have you on call, just in case they need you. And nothing ever happens. You probably didn’t film until 3.”
I remember saying to Kevin, ‘You didn’t have a lot of bad games.’ He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, the elbow jumper was wet.’ Especially in that series.Josh Safdie
During the making of White Men Can’t Jump, Johnson remembers learning a painful lesson about the differences between acting and playing pro basketball. “We’re on this hard asphalt playground in South Central Los Angeles, shooting this scene for two days. Wesley Snipes, I remember him saying to me, ‘This ain’t like the NBA. This is movie ball. We gonna see how you feel after two days.’ I had to do this live dunk probably 20 times. Different angles over and over again. Do it five, six, seven times, take a little break, do it again.”
On set, though, Johnson was happy to serve as an unofficial technical adviser. “We had to come up with a plausible scenario for Wesley Snipes to be able to block my shot,” he says. “And so I came up with me cocking the ball behind my head for a dunk knowing that me at 6-6 and him at 5-10, he’s not gonna be able to meet me at the summit up at the rim. He could catch me before I elevate. So right at the point of elevation, he catches me from behind. That was purely my suggestion in terms of having him block my shot and have it look realistic.”
But acting, Johnson cautions, isn’t just about showing up and being yourself. “You don’t just step out on the court and all of a sudden give dudes a four-step, side-step, stepback jumper like James Harden,” says Johnson, who majored in theater arts at UCLA. “You gotta work on that thing, perfect that thing, through training, repetition, trial, error, fall on your butt a few times. Acting, for us, it’s being private in public. For a lot of guys, that’s a really hard wall to break through.”
Aside from some notable exceptions—LeBron James in Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, Blake Griffin in Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s Broad City, and Kyrie Irving in Uncle Drew—there haven’t been many NBA players who have made a memorable mark in show business since the turn of the century. But Garnett, in Johnson’s eyes, has acting chops.
A few years ago, then-Bucks coach Jason Kidd invited Garnett to a practice. There in his role as a broadcaster, Johnson chatted with him. When the subject of the old-school NBA versus the league’s new school came up, Johnson remembers, Garnett began pounding his hands together and said, “These young motherfuckers don’t understand.” Then when Johnson asked him how he mentally prepared before a game, Garnett went on a five-minute diatribe.
“As an actor, you have to be able to access that stuff but you also have to have it be there to access. … You have to have a lot of thoughts running through your head,” Johnson says. “And Kevin Garnett is a kind of guy that’s got a whole lot of shit going on in his mind.”
Once Garnett agreed to be in Uncut Gems, the Safdies began reworking the script. They pored over box scores with hopes of finding a Garnett hot streak that fit their story. “We needed it to be a certain type of game that represented a ‘gem game,’” Benny says. That meant one in which Garnett, inspired by having the opal, delivered a well-rounded performance. Making things more difficult was that Garnett’s “gem games” needed to be broken up by poor performances.
“The narrative of the story revolved around a good game, bad game, good game,” Josh says. “And we weren’t affecting the NBA footage at all, so it had to happen in real life. So we had to then find those games in succession with one another.” Eventually, the brothers landed on the 2012 Celtics-Sixers series. Garnett “very rarely had a lot of bad games in that year,” Josh adds. “I remember saying to Kevin, ‘You didn’t have a lot of bad games.’ He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, the elbow jumper was wet.’ Especially in that series.”
The Safdies didn’t want to doctor any game tape, and still took great care to re-create the heightened emotions of an NBA playoff series. In need of a Doc Rivers halftime speech that would sync up Garnett’s and Howard’s situations, they reached out to their old idol and asked him to record one. The siblings had some specifics in mind, inspired by a speech the Clippers coach had delivered to his team after a postseason win over the Warriors last spring. “We don’t die,” he bellowed at the time. “We multiply. We’re like roaches.”
“I was like, ‘Listen, Doc, we’re not gonna write a speech for you,’” Josh says. “‘This is the speech that we love, this is what we want.’ And he’s like, ‘All right, give me a minute, I’ll write something.’ And then he just whipped up a Doc Rivers classic.”
In Sandler, Garnett had a foil who was as obsessed—OK, maybe nearly as obsessed—with basketball. It’s no coincidence that Billy Madison rains jumpers down on elementary schoolers or that Davey Stone in Eight Crazy Nights is a former high school hoops star. And we’ve all seen the paparazzi photos of Sandler playing pickup, draped in a baggy T-shirt and shorts. “The way I met Sandler was playing basketball with him,” Bear-McClard says. “There hasn’t been a day where—no matter if we’re 3,000 miles away—where he’s not like, ‘Do you want to hoop today? I’m playing hoop in half an hour. Come meet me.’ It’s kind of like, I think, his deepest catharsis. He is so deeply competitive. It’s somewhere in between his anger management and his meditation and his exercise.
“The guy is a crafty, crafty player,” Bear-McClard says of Sandler’s game. “He’s like Jewish Rod Strickland. He has handle, he has, like, quick little elbows, and hook moves, and a nasty midrange game.”
At one point in the movie, Howard brings up the sport’s Jewish roots, specifically mentioning that Ossie Schectman scored the first basket ever in the NBA’s predecessor, the Basketball Association of America. Looking back on it, Josh regrets not having Lakeith Stanfield’s character, Demany, push back on that. “My retort that I wanted Demany to say,” Josh says, “was like, ‘Oh yeah, and how many black people were there?’”
As both NBA fans and filmmakers, the Safdies couldn’t believe their good fortune in casting KG. Garnett’s performance belied his lack of acting experience. “We were getting so detailed and subtle with the direction,” Benny says, “but I remember looking up at Josh like, ‘I cannot believe that this is happening right now.’ He was totally knocking it out of the park in such an incredible way.”
In the final cut of the film, Garnett seems at ease sharing the screen with Sandler. He’s charismatic and funny, especially in his last scene. What’s more, the Safdies say that KG came up with a variety of improvised answers to NBA questions posed by Howie. When Sandler’s character asks who would win in a fight between Tony Allen and Ben Wallace, without missing a beat, Garnett replies, “T.A. all the way.”
Though Uncut Gems is technically built on the personality of Sandler’s character, basketball is its true foundation. And while the film isn’t about the team that perpetually tests the Safdies’ faith, it is in spirit. “I think there’s a certain level of parabolic storytelling within a basketball game,” Josh says. “The ups and downs, the mini dramas, the Pyrrhic victories, moral victories that do speak to a strange brand of Judaism.”
Benny puts it more succinctly, and in more Knicksian terms: “It’s the suffering.”
