There is a sanitized, overly polished look to modern cinema that removes all sense of danger from the screen. A perfectly lit room is a safe room. The Safdie Brothers, conversely, understand that true cinematic anxiety requires dirt, shadow, and unpredictability. Good Time is a masterpiece of making the audience physically uncomfortable through sheer production mechanics.
Stealing the Shot
To capture this frenetic energy, the Safdie Brothers and cinematographer Sean Price Williams shot the film on Kodak 2-perf 35mm. The lightweight ARRI LT allowed them to execute a “guerrilla” street-shooting mentality. They embedded Robert Pattinson into uncontrolled New York environments—active malls and rush-hour subway trains—intentionally blurring the line between scripted narrative and documentary reality. The camera moves like a panicked animal because the production itself was constantly in motion.
Painting with Dirt
The true genius of Good Time, however, lies in its lighting design. Traditional cinematographers light a scene to flatter the actors. Williams lit Good Time to make the world look diseased. He heavily utilized practical neon and strobe lighting, deliberately introducing mixed color temperatures to make the environments feel “dirty” and reflect the protagonist’s fractured, desperate psychological state.
Because the Kodak VISION3 500T 5219 film stock possesses such extreme latitude, the crew was able to shoot in impossibly low-light conditions. In a radical move against artifice, co-director Josh Safdie would frequently command the crew to turn set lights completely off during takes. He stripped away the safety net of illumination to force the raw, urgent reality of the street into the lens. It is ugly, it is abrasive, and it is absolutely brilliant filmmaking.
Insights regarding the 2-perf 35mm workflow, the guerrilla integration of Robert Pattinson into real New York environments, and the deliberate use of mixed-temperature ‘dirty’ lighting were synthesized from the Kodak technical case study and interviews in Filmmaker Magazine.