The Noah Baumbach Retrospective

Filmmaker Noah Baumbach has spent the past three decades transmuting his experiences into cinema, culminating in his latest film, Jay Kelly https://www.fandango.com/jay-kelly-2025-242419/movie-overview, his love letter to movies (and the memories they evoke). We begin with the “quiet crisis” Baumbach found himself in on the heels of releasing White Noise (5:30), finding his way back to the page, with co-writer Emily Mortimer, to create Jay Kelly for George Clooney (10:20), the films that defined his early years (15:00), and the week that Mike Nichols’ production of Heartburn took over his Park Slope childhood home (22:45). Then, we walk through his early, funny work in Kicking and Screaming (29:00) and Mr. Jealousy (30:45), how art imitated life in The Squid and the Whale (32:00), and the start of his lasting collaboration with Greta Gerwig in Greenberg (43:00). On the back-half, Baumbach talks about his love of working with actors (45:30), setting the stage for the infamous Marriage Story fight scene (47:00), his process of writing personal stories (51:30), and how his subconscious seems to always be one step ahead of him (52:00). To close, the influence of Noah’s Hollywood mentor, the late Peter Bogdanovich (58:45) and a prescient essay from Baumbach’s mother, former film critic of The Village Voice, Georgia Brown (1:05:00). Subscribe to our new YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Get 50% Off Monarch, the all-in-one financial tool at www.monarch.com/talkeasy http://www.monarch.com/talkeasy. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, writer-director Noah Baumbach. Earlier this year, Baumbach was at the Telluride Film Festival, where he was being honored for, quote, "30 years' worth of distinctive vision and indelible movie moments from Francis Ha to Marriage Story." After the tribute, which actually neatly ties into his new film, Jay Kelly, we'll get to that in a second, Baumbach went onstage for a Q&A surveying his career. And he shared this story, and it's one he's told before, but he talked about the first time he met Mike Nichols, like Mike Nichols of Nichols and May, or, you know, Mike Nichols, the famous movie director. It was right after he had seen The Squid and the Whale.

• 1:17Sam Fragoso?

  And Nichols, who seemed to always have the perfect line for everything, said, "Noah, I see you got into the movie business for the exact same reason I did." He then holds for a comedic amount of awkward silence. Revenge. And if it's not revenge that defines Baumbach's films, it's something like revisionist history. Since Kicking and Screaming in 1995, Baumbach has mined his lived experiences, from being a child of divorce to getting divorced himself, and turned it into art. Quote, "It's not exactly revenge on a person. It's like taking things from your life that, at the time, you're at the mercy of, and then later saying, 'How can I make this

• 2:00Sam Fragoso?

  something beautiful? How can I make this relatable to other people?'" And sure enough, the work is often so relatable, so painfully and specifically rendered, that Bon Box audiences and, hell, critics, have sometimes, at the risk of being overly literal, mistaken fiction for fact, as if he was a memoirist who happens to moonlight in motion pictures. That interplay between life transmitted onscreen and life lived offscreen is at the heart of this conversation with Noah. It's also one of the central themes of "Jay Kelly", which stars George Clooney, as a movie star of a bygone era, who unwittingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery across Europe,

• 2:44Sam Fragoso?

  accompanied, of course, by a team of handlers. Most notably, his manager, Ron, played by Adam Sandler, and his publicist, Liz, played by Laura Dern. Here's a clip from the trailer.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Stars.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Is that Jay Kelly?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  He come and go. Oh, no, it's Jay Kelly! He come fast, they come slow.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  When I look at you, I see my whole life.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  I don't know who to be mad at, but I'm finding myself being very mad at you, Ron.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  You're being mad at me, Liz? The train was my idea.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  That's the problem. I'm not allowed to be mad at you.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Lately, I feel like my life doesn't really feel real. Suddenly remembering things. And what is that? Memory? It's like a movie where I'm playing myself.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  I just want you to come with me to see what I did. It's got to have meant something. What if it didn't? Does none of this mean anything to you? Because it means something to me. I mean, you're Jay Kelly, but I'm Jay Kelly too.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  That's a crazy thing.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Everything he thought you were.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Isn't true.

• 4:15Sam Fragoso?

  That was from the new film, Jay Kelly. It's now playing in theaters across the country and will premiere on Friday, December 5th exclusively on Netflix. The film is an unabashed love letter to making movies and really to movies themselves. But we start today's episode in the period that preceded Jay Kelly and also Barbie, which Bonba co-wrote alongside his wife, the director Greta Gerwig. It was in that time, on the heels of his 2022 release of White Noise, where his lifelong passion for cinema was dimmed, if only for a moment. And so with that, here is my conversation with Noah Baumbach.

• 5:15Sam Fragoso?

  Noah Baumbach, nice to meet you.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  You too. Thanks for having me.

