When Hollywood needs a table tennis scene, this couple serves aces

[ad_1] PASADENA, Calif. — When director Josh Safdie first approached him to assist with “Marty Supreme,” Diego Schaaf genuinely couldn’t “put a face to the identify” of the movie’s star, he stated.

“Have you learnt who Timothée Chalamet is?” Schaaf wrote in a textual content to his 20-year-old niece. “We’re going to be engaged on a film with him.” Her response was simply three letters: “O.M.G.”

Few are prone to decide Schaaf, 71, out of a crowd, both. However since 1993, he and his spouse, Wei Wang, 64, have constructed a reputation for themselves in Hollywood serving to A-list stars like Chalamet grow to be desk tennis professionals.

The duo, who run Alpha Productions out of Pasadena, work as consultants for movies, exhibits, commercials and music movies involving desk tennis. Their credit embody “Forrest Gump,” “Associates” and “Balls of Fury,” amongst different initiatives.

Diego Schaaf, 71, repping swag from "Marty Supreme." Maggie Shannon for NBC Information A24’s “Marty Supreme,” a buzzy Oscars contender that debuted broadly in North American theaters on Christmas Day, depicts a fictionalized model of the profession of mid-century desk tennis champ Marty Reisman. To remodel into the character Marty Mauser, a U.S. desk tennis star whose dream is to win the world title, Chalamet needed to move as a world-class participant.

Step one: assessing Chalamet’s desk tennis expertise.

Chalamet reportedly spent about seven years coaching; he advised the BBC that he took his desk tennis desk into the desert whereas he was filming “Dune” and on the set of “Wonka.” He even practiced desk tennis as he discovered guitar for his position in final yr’s Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan biopic, “A Full Unknown.”

But it surely wasn’t till June 2024, simply months earlier than capturing for “Marty Supreme” started in New York Metropolis, that Schaaf and Wang entered the fold.

“We watched [Chalamet] play, and we wished to see how we are able to make a professional participant out of that,” Schaaf stated. “Do we've got the arrogance that he has the athletic potential to do it? I noticed him hit for a few minutes. ‘Yeah, he can do it.’”

Schaaf grew up taking part in desk tennis in Switzerland, however by no means ultra-competitively. His actual love was music. He moved to america in 1979 to pursue a profession as a guitarist and later transitioned to sound engineering and video manufacturing.

His job now focuses totally on choreography and ensuring the general manufacturing on the initiatives he and Wang work on is high-quality. For “Marty Supreme,” Schaaf did the whole lot from hiring top-tier gamers for a match scene to discovering gear used solely within the Fifties to crafting storylines.

“The event of factors needed to be proper, and the depth needed to be proper. All of it needed to match the remainder of the story, and [Safdie] had a imaginative and prescient of that,” Schaaf stated. “We had a variety of conversations going backwards and forwards — what the purpose growth needed to be, which level must be when, when the stress needed to construct — however then additionally not make it like a daily sports activities film. ... Present it in a cinematic approach so you're feeling such as you’re in a match. It feels actual.”

Wang, in the meantime, is the hands-on professional in educating actors kind and approach. Wang, initially from Beijing, discovered tennis when she was 10 years previous and ultimately rose to be the No. 5-ranked participant within the nation.