The Only Living Pickpocket in New York: Behind the scenes with DOP Sam Levy

DOP Sam Levy on crafting the neo-noir look of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York has all the ingredients of a classic New York crime film: iconic locations, tense subway sequences and a cast entrenched in the city on-screen, including John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito.

Although a Boston native, DOP Sam Levy has developed a deep cinematic relationship with New York. Now his longtime home, the city has provided the backdrop for many of the features he has photographed, including Frances Ha, Maggie’s Plan, His Three Daughters and Lena Dunham’s upcoming Good Sex. With The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, however, Levy had the opportunity to explore a side of the city, and a genre, he had never photographed before.

After reading the script, Levy met director Noah Segan for coffee, and the two immediately clicked. “We had a lot in common; our family backgrounds were quite similar and we shared a clear frame of reference,” Levy recalls “Sometimes you meet someone and there’s an unspoken connection. You recognise something in each other and instinctively feel that you’re going to work well together. But with a director and cinematographer, you can never really know until you’re on-set. That’s where the relationship becomes real. Noah and I quickly became brothers; we finished each others’ sentences, we worked really hard together and we’ve been laughing all the way until right now.”

While the film has the feel of a nineties movie, Segan told Levy that he wanted to make a neo-noir for the 21st century. “Even though the film is set in the present, we thought it should feel as though it belonged to another time. A lot of that comes from the anachronistic nature of the characters. John [Turturro’s] character barely has a cell phone and has never bothered to learn how to use a computer. Steve Buscemi’s character is the same. They belong to a bygone era that our society is gradually leaving behind and discarding.”

Early in his career, Levy was mentored by renowned cinematographer Harris Savides ASC, who photographed Turturro’s 1998 film Illuminata, which he directed and starred in. “John and I talked about Harris and his family,” Levy says. “Harris’ wife, Medine, and daughter, Sophie, visited our Pickpocket set, which was fun and also emotional. So, John and I had that connection even though we had never worked together before.”

Levy and Turturro also bonded over their shared love of cinema. Levy now proudly displays a framed poster of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, a gift from Turturro. “John is a big cinephile and a collector of movie posters. During prep, Noah, John and I looked at L’Argent, which is one of my favourite films. We looked at it for the atmosphere, but also very technically. Bresson uses a lot of what we might now call insert shots. Close-ups of objects that, conventionally, you’d use simply to clarify a plot point. A hand holding a banknote, fingers typing, someone reading a newspaper.”

But Bresson, Levy tells me, holds on these images much longer than we’re accustomed to. A shot might begin as a close-up of an object and then widen, pan or track with someone as they move, and suddenly what began as a functional insert transforms into something else entirely. The image is no longer just conveying information; it becomes a cinematic moment in itself. There’s something transcendent about the way he allows those details to linger.

The technique was adopted for Pickpocket, with the crew referring to them as ‘Bresson Inserts’. “I’d line up over John’s shoulder,” Levy adds. “Then I would give him a monitor and he would really get into the specificity of his positioning and blocking of these tight, Bressonian moments.”

Segan and Levy also discussed Ulu Grosbard’s film Straight Time, Robert Mitchum’s films The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Out of the Past, and The Godfather. That led Levy to Bausch & Lomb’s Super Baltar lenses, used by Gordon Willis to photograph The Godfather. He knew Super Baltars well, having tested them several times for earlier projects, and Segan agreed they were perfect for what they wanted. For certain shots, he used Harris Savides’ personal set of Standard Baltar primes.

“John Turturro has one of the great faces and profiles in movies today,” Levy says. “He looks amazing on camera, especially with these lenses. We had wonderful producers, Katie McNeill and Leopold Hughes, who let me shoot a test on my own and bring John to the location. I had the chance to photograph him before principal photography began, and John was incredibly patient. He’s a real filmmaker who understands the process. I got to shoot him in his character’s apartment, moving in and out of silhouette and really study his face from every angle. It gave me a chance to discover how I wanted to light John and photograph him, but also just to spend time with him while I stood behind the camera, feeling things out together as filmmakers. It was thrilling.”

Portraying a bygone New York involved extensive location planning. For the pawn shop owned by Steve Buscemi’s character, Levy sought out a space with windows looking onto the street, giving the images greater depth and creating a dynamic field of view in which everyday New York life could continue outside while John and Steve’s characters went about their mysterious and illicit business.

The subway scenes required more technical planning. Levy initially explored shooting on a live subway, although he admits that has become increasingly prohibitive in New York. “There’s a train that the transit authority uses specifically for filming,” he says. “There are several stations it can run between, and you can dress it however you want. We timed how long the train took to travel from one station to the next, and Noah, our wonderful AD Laura Klein and I used those windows as part of our shot-listing process, breaking down the scenes we had set throughout the city subway.”

Levy has filmed extensively on the New York subway throughout his career, and says that shooting there is never quite the same experience twice. The practicalities and restrictions continually evolve, depending on what is happening in the city and the team working at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But for Levy, the unpredictability of the subway is also part of what makes it such a compelling place to photograph.