• 5:18Sam Fragoso?

  How are you doing?

• 5:19Speaker 04

  I'm good. I'm tired. I'm a little jet lagged, but I'm okay.

• 5:24Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. Do you want that coffee now instead of at 3?

• 5:26Speaker 04

  No, because I had a lot of coffee already, so.

• 5:28Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, so it's not gonna help you?

• 5:29Speaker 04

  I have to pace it.

• 5:30Sam Fragoso?

  Right. What are your increments? Every 90 minutes?

• 5:33Speaker 04

  No, no. I have coffee in the morning and I've maybe, particularly when I'm working or jet lagged, I have coffee at somewhere in the 3 to 4 range.

• 5:42Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. Well, in between your last film, White Noise, from 2022, and this new one, Jay Kelly, you said that you had something like a quiet crisis. Quote, "Am I making movies just because I always wanted to? And do I even like doing it anymore?" I don't think I've ever had a quiet crisis. Like, they've always been pretty loud and pronounced. But tell me, what were the contours of the crisis? And how do you get back in the saddle, so to speak?

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Well, I would say the time of the crisis was loud. I mean, it was a movie set and. I think the asking myself the question felt quiet. It was maybe because I didn't even want to acknowledge it, but I think it was like it was a check in in a way of I, I, you know, when I grew up, I wanted to make movies. It was sort of a dream in a way, but I also didn't know anybody who did it, or I didn't have any sort of access to the reality of it. I just knew the the movies themselves when they arrived. And so the fact that I've been able to do that and have this career and life has been amazing. So in some ways to check in and say like, do I actually like it? I was scared, I think,

• 6:54Speaker 04

  in some ways to even ask myself that because it was sort of like, what is this all for? And like, why, you know, did I just do something because it was a dream and not something I actually enjoy? Now, of course, I love making movies, so I it wasn't that. But I think I thought maybe I reached a point on White Noise where it had lost some pleasure for me. But I think it was really just that movie is what it came down to.

• 7:20Sam Fragoso?

  What about it was not pleasurable?

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Not only its development, its theme for me, the making of it was all during COVID and the height of it, too. I mean, by the time we were shooting, we were vaccinated, but it was, there was this anxiety that accompanied everything, as it did. But also just the process of making a movie under those circumstances is so much harder and longer. And, I mean, I realized it one day when I was directing even. And then we did a thing outside and I took my mask down and Greta said, it's an entirely different thing, you know, to get direction from you when I can see your face, which I didn't even think about. Because of course, when you're wearing the masks, we got so used to it, you don't think they can't see my expression.

• 8:07Sam Fragoso?

  And you two are married, so.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:09Sam Fragoso?

  If she felt there was a barrier, then.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:12Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know what we would do.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  I would say that was, that was a big part of it. But I mean, it was an ambitious movie. And I think in some ways, I didn't quite prepare myself for what, I mean, I prepared a lot for the movie, but I didn't prepare emotionally or even sort of like practically, like, why would I want to make a movie of this size? Because I think also because I developed it in COVID, you know, when I was writing it. Kind of as an exercise. So the fact that it sort of eased its way into being made, there was always that unreality in COVID of like, are we even gonna be able to do this? Is this even possible? So when, when we were actually doing it, I kind of had a moment of like, wait, I don't know. Maybe I didn't mean this, you know? So it was just very ambitious. I mean, it was, you know, if you've seen the movie,

• 8:57Speaker 04

  there's a lot of big shit in it.

• 8:59Sam Fragoso?

  How do you get back from, I don't know if I like doing this anymore to, I want to make a movie about how much I love movies?

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Well, I think because some of that was conscious, but some of it was just some emotional interpretation of where I was and what I was going through. Cause the other side of the coin was, I do love it. And so, I mean, writing for Tuscany was a good start, but I, I hoped that the process of making J. Kelly would prove, would, would sort of correct it, the previous experience. And it did. I mean, it was a really pleasurable experience. It just, it happened to be a great shoot. I mean, really one of my favorites.

• 9:39Sam Fragoso?

  So it was like a cinematic antidepressant?

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, or maybe a shot of adrenaline. I mean, it was, it didn't sedate me. It actually gave me energy.

• 9:50Sam Fragoso?

  New life. Antidepressants, they can do that. They can kind of.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  No, I mean, it's, yeah, of course, I'm not saying, I, I'm never actually taken an antidepressant. So I don't know, but.

• 9:58Sam Fragoso?

  Really? You've gone your whole life, never tried it?

• 10:01Speaker 04

  No, never got a shot of adrenaline either. So I was not speaking with, with any sound information. I'm curious, but I've, I've never done it.

• 10:12Sam Fragoso?

  But look, it's, it's never too late.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  I've been doing the talking cure for so long.

