Is the Next Great New York Crime Movie Set in Flushing?

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To make the new drama “Good Time,” a New York crime movie that harks back to the gritty streets of “The French Connection” and “After Hours,” the filmmaking brothers Josh and Benny Safdie looked to less obvious neighborhoods.

They shot the movie, which stars Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie as small-time bank robbers, in all five boroughs as well as Westchester and Suffolk counties. “We actually wanted to call the movie ‘Rego Park’ at one point,” Josh said, referring to the Queens neighborhood just west of the brothers’ native Forest Hills.

The brothers — the bearded Josh, 33, and the clean-cut Benny, 31 — took me on a tour of locations they used, a trip that felt a bit like being in a Safdie film myself, down to visiting a bail bondsman who was actually in the movie.

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Adventureland, Farmingdale, N.Y. This amusement park is the site of a late-night caper in the movie. Calling the park a “personal landmark for us” from childhood summers, Josh added, “We restaged a very violent scene in ‘Good Time’ at the exact place where I saw my first brawl.” The haunted house was lit with neon and black lights for the shoot. “I think we made it scarier,” said Benny, whose son was just two weeks old when shooting began in early 2016. “Adventureland was the hardest for me,” he said, adding, “Towards the end I got a little delusional.”

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American Liberty Bail Bonds, Kew Gardens, Queens A cluster of bail-bond agencies sits outside the Queens County Criminal Courts, though only American Liberty Bail Bonds now has walls adorned with photos from a movie shoot. Eric J. Paykert, a bail bondsman who played one in the movie, was there the day we visited. (He runs the agency with his wife, Astrid Corrales, who is also in the film.) He hadn’t seen “Good Time” yet, but he told Benny, “I already bought my ticket.” He was also excited about a television interview that Mr. Pattinson had chosen to do there.

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New World Mall, Flushing, Queens With a reputation for having some of the most authentic Asian cuisine in the city, the crowded mall is the site of an early chase scene that ends in the arrest of Benny’s character. Although the brothers had permission to film there, “we shot it as if we were stealing the location,” Benny explained. “That was the best way to capture the energy of the mall. If we had told everybody who was in the shopping area that we were going to be shooting this thing and that we were going to be running through, people would be aware of what was about to happen.”

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Popular Community Bank, Elmhurst, Queens For the robbery that sets the plot in motion, the brothers were attracted to this branch of the bank in part because of a “copper brass wall that feels like the type of thing that you remember as a kid, going to take money out with your aunt or your father,” Josh said. But when we arrived, the brothers were shocked to find that the bank was undergoing renovations and a nearby business they loved, the Mango Rico grocery store, was gone. (Within weeks it reopened across the street.) “Everything about this location changed,” Benny added. “We would have not shot here.”

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Tivoli Towers, Crown Heights, Brooklyn The location manager, Samson Jacobson, said that for the film’s climax, Benny sent him pictures of “monstrous, brutalist, ‘Blade Runner’-type towers.” They looked at Co-op City, the huge housing development in the Bronx. The complex “was going to allow us to film there, but I think in the end Co-op City sat too much by itself.” At Tivoli Towers in Crown Heights, he especially liked the mazelike structure that Mr. Pattinson’s character runs through — a “weird, odd on-ramp to some parking lot to nowhere,” as Mr. Jacobson put it. “That thing made no sense being there, but it looked great, and it all fit perfectly into the brutalist aspect that they were looking for.”

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