PRODUCTION THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK
“We wanted the film to feel as though it belonged to another time”
DOP Sam Levy on crafting the neo-noir look of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
WORDS OLIVER WEBB IMAGES SONY PICTURES
T he 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.”
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