• 10:16Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, I tried that too. That, that one works intermittently. Your work is not exactly autobiographical, but it is deeply personal.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:24Sam Fragoso?

  One in the story of J. Kelly, which follows a famous actor played by George Clooney, who confronts his past and present and sort of everything in between. What did you want to explore that was personal to you in this film?

• 10:37Speaker 04

  I mean, I wrote it with Emily Mortimer, so it's her personal elements too. But as happens even in collaboration, it's like, even if it's somebody else's idea, it fits because it feels personal to me as well.

• 10:50Sam Fragoso?

  How do you understand the things that are personal for you?

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I think you touched on it in the beginning. I think, you know, getting back in touch with what you love about what you do is another aspect of checking in with yourself. You know, I think this sort of question of who am I, this sort of basic idea and who am I over time and how we grow accustomed to versions of ourselves that we've, you know, it happens in interviews, you know, you'll, you get asked a question in like the first couple of interviews and you sort of come up with an answer and then you end up repeating that answer and then people quote that answer back to you in other interviews and often you're not even sure that you meant what you said in that first interview or if it's even true, but now it's

• 11:38Speaker 04

  become true throughout the course of an interview. And I feel like, you know, of course we do that all the time with ourselves. It's like this sort of ways we've gotten comfortable with who we are. I mean, I think a lot of my movies are people who are challenging themselves or challenged because of external events or, you know, just everyday life with who they are. I mean, many of my characters in the, some of the past movies are defined themselves by their, I mean, lack of success in some way, but it really more that they're not who they kind of thought they might be.

• 12:14Sam Fragoso?

  This sounds like Frances Ha and Greenberg.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Frances Ha and Greenberg, but even like Jeff's character Bernard in Squid and the Whale, or Dustin's character in Meyerwitz are also people who are sort of hung up on what they're not in some way, which of course becomes a barrier between who they might be. It's two sides of the same coin, you know, and Jay is sort of defined by his success, which is in some ways, it's the same story told in another form.

• 12:44Sam Fragoso?

  Is that something you're hung up on? Who you're not, who you're supposed to be?

• 12:48Speaker 04

  No, but I am interested in, maybe another way of saying it is like, I was seduced by a kind of idea of what adult life was, modeling my parents, but also even their value systems, the things they talked about, the movie, I mean, they were very interested in movies and books and art.

• 13:08Sam Fragoso?

  So that was a template?

• 13:09Speaker 04

  That was, yeah, it was a kind of religion. I mean, actually, it was something I Remember kind of putting that label on it as an adult. It's sort of because I would hear about other people who grew up in more religious households. And think because we were not religious in any way. And and even the role of religion, even in a casual way in people's lives was sort of not something I was that familiar with growing up.

• 13:34Sam Fragoso?

  So what were the rituals and practices of the Bambock religion?

• 13:38Speaker 04

  You know, in some ways, again, if you were going to become an artist of some sort, or if you weren't going to become an artist, that was its own, I don't say betrayal, but it was, you know, it's the sort of the same idea of like, either you're going to join the flock or you're not, you know? And and so if you don't, you kind of are defined by the fact that you didn't. And if you do, you're kind of dealing with the burden of being in a legacy of artists. So in that way, I would say, in that general way, it could have some similarity to religion. And, you know, also just the way art was talked about in the house and movies were talked about and the way they were kind of broken down. And I mean, it was true of books too, but mostly novels, like nonfiction didn't quite get the same treatment.

• 14:23Sam Fragoso?

  And I have to say, that sounds eerily similar to a conversation had in Squid and the Whale.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  I want to be a tennis pro like Ivan.

• 14:32Speaker 06

  Oh, come on, you don't want to be a tennis pro.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  Why not?

• 14:34Speaker 06

  It's not serious. I mean, McEnroe, Borg is an artist. It's like dance. Connors has a brutish brilliance, but at Ivan's level, Ivan is fine, but he's not a serious guy. He's a Philistine.

• 14:46Speaker 05

  What's a Philistine?

• 14:47Speaker 06

  It's a guy who doesn't care about books or interesting films and things. Your mother's brother Ned is also a Philistine.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  Then I'm a Philistine.

• 14:55Speaker 06

  No, you're interested in books and things. You liked The Wild Child when we saw it.

• 15:00Speaker 05

  Lots of people like that movie. No, I'm a Philistine.

• 15:10Sam Fragoso?

  In the new film, Jay says, "All my memories are movies." And I was thinking, like, growing up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which, in your rendering, was more like Sacramento than Manhattan in the 70s and 80s.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:24Sam Fragoso?

  How much of your childhood can be mapped by the movies you saw with your family?

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, a lot of it.

• 15:30Sam Fragoso?

  For example, age nine, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  Seen at the Duffield on Fulton Street, just outside of Brooklyn Heights, which was kind of an amazing old, I mean, there were so many in Brooklyn at the time, these amazing movie palaces that had been like, just cut up into these multiplexes. So it was in one of those that I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

• 15:51Sam Fragoso?

