Noah Segan is best known as an actor—Knives Out, Looper, Don't Breathe—but for his directorial debut, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (Sundance 2026), he made a decision that signals everything about the film's visual ambition. He chose Sam Levy as his cinematographer. Levy has shot five features that premiered at Sundance. He was a Sundance cinematography fellow. That is not a casual choice from a first-time director. That is a director understanding that the invisible architecture of the film—the camera language, the visual rhythm, the way the image tells you what to feel—is so important that it needs to be in the hands of someone who has done it before.
Levy's festival-circuit reputation is built on a specific kind of invisibility. He makes the camera disappear into the story's needs. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008), Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012), Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017), His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs, 2023, premiered Venice)—these are films in vastly different modes, told in vastly different visual languages. But in every case, Levy's cinematography serves the director's intention without announcing itself. He understands that a DP's job is not to make beautiful images. It is to make images that are right.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is Segan's first time behind the camera, and the material is a genre film—a crime thriller set in 1970s New York. This is unfamiliar territory for Segan as a director. But it was unfamiliar territory for Levy too. In an interview with British Cinematographer, Levy said: "I had never shot a crime thriller before, and that unknown was exactly what excited me. I was eager to step into a lineage of films I had long admired." This is the secret of the Segan-Levy collaboration: both filmmakers are newcomers to the specific genre they are working in. That mutual discovery, that research into 1970s New York crime cinema, gave them a shared reference framework that is stronger than any existing house style.
Segan was smart enough to understand that choosing an experienced festival DP does not mean sacrificing visual discovery. It means ensuring that the discovery happens with someone who knows how to navigate it. Levy has been through the first-feature process multiple times—not as a director, but as the cinematographer standing next to the director during their first feature. He understands what needs to be solved and what can remain open. He understands the rhythm of a shoot in a way that a debut director cannot yet understand. That experience is not a constraint. It is a resource.
For emerging directors, the lesson is clear: your DP's experience is not about imposing a predetermined visual style. It is about bringing the discipline and problem-solving capacity that the first feature demands. Segan and Levy approached The Only Living Pickpocket as mutual newcomers to the crime thriller genre, but with Levy bringing the institutional knowledge of how to make a first feature work. That combination—a first-time director with a clear vision, a festival-veteran DP with the problem-solving skills to execute it—is one of the most reliable paths to a successful debut.
First-time director. Experienced festival DP. Both newcomers to the genre. The mutual discovery is in every frame.
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