Benny Safdie has confirmed that he will not co-direct the next Safdies movie with Josh, who will direct solo.
The “Oppenheimer” star shared the news with GQ, marking the first Safdie-directed feature not to be helmed by both brothers. The yet-untitled film reteams the Safdies with Adam Sandler and is set for a Netflix release under Sandler’s production deal with the streamer. The film is set in the world of sports memorabilia collectors and also stars Megan Thee Stallion.
“Elara is still there. We work on a lot of documentaries and there’s just a constant flow of ideas,” Benny Safdie said. “It just felt like, OK, there’s things that I want to explore that don’t necessarily align right now with Josh. So it’s a divide and conquer mentality. He wants to tell this story, he can go and do that. I’m going to go and do a couple of other things. It seems like a natural progression for how things have happened.”
Jeff Sneider first reported the creative split on the project earlier in the spring. IndieWire has reached out to Netflix, who declined to comment on the previous report.
After Benny Safdie went on to act in “Licorice Pizza,” “Oppenheimer,” and upcoming satirical series “The Curse,” which he co-created with Nathan Fielder, Josh Safdie was already well into working on the Sandler sports film with collaborator Ronald Bronstein, who co-wrote the script with Josh.
“It was just a matter of, ‘This works for me right now and this is what I’ve got to do,’” Safdie said.
During the GQ interview, Benny Safdie also spoke out on the allegations against longtime collaborator Sebastian Bear-McClard.
The “Uncut Gems” producer and Elara Pictures co-founder was accused of sexual misconduct and grooming teenage girls in March 2023. Elara Pictures had previously split ties with Bear-McClard in July 2022 after becoming aware of his alleged behavior.
“It’s disgusting, and when you find out something about somebody that you didn’t realize, you just have to be much more careful,” Safdie said. “It’s a lot, and it’s not something that you want to have happen to anybody. And when you find it out, the one thing that you can do is really just take control.”
As of March 2023, Bear-McClard was involved in private mediation with the Safdie Brothers. A spokeswoman for the Safdies said at the time, “The Elara team were made aware of Sebastian McClard’s behavior in July 2022. They took immediate action and terminated him.”
The Safdie Brothers’ Elara Pictures started a first-look deal with A24 in 2020; the allegations against Bear-McClard involved inappropriate on-set behavior for the Safdie Brothers’ “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems,” both A24 releases. A source told IndieWire that A24 was not aware of any such allegations when it licensed “Good Time” for U.S. distribution in 2016 and that the distributor never received a complaint during the making of 2017’s “Uncut Gems.”
The new upcoming Elara Pictures project does not involve Bear-McClard.