  You said this is a film that in every therapy session, this has come up for you. Why is that?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Because I think, I couldn't say it quite then, but I would say now, looking back, that the idea that people appear to be themselves, but are actually not, was probably the scariest thing I could imagine. I mean, contextually now, too, I can see it as, you know, my parents were on a slow path to divorce in those sort of earlier stages of it. So I think I was also, of course, picking up on things in the house that were presented as one way, but were another way. And I could feel they were another way, but I didn't have words for that. So the notion that my parents were body snatchers and I was at their mercy was, didn't seem that far fetched.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  And yeah, I mean, the movie scared me so much that when I saw Animal House with Donald Sutherland again, I was scared. It also, Donald Sutherland in Animal House is in a more kind of disturbing part of, I mean, now, a lot of that movie's disturbing for several reasons. But, you know, as a kid, you know, the teacher is having an affair with the student. I mean, that just seemed sort of... I was intrigued, but also made very uncomfortable. But the fact that he was also, the last time I'd seen him was him screaming at the end of turning in Veronica Cartwright at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Cause that movie also ends as bleakly as you can imagine. So it wasn't even like the movie gives you some, some way out.

• 17:22Sam Fragoso?

  I don't mean to laugh at it. I, I keep imagining you in a therapist's office, but like different therapist offices. And it invariably gets to the part where you're like, okay, well, you remember the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

• 17:35Speaker 04

  Not the Don Segal, but the Philip Kaufman. So he's now, it's not about the red scare. It's about the counterculture in San Francisco. Are you with me now, doc?

• 17:45Sam Fragoso?

  You know, do you ever have that thing in therapy where you go, when you get a new therapist, it's sort of like when you fall in love again and you have to kind of re-explain everything that's wrong with you.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:53Sam Fragoso?

  It's such a demoralizing.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Telling your story.

• 17:56Sam Fragoso?

  Embarrassing. I don't want to tell it.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:58Sam Fragoso?

  I don't want to relitigate. I don't want to go over again.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Well, sort of again, to the, the Jay Kelly themes that we were talking about. It is an opportunity to tell your story differently, you know, with a new therapist. You can, you know, you don't have to necessarily just pick up whining from the last one. You can actually come in and say like, maybe.

• 18:18Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, isn't same true in a second marriage?

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Right, sure. I mean, I think it's true throughout our lives and different situations. And, and it's different, it's true with different people. I mean, of course, therapy, particularly if you're in a kind of more traditional like transference and counter-transference is a possibility. But I think you meet new people or certain people you're with. You, you know, you like yourself with certain people more than you like yourself with other people. You know, other people might bring out stuff you don't particularly like about yourself. And other people, you know, you find yourself, Emily Mortimer is one of those people who I, I think I'm funnier. You know, with Emily.

• 18:56Sam Fragoso?

  She has a good laugh.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  She has a good laugh, but she's hilarious too. And you just are a better version of yourself.

• 19:03Sam Fragoso?

  Both of your parents were writers and at various times they were film critics themselves.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:09Sam Fragoso?

  Did you ever get to see films early?

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, going back to your question about marking time with movies, I. I think it was probably a little after Body Snatch, it was like eighty, eighty-one, where my dad was getting all these screenings to movies and he, you know, again, I wasn't quite aware why at the time, but I got to be his sort of date to all these things, you know, in retrospect, he and my mom weren't really going out anymore. So I was his partner to all these movies. So I benefited in this case from there.

• 19:39Sam Fragoso?

  You were his plus one?

• 19:40Speaker 04

  I was his plus one. And I was also just now old enough to be taken to most things. And so I still have, um, they weren't lobby cards quite, but they would give you sort of these little poster of the movie and the credits on the back, sort of these like laminated plasticky things that I kept all of them. And it's a real grab. I mean, there's some classics in there. There's The Thing and what was it? I guess like Empire Strikes Back and E T's in there.

• 20:06Sam Fragoso?

  I bring up mapping movies this way because E T. did something similar for you. I read somewhere that like there was a car ride back home that seemed especially meaningful. What happened?

• 20:17Speaker 04

  It was an instance where like I had had an incredibly emotional experience seeing the movie. You know, I was, I guess, at that age twelve.

• 20:25Sam Fragoso?

  You were wearing your Vassar T-shirt with Snoopy on it.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  I was because I I knew because I lifted it up over my face because I was crying so much.

• 20:32Sam Fragoso?

  Sometimes I wish I picked a less important shirt.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was also like not particularly absorbent of my tears.

• 20:41Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  But it was a good cry. It was a cry that I I felt earned and I wanted to have. I mean, I would go back to the movie repeatedly just to have some, it was diminishing returns by like the ninth time I saw it, but I would pretty reliably cry every few times, you know, throughout the movie.

