PASADENA, Calif. — When director Josh Safdie first approached him to help with “Marty Supreme,” Diego Schaaf genuinely 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 his 20-year-old niece. “We’re going to be working on a movie with him.” Her response was just three letters: “O.M.G.”
Few are likely to pick Schaaf, 71, out of a crowd, either. But since 1993, he and his wife, Wei Wang, 64, have built a name for themselves in Hollywood helping A-list stars like Chalamet become table tennis pros.
The duo, who run Alpha Productions out of 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 buzzy Oscars contender that debuted widely in North American theaters on Christmas Day, depicts a fictionalized version of the career of mid-century table tennis champ Marty Reisman. To transform into the character Marty Mauser, a U.S. table tennis star whose dream is to win the world title, Chalamet had to pass 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 table tennis table into the desert while he was filming “Dune” and on the set of “Wonka.” He even practiced table tennis as he learned 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 shooting for “Marty Supreme” began in New York City, that Schaaf and Wang entered the fold.
“We watched [Chalamet] play, and we wanted to see how we can make a pro player out of that,” Schaaf said. “Do we have the confidence that he has the athletic ability to do it? I saw him hit for a couple of minutes. ‘Yeah, he can do it.’”
Schaaf grew up playing table tennis in Switzerland, but never ultra-competitively. His real love was music. He moved to the United States in 1979 to pursue a career as a guitarist and later transitioned to sound engineering and video production.
His job now focuses mostly on choreography and making sure the overall production on the projects he and Wang work on is high-quality. For “Marty Supreme,” Schaaf did everything from hiring top-tier players for a tournament scene to finding equipment used only in the 1950s to crafting storylines.
“The development of points had to be right, and the intensity had to be right. It all had to match the rest of the story, and [Safdie] had a vision of that,” Schaaf said. “We had a lot of conversations going back and forth — what the point development had to be, which point should be when, when the tension had to build — but then also not make it like a regular sports movie. … Show it in a cinematic way so you feel like you’re in a tournament. It feels real.”
Wang, meanwhile, is the hands-on expert in teaching actors form and technique. Wang, originally from Beijing, learned tennis when she was 10 years old and eventually rose to be the No. 5-ranked player in the country.
