Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie Get Uncomfortable, ‘The Curse’-Style, at IndieWire Honors

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie are the heads behind Showtime and A24’s mind-bending reality TV satire “The Curse,” currently heading into its fifth episode on December 10. But just a few days prior, the creative duo received the Wavelength Award at the IndieWire Honors event at NeueHouse Hollywood on December 6, hosted by Dewayne Perkins.

At the event, they were in characteristic improvisatory, slightly off-kilter (and off-putting) style, with “The Rehearsal” creator Fielder starting off his acceptance speech, in deadpan droll, “It’s very nice. Thank you so much for this. We both are big fans of this website and all the content. It’s such an honor to be given the Wavelength Award because, especially just speaking personally for someone like me, it’s very hard to get on the same wavelength as another person. So getting an award for being the best at that is very cool. But it is just a comment on the fact that we are friends and doesn’t speak to the quality of the work, so it is perhaps one of the most insulting things we’ve ever been given. I think this is real glass. Thank you so much for that.”

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Both recipients seemed to be channeling the vibes of their series “The Curse” onstage.

Safdie followed up, “For those of you who weren’t on the same wavelength as me, thank you very much. This does mean a lot. I don’t know if it speaks to the quality of the work but at least we collaborate well together. I want to thank everybody who helped make this thing. I really believe we got together with the community and built this thing with our bare hands. Thank you for this beautiful statue.”

“Nathan for You” creator Fielder and “Uncut Gems” co-director Safdie previously sat down with IndieWire to talk about how they almost talked themselves out of making the show entirely. In the series, Emma Stone and Fielder play a newly married couple setting up environmentally sustainable homes in an underserved New Mexico community, with an HGTV camera crew following them around at their most intimate and cringe-inducing moments. Part marriage drama, part black comedy, and part surreal thriller, “The Curse” is many things but above all takes enormous storytelling swings that dare to hook and repel audiences at the same time.

“We were like, ‘This isn’t a good idea.’ But then we couldn’t help but think of other things that would build into this or play off of that. We really were just having a good time talking about making this as complicated as possible,” Safdie told IndieWire previously.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s make a show together,’” said Fielder, who first met Safdie in 2017. “It was literally just that we were texting and talking for months and months.”

Explaining how Stone and Fielder’s characters unravel over the course of the series as performative do-gooders whose relationship is tested by their own project, Fielder said, “They’re projecting things that may or may not exist onto everyone around them, and everyone is sort of doing that to each other. That idea of what’s actually real or what matters in a situation is a lot of what the show is exploring and reveling in. Because it’s easy to sort of go, ‘Oh, well this person’s good or bad,’ or ‘This is real or fake.’ But in a lot of these situations, it’s so much more complicated than that.”

The rest of the IndieWire Honors recipients at Neuehouse Hollywood included Greta Gerwig, Lee Sung Jin, Cord Jefferson, Lily Gladstone, Todd Haynes, Chad Stahelski, Jharrel Jerome, and Melina Matsoukas.

Veronica Flores conducted all interviews for IndieWire Honors social media videos.

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