• 20:58Sam Fragoso?

  What about it got to you in those moments?

• 21:01Speaker 04

  I mean, I think goodbyes are always sad for me. And there's the goodbye when he thinks E T.'s dead. And then there's the goodbye at the end. And so those are definitely were big ones. You know, I think the connection, the friendship, the sort of loneliness of the kid, the the specificity, you know, I mean, I didn't grow up that way. And also at that point, my parents actually hadn't split yet. But, you know, sort of more suburban to my eyes way of living was not relatable in any kind of obvious way, but I completely related to it because it was so specific and so felt so true to something. And I also think, you know, it was an expression of what movies could be too, you know, I mean, I think the gift of it was moving to me.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  But to finish the thing, what my father said on the way back, which was funny because it was a kind of like intellectualizing the whole thing, which he would do. And was very smart about things, but he, he said that E T was a surrogate father for Elliot because Elliot was without a father. And, you know, until the end, when maybe the Peter Coyote character was going to become some kind of surrogate. And I started crying all over again because that was clearly something I was, I wouldn't have put it in that form. I wouldn't have voiced it that way, but I, I think I was really responding to this sort of loneliness and the sort of lack of feeling like not parented in a way.

• 22:28Sam Fragoso?

  You know, and movies sometimes can give you language when you don't have your own.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:33Sam Fragoso?

  I'm curious, when your parents split, the arrangement is basically the one that plays out in Squintin' the Whale.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:39Sam Fragoso?

  Your mom's in Park Slope, your father's in Prospect Park, splitting time evenly, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays, and every other Thursday.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 22:47Sam Fragoso?

  Which even when I saw it the first time, I thought was insane. An insane setup. But I'm curious, when a location scout for the film Heartburn came knocking at your mother's door in 1985, was that your first true brush with the movie industry? Like with the world that's at the center of J. Kelly?

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And at the time, it was as if I'd been cast in a movie that my home got picked as a location in Heartburn. It was a total ringing bells location scout. And, you know, then we heard they were going to come back. And then there was the time that I heard Mike Nichols is coming, so I made sure I was home.

• 23:26Sam Fragoso?

  Did you meet him?

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then I remember I was at my dad's and my mom called and told me we got picked. I mean, it was like, we were, I don't know, we were, I mean, the idea now of having anything shot in your home is the most unappealing thing I can think of, uh, at least in the top 50.

• 23:47Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, it has to make the top 50.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Definitely the top 50. So, yeah, it was amazing. And, and even in retrospect, the kind of layers of talent on that movie. When we first heard about it too, it was Mandy Patinkin and Meryl Streep. And then they parted ways with Mandy Patinkin and Jack Nicholson. So it was like, we couldn't believe our luck, you know, now it was Jack Nicholson. And then it was Stoker Channing, Catherine O'Hara, and Milos Forman also was an actor in it. So he was there. And then you had Nestor Almendros as the cinematographer.

• 24:20Sam Fragoso?

  Did seeing that make you go, I want to join the circus?

• 24:23Speaker 04

  I already wanted to, but I'd never seen this circus.

• 24:27Sam Fragoso?

  The circus had never been in your house?

• 24:29Speaker 04

  No, movies came formed, you know, like when we would go to those screenings and get these cards with, you know, these little poster cards.

• 24:35Sam Fragoso?

  The meal was at the table.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So I maybe knew what variety was, but I'd never seen one. When I bought like screenplays, you know, they're transcripts. They're not, they're not like the real screenplay. So I also, my understanding of what a screenplay was, was it's exactly the movie.

• 24:52Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  So, yeah, it was kind of incredible to see like an actual movie and a movie of that level, with that kind of level of talent being made was amazing.

• 25:03Sam Fragoso?

  So, once the crew goes home, your mother begins writing this dispatch for a variety like magazine called American Film. It no longer exists, but she published a piece that was a diary account of her week with this movie overtaking her home. And there's a section towards the end that I thought maybe we could read today, if you're open.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  Sure. Oh, wow. Yeah, I'd like to get a copy of that.

• 25:28Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 25:31Sam Fragoso?

  You can set it up as much or as little as you want.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Am I to read it?

• 25:36Speaker 04

  So it's American Film, 1986, March, April issue. So that would mean I am 16, I guess. Turning 17 that September. This is quote from her, "Finally, a few parenthetical words about mothers may be to the point. Phoebe Ephron, a playwright and screenwriter, raised her daughter Nora on the maxim, everything is copy. I know this because Nora Ephron quotes her mother often as a formative influence. The advice, the permission, clearly has served her well. In heartburn, she gives her heroine's dying mother Phoebe's actual deathbed injunction, which was to take notes. You're a reporter, Nora. Take notes. I quote less with irony than with envy. To me, a parent's sanction to see, hear, and tell borders on the bizarre.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  My family labored under an ethic that one should neither see nor hear, much less tell, so that in my life, speaking and writing have come with difficulty and are fraught with prohibitions. I put this in by way of saying that I think hard about prohibitions, and there's no way I can resist violating this one."

