John Turturro and cinematographer Sam Levy hadn’t worked together before, both signing onto Noah Segan’s “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” but they did have something in common. Levy came up as a camera assistant under the great Harris Savides, who also shot Turturro in “Margot at the Wedding.” They’d both gotten close to Savides and had all kinds of stories that gave the actor and DP a nice shared language to work on this throwback crime thriller about a thief named Harry (Turturro) who steals from the wrong vape goon (Will Price) and has one last, desperate chance to make good.
But Levy also had something tangible.
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“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” was shot primarily with a set of Bausch & Lomb Super Baltar lenses — the same set, in fact, that cinematographer Gordon Willis used to shoot “The Godfather.” But Savides also owned an even older set of original Baltar lenses that Levy brought to bless the set. “I carried Harris’ lenses with us,” Levy told IndieWire. “They’re very similar but had just a little bit of a different flavor, and they had a different focal length. Some of them had kind of in-between focal lengths. So, it was convenient, but it also just felt nice to have a piece of Harris.”
It’s especially nice for the eyes of the project, the lenses, to have history and lineage on a movie like “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.” Segan’s thriller takes as its central dramatic question the tension between the analog and the digital, the New York that’s coming into being in the 2020s and the New York that’s disintegrating to bring it to life. And Levy really wanted to lean into that, visually.
“[The Super Baltars] have these aberrations in them which put off a lot of people. They vignette and they flare in a way that is very beautiful but you can’t — it’s hard [to control. For example, if you shoot with the iris wide open, they completely fall apart, and they look soft, but not in a pleasing way. Harris Savides used them on ‘Margot at the Wedding,’ which John is in. And at that time, I remember having a lot of conversations with [Savides] about how difficult they were,” Levy said.
But after doing some camera tests with Turturro and seeing how he looked through those lenses, Levy found a sweet spot that’s weathered and alluring, with a clarity that is purposeful but never too sharp or soulless. The flaws and the aberrations the lenses created were, in fact, Levy’s favorite parts. “It’s an urgent necessity to take risks when you’re a cinematographer and to try things that are maybe on the edge of being too dark or underexposed. I played a lot with that in this film, with silhouette,” Levy said.
This is especially true in the Bronx apartment that Harry shares with his wife Rosie (Karina Arroyave), trapped in a hospital bed in what New Yorker realtors would call a “prewar” building and what most New Yorkers would call “don’t trust that elevator to work.” Levy spent a lot of time there, trying to see and absorb the character of the space, not to correct it with lighting, but to see how it could help tell the story through how his camera captured it.
“ You open the door, you see the hallway; you close the door, it’s completely dark, and I knew so much happens in that little stretch. And I had to really spend time there to get to a place where it’s like, ‘Oh, when he comes home, he’ll emerge out of the darkness,” Levy said.
Levy also worked with production designer Rocío Giménez to arrange the space so we felt the transition and the invasion of Harry’s home when it happens. How can that conflict pop in the frame before the actors even start speaking?
“I suggested, ‘Why don’t we put a picture up and we see the guys in the reflection?’” Levy said. “It’s got to be at a very particular angle, and then we’ve got to light them so that you can really see [the goons in the next room], but we’re panning from John. It really was all in one. So that was really fun, but it was very painstaking to plot that out, and I worked very closely with Rocío Giménez, our great production designer, and our art director, Rosa Callejas, on being able to get that,” Levy said.
Giménez told IndieWire that her goal was to make sure Harry and Rosie’s apartment reflected a home that had history, and therefore room for all those hidden surprise angles, too. “It needed to feel textured — in the objects, in the layers of paint — and never remodeled. Things break, walls chip, and those marks accumulate over time. We also wanted the apartment to feel very warm, almost glowing. Although the apartment was a location, we transformed it extensively: reworking parts of the kitchen, adding wallpaper, repainting, and building walls to make the space feel smaller,” Giménez said.
Giménez and her team also made adjustments to make the home invasion look properly invasive, scattering even more objects around every time we cut back to it. But it took a real team effort to craft that sense of lived history that imbues every frame of “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” and especially those sequences in Harry’s apartment. Giménez, Levy, and Segan all talked about it extensively, and then, at a certain point, let their New York location have its say, too.
“When you’re working on a location — sometimes you don’t have the time, but it takes time to acclimate to the environment. And one thing I really learned from Harris Savides, that he would always say to me when, a few times, I got to operate for him, ‘Just look. Take a look at what you’re doing. Look at it. Don’t frame it up. Just sit there and look,’” Levy said.
It’s apt, then, that Savides’ lenses were on Turturro, right alongside Levy’s.
“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is now playing in theaters.