So, Kevin O’Leary wasn’t kidding around when he said “Marty Supreme” should have ended with him turning into a vampire— in fact, that’s originally what Josh Safdie wanted.
In an A24 podcast interview (via The Playlist), Safdie confirms that the film was supposed to have a coda, set 30 years later, in the 1980s, which would have turned the film over its head.
The setup would have had Timothee Chalamet‘s Marty, now in his 50s, with him in old age makeup, taking his granddaughter to a Tears For Fears concert, only for O’Leary to suddenly come up behind him and bite him as a vampire. That was supposed to be the final scene.
“You’re on his eyes, we built the prosthetic for Timmy and everything, and Mr. Wonderful shows up behind him and takes a bite out of his neck, and that was the last thing in the movie,” Safdie revealed of his cut vampire ending to Baker.
The only thing that held Safdie back from including this wild ending? The studio. “I remember A24 and everyone was like, ‘This is a mistake, right?’”
He turns that [shoe store] into the most successful shop on Orchard Street. He changes it to Marty Mauser’s Shoes,” Safdie said of the scraped ending. “Franchises, franchises again, leaves New York State, becomes a very rich man. All the metrics of success are there. His family grows, he leaves the city, has this beautiful house, and it ends with him at a concert for Tears for Fears with his granddaughter. They’re great seats, up front, and he’s watching it. And he’s thinking about ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ and youth, and what does it mean, and he has this success, but he’s not doing the thing that he believed he was born on the planet to do.
To all this I say, WTF? It’s odd to imagine such an ending. Was this supposed to be an ode to the ‘80s set “The Lost Boys,” which featured vampires roaming concerts? Then again, despite being set in the ‘50s, “Marty Supreme” does have an ‘80s soundtrack playing throughout the film — so maybe this was a tongue-in-cheek way for Safdie to bring things back full circle.
It does all make sense when you suddenly remember that in “Marty Supreme” there’s a very memorable — and very literal sounding — “vampire speech” delivered by O’Leary’s character Milton Rockwell near the end of the film. In the scene, Rockwell ominously tells Marty that he’s a vampire who has lived for centuries and seen countless people like him.
On the surface, it sounded literal, but within the context of the movie, it’s more often read as a metaphor for how Rockwell views himself. Turns out, Safdie was actually going to take that speech at face value and completely upend his film with what would have been a polarizing twist. Fortunately, he didn’t—“Marty Supreme” ends perfectly.