• 26:38Speaker 04

  Good for her. But however, I actually understand from the movie place now, from the people making the movie, is that it would feel quite vulnerable to have gone and filmed in someone's home and then have them. Of course, now I guess everybody just films you. So I suppose I understand both sides.

• 26:58Sam Fragoso?

  But hearing you read that, I can't help but think that in some ways, it plays like the very basis of you becoming a filmmaker, someone who tells stories from the pages of your life, taking notes, always.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:13Sam Fragoso?

  Was note taking sanctioned? Or was making the movies you'd go on to make, especially the early ones, some kind of rebellion?

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Note taking was sanctioned, but those movies were a rebellion, a late rebellion, though, you know? I mean, I think I was 34 when I made The Squid and the Whale. But I suppose I could write something similar to this, although about what I did.

• 27:40Sam Fragoso?

  What adjustments would you make?

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, you know, in this case, she was asked by the publicist, you know, the onset publicist. It's funny because I've now, I mean, I've worked with Anne Roth several times. He was the costume designer on that movie. And I became very close to Mike later on. And I wish I'd met Nestor Almendos beyond that time, but he passed away. But I, the onset publicist I actually worked with, he was on Kicking and Screaming, my first movie. But he had asked her not to write anything. So that's what she's referring to, that she was breaking the prohibition. But what would I say? I don't know. I think I probably would say something similar. I mean, in that she and my dad kind of raised me to be...

• 28:23Sam Fragoso?

  Everything is copy.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, in some way. Or certainly, everything is material for fiction, which is maybe a different version of that.

• 28:32Sam Fragoso?

  When we come back, let's get into how some of that material became movies themselves. We'll be right back with Noah Baumbach.

• 28:57Sam Fragoso?

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• 29:41Sam Fragoso?

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• 30:04Sam Fragoso?

  I think a lot of us are gonna spend the next few weeks looking for gifts online. And while I like finding something thoughtful for the people in my life, the process can get a little ridiculous. You've got a dozen tabs open, you're comparing prices, and you're trying to remember which store had that one thing you saw that has a deal, and you flagged it, and you saved it, and now you can't find it. Anyway, that's what I like about Shop. Shop brings all kinds of stores together in one place, so you can search for what you're looking for across different brands while discovering new ones along the way, plus tracking all your orders without jumping in-between websites. And just in time for the holidays, they're celebrating the all-new Shop.com with a pretty extraordinary giveaway.

• 30:45Sam Fragoso?

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• 31:31Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back, when Godard started making movies, he realized that he couldn't make the movies he wanted to make before he became a filmmaker. When you look back on your first two films, Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, which you made in your mid 20s, I think it was.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:47Sam Fragoso?

  What kind of filmmaker do you think you were trying to be?

• 31:51Speaker 04

  Well, in a certain way, I think Kicking and Screaming is not so far off of the filmmaker I am. I think it was, it came very much out of my experiences with my friends and my experience at college. And it was observational and about friendship and human. I mean, a lot of things in that movie, there are versions of those themes that have turned up in my other movies. You know, it's about growing up. They're all kind of coming of age movies in some way. No, no way, no hole for me.

• 32:21Speaker 06

  That's where we're comfortable. That's where the fun is. Freshman pennies are there.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  I don't need to go to a campus bar to be reminded of my lack of success. We're a bunch of thrill-seeking, snotty college kids.

• 32:31Speaker 06

  That's us. We're like celebrities to them.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  No, we were, for that reason. Now going back would be like doing Hollywood Squares. I'm too nostalgic, I'll admit it.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  We graduated four months ago. What can you possibly be nostalgic for?

• 32:44Speaker 04

  I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I- I've already looked back in it in my memory and I didn't have a good time.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think I'm gonna switch back to briefs.

• 33:00Speaker 04

  But I think even when I made it, there was some adolescent idea that I was holding on to that this was a kind of starter movie before I made sort of movies in quotes, you know, that were slicker, you know, or I mean slicker sounds negative. I didn't mean it that way. I, you know, but, you know, I think probably my second movie, Mr. Jealousy, has a little of like what I thought should be in a movie. Like what? Like plot and, you know, and, you know, misunderstandings and things that were more constructed or more clearly constructed. I mean, kicking and screaming is constructed, but in a more hidden way.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  You know, it has like a, a story that's more like joining your ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend's therapy to spy on them, you know, like it's like a concept. And I think in making that movie, I realized I didn't actually, I realized that that wasn't natural to me or wasn't something I wanted to do as an adult. You know, I was still close to the teenager, you know, who was seeing Outrageous Fortune in the movie theater. On the set of Mr. Jealousy, did you go, maybe this is not what I should be doing? No, I didn't have that at the time. I think in retrospect, I probably wasn't even really until I started writing The Squid and the Whale that I, you know, in some ways, maybe I realized I was more on the path with kicking and screaming than I realized.

