How Kevin Garnett was casted for "Uncut Gems" A role contended by Amar’e Stoudemire, Kobe Bryant and Joel Embiid

Amar’e Stoudemire should have been in the cast of "Uncut Gems" - the latest film by the Safdie brothers with an incredible Adam Sandler as an inveterate New York bettor who, in his spare time, is also a jeweler. There had to be Kobe Bryant  and at some point, there had to be Joel Embiid. And instead, Kevin Garnett was the chosen one, one of the most hated players by Josh Safdie: «because I'm a crazy Knicks fan, and my instinct when I saw the name of Kevin was “I hate him, I don't even want him close to mine films” he said in an interview with The Ringer. Kevin Garnett's name had come out mainly to meet the main need of the Safdie brothers: to tie the story of their film as much as possible to reality. In "Uncut Gems" (which in Italy is available on Netflix as "rough diamonds") in fact, Howard Ratner's addiction to gambling meets the NBA playoffs and their unpredictability. The Safdies wanted to use original footage from the NBA playoffs and, to do so, they had to find a series that suited their needs: a win-defeat-win sequence was ideal for their script. The turning point of "Uncut Gems" is, in fact, the existence of a rare Ethiopian stone, belonging to the black Jews, which Ratner imports in New York and loaned to Garnett - which is 2012, the year in which the film, it was to the Boston Celtics - who feels a "special connection with the stone".

The setting of New York in the early '10s, the use of some archetypes of the New York Jew and costumes that fit perfectly with their time, the presence of Lakeith Stanfield (by far the most requested African American actor of the moment) have made "Uncut Gems" an instant cult. A basketball film where basketball is the backdrop to human misery, and where the NBA invades people's lives in a pervasive way. An NBA that is shown from afar, on TV: in fact, for the making of the film, the Safdies have not obtained any license from the League. They appealed to Fair Use, a law that allows the use of copyrighted material for a minimum length. This is why all the images of the game we see in "Uncut gems" are framed by the thousand Howard Ratner's televisions and never directly. In addition: "Fair Use" was one of the reasons why we could not change any element of the games at any point. The chronology of the races could not be alternated ». The ability of the Safdie brothers was to use all the temporal and bureaucratic constraints that faced him, and that allowed him to set up one of the best films on NBA basketball in recent history.