Popcorn movies, termite art, and more from Josh and Benny on opening weekend of their Movie-Movie Good Time.

To the A24 Bleeders:

For nearly a decade, we’ve been nickel and dime-ing the industry and finding our little corner in the world...Mining reality and educating ourselves over and over again. Yes, Good Time may be our 4th feature film (5th if you count our documentary Lenny Cooke), but in a lot of ways it’s our first Movie-Movie, so we don’t blame you for maybe not having heard of us before! 

When we received a blind email from Robert Pattinson on the dawn of the Texan premiere for Heaven Knows What, Good Time wasn’t even a thought. Of course there is a lifelong obsession with the American criminal through the strange portrait of America via exploitation in COPS (arguably the greatest TV show ever) with pulp, with lightning-fast entertainment... but Good Time would not have come into existence had Rob not written us a romantic/psychotic email about how he felt deeply connected to us just by having seen a still on Indiewire.

We’re happy he did. Since we were kids—when our dad was forcing us to find answers in movies for questions that were too murky for words—we’ve often been dually obsessed with a specific type of genre movie. Thrilling movies that were after something else as subtext. Reflections of society. Entertainment that provided truth. Movies with surprising wells of emotion: the exposé of racism and how absurd and shallow it really is in 48 Hrs.... the importance of the individual in the face of conformity in The Running Man... the numbing effect of isolation and suburbia (the suburbs were completely foreign to us growing up) in Dawn Of The Dead... the dangers of xenophobia in E.T.... 

Popcorn films... Termite art... Stuff that you consume and later on find that you’ve got these termites inside of you refusing to go away, begging you to answer questions from the film. “Why did the cops arrest those people?” “Is the prison ethos of America inescapable?” “What does it mean to love someone?” “How far am I willing to go in the pursuit of a dream?” Today, our Movie-Movie is in the hands of the public ready for consumption and this excites us. It excites us that people will move closer and closer to the edge of their seats wondering where the film will go next. Selfishly, we’re jealous...we’ll never get to experience that, but we can hope that it will move you and we can hope that the termites will make their way in and you too can think about this story as much as we have! 

We made this movie to be consumed publicly and in a theater. There are only two places left that come with an excuse for being unreachable—the shower and the movies. “Sorry, I was in the shower” or “Sorry, I was in a movie.” USE THAT!!! Seeing Good Time in a room with strangers, with the lights down and a sound system way bigger than anything you could have in your home...is how it was meant to be seen. Be thrilled. 

We hope you have a good time. (Sorry, we had to). But really, please remember to have a good time. Life is messy.  

Our best,  

Josh and Benny Safdie  
New York, NY