• 34:24Speaker 04

  But by detouring, I think coming back to it, I had a different way into the material. You've talked a lot about this eight-year period between making these first two movies and then eventually getting to make Squid and the Whale. What did going to therapy do for you? That was the first time you went, right? Yeah. Did you have any trepidation that it would somehow?

• 34:43Sam Fragoso?

  Interfere with whatever process you had developed?

• 34:46Speaker 04

  Well, I had, I had a romantic notion of that because I think I'd read an interview with both David Lynch and David Cronenberg. Maybe both had remarked that they thought therapy would interfere with the way their unconscious spilled into their movies. And they might have been right.

• 35:02Sam Fragoso?

  I think I could see interfering with their movies.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  That's what I mean. They may have been right about themselves. I actually found therapy actually gave me more material. Like it actually, it opened doors up because of course I was going, going inside and that's where the stuff was. And the stuff that I felt was of movies and of movies that I wanted to make.

• 35:25Sam Fragoso?

  How did, how did that feel to go inside?

• 35:27Speaker 04

  You know, it was a period of adjustment. I think when I first went into therapy, it was another thing that I'd heard about it from my parents.

• 35:34Sam Fragoso?

  And what did they say?

• 35:35Speaker 04

  Well, I think there was just sort of a notion of like, there was like a lot of things, I think in the seventies with my parents' generation of liberals, who also kind of had a sort of sneakily conservative way of looking at the world.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  Like there were more rules to things than I, you know, would have thought, or rules that they imposed or preached anyway.

• 35:55Sam Fragoso?

  And, and one of the rules was you don't need to sit on the couch.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Well, there's that thing of like, not only lying on the couch, but like this notion that like, you know, I think I was concerned going to therapy. I was doing it right in a way, you know, like, you know, I was probably overly polite when I first came in. And he, of course, clocked that immediately and was, he was good at shaking me out of it, you know, or challenging it in certain ways, even though he wasn't a big talker. It was, it wasn't strict Freudian, but it was, it had connections to that. But I just, you know, as I got more and more comfortable, of course, I got freer. And that's, you know, I did the thing that I think happens a lot. You go in for one thing and then. Several years later, you're down the path.

• 36:36Sam Fragoso?

  What did you go in for?

• 36:38Speaker 04

  I, I think it was after I'd made my second movie. And I think I felt a little bit of a variation on where Jay Kelly is, you know? It's like, you know, or where I was after White Noise. The question wasn't, oh, do I want to do this? It was, oh, maybe I had these two opportunities and maybe I'm not going to be able to do this. And that was scary to me and also hard to acknowledge. And I was so young, so I was, you know, almost had this feeling, it was like, is my career over before it began?

• 37:10Sam Fragoso?

  Quiet crisis.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Quiet crisis. That fear didn't help me write better.

• 37:16Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  You know, I think, yeah, well, it may have helped me write faster because I think I almost was writing with a panic. It was like, I need to figure a thing out. And that's why it was for me profound arriving at writing Squid in the Whale, because I did end up then, after a few years of, I mean, it was a very hard time for me, but it was also, I was in a privileged hard time because I had made two movies, so I got hired by TV to write my own pilots. It wasn't like I was writing for other people. So I, I actually got to practice and get paid for it during this time. I mean, I didn't and don't have any particular facility for television because I don't inherently understand it, writing for it or making it. And I don't dislike TV.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  I just, I'd rather watch a movie if I'm sitting down to watch something on an actual television. But what was good about it is I think it really helped me. I had to write and condense the story in a short period of time. And I think that aspect of it was good, good training.

• 38:19Sam Fragoso?

  So it didn't paralyze you, the fear of not getting another chance?

• 38:23Speaker 04

  No, but I think it, again, it was, I was back in this like, writing the idea of what a movie should be as opposed to writing a movie that really was coming from me.

• 38:31Sam Fragoso?

  So when it does come from you, it comes out in the form of Squid in the Whale, which again is very much about and inspired by the Park Slope upbringing we talked about earlier. You said when you first showed it to your mother, it was, quote, like a cat bringing a dead bird as if it was a present.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  You understand that, right? What I meant by that?

• 38:51Sam Fragoso?

  I do.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:52Sam Fragoso?

  Did she see it that way?

• 38:55Speaker 04

  Well, I think in some way, because I think, you know, I really was to both my parents. I was essentially like, this is pretty good, right? You know, and they were like, yeah, but.

