PASADENA, California — When director Josh Safdie first approached him to help with “Marty Supreme,” Diego Schaaf couldn’t really “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 message to his 20-year-old niece. “We’re going to work on a movie with him.” His response was just three letters: “OMG.”
Few are likely to pick Schaaf, 71, out of the crowd. But since 1993, he and his wife, Wei Wang, 64, have made a name for themselves in Hollywood by helping A-list stars like Chalamet become table tennis professionals.
The duo, who run Alpha Productions in Pasadena, work as consultants for movies, shows, commercials and music videos related to table tennis. His credits include “Forrest Gump,” “Friends” and “Balls of Fury,” among other projects.
A24’s “Marty Supreme,” a lively Oscar contender that debuted widely in North American theaters on Christmas Day, depicts a fictionalized version of the career of mid-century table tennis champion Marty Reisman. To transform into the character of Marty Mauser, an American table tennis star whose dream is to win the world title, Chalamet had to pass for a world-class player.
The first step: evaluate 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 to play 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 filming on “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 translate that into a professional player,” Schaaf said. “Are we confident he has the athletic ability to do it? I watched him hit for a couple of minutes. ‘Yes, 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 and later moved into sound engineering and video production.
His work now focuses primarily on choreography and making sure the overall production of the projects he and Wang work on are of high quality. For “Marty Supreme,” Schaaf did everything from hiring top players for a tournament setting to finding equipment used only in the 1950s and crafting stories.
“The development of the points had to be right and the intensity had to be right. Everything had to match the rest of the story, and (Safdie) had a vision for that,” Schaaf said. “We had a lot of conversations back and forth: what the point of development should be, what point should be when, when did I have to build up the tension, but also not make it like a normal sports movie… Show it cinematically so you feel like you’re in a tournament. It feels real.”
Meanwhile, Wang is a hands-on expert in teaching form and technique to actors. Wang, originally from Beijing, learned tennis when she was 10 and eventually rose to become the country’s No. 5-ranked player.