“The subway is the main artery of New York, constantly pulsing with life and an incredible sense of theatre,” he says. “For a character like John’s, who doesn’t own a car, it’s how he moves through the city, but it’s also where he works as a pickpocket. He’s surrounded by a constantly shifting cast of people. Observing them, moving among them and looking to steal whatever he can get his hands on.”

The pickpocket sequences feel convincingly real, something Levy attributes to Turturro’s commitment to making the sleight of hand seem authentic. “We had a pickpocket consultant who was incredibly helpful to John, and they spent a lot of time practising and rehearsing together. So much of it comes down to hand-eye coordination. John is very athletic and has an extraordinary understanding of choreography, blocking and where the camera is. He has tremendous control over his physicality, so the precision and sleight of hand involved in stealing an object from someone played beautifully to his strengths.”

The film was shot over 24 days, making consistency and control particularly important. Working closely with his gaffer, Jason Velez, and key grip, Chris Keenan, Levy found lighting Harry’s apartment scenes presented a particular challenge. Located on the top floor of a co-op building in the Bronx, the space required them to place ARRI SkyPanel X23s on an adjacent roof, allowing consistent, controlled daylight regardless of the time of day.

At night, they shifted the fixtures to evoke the sodium-vapour and industrial lighting of the surrounding city.

That degree of control was equally important for a nighttime parking lot sequence, in which Turturro’s character pickpockets Will Price’s character before breaking into his car. “We return to this scene in several critical flashbacks, so Jason, Chris and I had to design the lighting to accommodate shooting the incident a number of different ways,” Levy explains.

“The characters revisit the moment as they watch security footage, and each time we see it from a slightly different perspective and learn something new. We primarily used the ARRI SkyPanels, along with some punchier Aputure LED fixtures that gave us a more specular, slightly more theatrical quality of light.”

Levy relied on the ARRI ALEXA 35 to capture the film, but he opted for GoPros for the surveillance-camera sequences. “I love using GoPro cameras for surveillance footage. They’re lo-fi and grainy, and produce an image that naturally feels surveillance-y. They’re also very user-friendly, and you can easily transmit the image to an OLED lighting monitor. Someday I’d love to shoot an entire film on a GoPro! We shot the ALEXA at ISO 1600 and the GoPros at ISO 800.”

The sequence, however, proved to be tricky. “We shot every moment [in] two different ways: once as it happens in linear time and then again, slightly offset, for the surveillance footage. We carefully mapped out those differences because each time the audience revisits the incident, they’re learning something new.”

The scene in which Price’s character finally returns to watch the surveillance footage was the last shot of principal photography. “We were able to play the original GoPro footage back live on the prop television, which is a real luxury. Usually you’re photographing a blank screen and the image gets composited in later. I brought the ALEXA extremely close to the television, and you could actually see the pixel structure of the screen in a way that would be very difficult to replicate in VFX.”

Rephotographing an image from a monitor is a technique that Levy learned from mentor Harris Savides. “Harris loved photographing images off screens because of the decay and patina they acquire in the process. You’re taking an image that already exists and passing it through another layer of glass and technology, and it comes out the other side with a completely different texture.”

The film’s climactic scene takes place in a limousine and was shot on a stage. “We did a lot of poor man’s process in this film,” he says. “I thought very carefully about how to control and introduce light into the picture car. I designed an interactive moving-light sequence, but the tempo of John and Jamie Lee Curtis’ performances would shift from take to take, which meant the lights would interact with them differently each time. That was really exciting. We had a whole team of grips and electricians rotating lights and reflectors around the car. It became an orchestrated dance between the actors, the camera and the lighting that was exhilarating. Jason, Chris and their teams did an incredible job.”

Levy was greatly inspired by a beautiful poor-man’s-process shot in Broadway Danny Rose, photographed by Gordon Willis. “I showed the scene to Noah during prep, and it helped steer us in the right direction. We designed our lighting to create opportunities for surprises to happen without knowing exactly when they would happen. At one pivotal moment, when John is reacting to something the mob boss is saying, the light stops right on the edge of his face. I could never have planned that exact moment. It was a wonderful accident.”

Working within a tight schedule ultimately brought a heightened sense of focus to Levy’s work. “I worked very hard to keep all the logistics – the schedule, the budget, everything happening outside the frame – contained. But once you’re shooting, all of that falls away. What matters most is what’s in the frame, and how that image connects narratively to everything that came before it and everything that comes after.”

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York offered Levy the opportunity to photograph his home city through a genre he had never explored before. “I live in New York and I’ve shot many films here, but I’ve never had the opportunity to make a crime thriller in the city, so that was exciting. And to do it with John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito, and with Noah Segan, who has such a distinctive voice as a filmmaker, made it all the more special.”

 

This article appears in the October/November issue of Definition

WORDS: OLIVER WEBB. IMAGES: SONY PICTURES