PASADENA, Calif. — When director Josh Safdie first contacted him for help with “Marty Supreme,” Diego Schaaf really couldn’t “put a face to the name” of the film’s star, he said.
“Do you know who Timothée Chalamet is? Schaaf wrote in a text to her 20-year-old niece. “We’re going to work on a film with him.” His response was only three letters: “OMG”
Few will pick Schaaf, 71, out of the crowd. But since 1993, he and his wife, Wei Wang, 64, have built a reputation in Hollywood by helping A-list stars like Chalamet become table tennis pros.
The duo, who run Alpha Productions in Pasadena, work as consultants for films, shows, commercials and music videos involving table tennis. Their credits include “Forrest Gump,” “Friends,” and “Balls of Fury,” among other projects.
A24’s “Marty Supreme,” a bustling Oscar contender that debuted in North American theaters on Christmas Day, depicts a fictionalized version of the career of mid-century table tennis champion Marty Reisman. To play Marty Mauser, an American table tennis star whose dream is to win the world title, Chalamet had to come across as a world-class player.
The first step: assessing Chalamet’s table tennis skills.
Chalamet reportedly spent about seven years training; he told the BBC that he took his ping-pong table to the desert while filming “Dune” and on the set of “Wonka.” He even practiced table tennis while learning guitar for his role in last year’s Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown.”
But it wasn’t until June 2024, just months before “Marty Supreme” began filming in New York, that Schaaf and Wang entered the fold.
“We watched [Chalamet] play, and we wanted to see how we can make him a professional player,” Schaaf said. “Do we have the confidence that he has the athletic ability to do that? I saw him hit for a few minutes. ‘Yeah, he can do it.’
Schaaf grew up playing table tennis in Switzerland, but never ultra-competitively. His true love was music. He moved to the United States in 1979 to pursue a career as a guitarist, then moved into sound engineering and video production.
His work now focuses primarily on choreography and ensuring that the overall production of the projects he and Wang work on is of high quality. For “Marty Supreme,” Schaaf did it all: hiring top players for a tournament scene, finding equipment used only in the 1950s and creating storylines.
“The point development had to be right and the intensity had to be right. Everything had to match the rest of the story, and [Safdie] “We had a vision for this,” Schaaf said. “We had a lot of conversations – what the development point should be, what point should be when, when the tension should build – but also without making it a regular sports movie. … Show it in a cinematic way to feel like you’re in a tournament. It feels real.
Wang, meanwhile, is the hands-on expert in teaching acting form and technique. Wang, originally from Beijing, learned tennis at the age of 10 and eventually became the country’s fifth-ranked player.