• 39:07Sam Fragoso?

  But what caused?

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, in that way, yeah, like, you know, I'm impressed. You caught that bird flying in the air, but I don't want it in the house. I think, you know.

• 39:18Sam Fragoso?

  No, we really thank you for taking notes.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:21Sam Fragoso?

  We understand everything is copy. We wish it was a little less copy of us.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Yes, it was, it was a cool thing. I mean, the thing that I didn't anticipate making that movie is all the things I fictionalized, which is a lot. Of course, because of the, the sort of general autobiography of it, you know, in terms of Park Slope, parents, divorce, writers, that then everybody around them would assume everything was true. So then all these things that were there, you know, I can understand how that was kind of lousy for them to be like, well, no, I didn't. It wasn't the tennis pro, you know, like all these, you know, whatever things. So, because I didn't think of it that way. I just thought like, well, I've, it's, it's a work of fiction. It's, yes, it uses, but it's, it's a work of fiction.

• 40:05Sam Fragoso?

  Having said that, writing that film down, committing it to paper, then making it, then releasing it, was there anything you understood or saw anew in your childhood after having turned it into a movie?

• 40:18Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, a, a basic thing is what you even remarked on earlier, which is the joint custody arrangement. I mean, how nuts it was, because even in writing and making that whole movie, I, I mean, I hated it as a kid, but part of me felt like, well, my parents know best and probably was right for me, even though I didn't like it because I was a teenager and who wants to go back and forth that amount. But of course, then every time it was written in print, you know, or in a review or in a thing, and I read it again, I was like, that's nuts. You know, I think there was definitely a feeling of like, we grew up feeling like outsiders and being in Brooklyn, not Manhattan, they were writers, but, and fiction writers,

• 41:03Speaker 04

  but they weren't, you know. At least the way they presented it, or my father particularly, was like, he didn't have the success that all these friends of his had, or, you know, he wasn't Philip Roth, you know, and, and again, defining yourself by what you aren't. So I think I also felt like this was our weird way of doing it. And there's truth in that. It's truth of that for every family, you know, but I think the fact that it was received in a universal way was very gratifying. And also, I did feel less alone in that way.

• 41:39Sam Fragoso?

  Was it also instructive in how to go about making the next batch of movies you wanted to make?

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I felt like I could communicate myself in movies in a kind of clearer way. I mean, it's always hard and there's so many barriers always. So I don't want to make it sound like it's like a the spigot. The spigot was open, but still there's a lot of pipes that are going all over the place. You've got to like, still figure out a way to tell a clear story. And I always sort of say, it was sort of the beginning of the career I have, even though it's not my first movie.

• 42:12Sam Fragoso?

  You started to have the career you wanted to have. You were becoming the filmmaker you wanted to be.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:17Sam Fragoso?

  After Squid and the Whale.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:18Sam Fragoso?

  And I was thinking, like, when you're on Frances Ha, and it's called Untitled Public School Project, and the actors are changing clothes in a van parked on Sixth Street, no one knew what was going on. Was that you kind of getting back to the kicking and screaming days?

• 42:36Speaker 04

  Yes. In one sense, I mean, because in Kicking and Screaming even, I mean, it was made for not a lot of money, but it was made for a million dollars, which if you asked me if I'm, you know, my concept of a million dollars at that time, that seemed like an impossible amount of money. So in a funny way, Kicking and Screaming was made for like too much and too little money, you know? I always felt that like if I had more technical know-how at that time, I would have figured out a way to make it for less.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  And smaller. So it was like both like again, big, but not big enough. You know, whereas Francis was in that sense, like the first film I had never made. But it was made with all the experience I had up until that point. So I could do it in a way that I would never have made a first film. Because the thing about Francis too, is I don't even think of it as having a low budget. It almost had no budget. Because what happens on small movies so often is you essentially just shrink a big movie. So, and that was the case of Kicking, Screaming or Mr. Jealousy. So you, instead of having fifty days, you have eighteen or twenty-two. And you can't afford this, so you have to cut that sequence and do it in someone's bedroom.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  You know, there, there are like these like very straightforward ways, which I don't think, you know, are the way. And instead of having this amount of people on a crew, you have this amount of people, but it's still too many people. And I felt like, what if we just never told anyone we were making a movie? You know, my thing always was like, what if this is part of the movie? And we actually have mics and cameras. So what if this was the movie? And why do we have to tell anybody? And if this is the movie, how many people do we need? And we could be incredibly flexible and I could be as, I could do as many takes. I could shoot for as long as I wanted.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  And it was a reaction in some ways. I mean, I'd made at that point after Squid, I'd made Margot at the wedding in Greenberg, both. Um, with Paramount and Paramount Vantage, which was their sort of indie or smaller arm for a while. And then Focus, you know, was the universals, or still is. And it was, I think also, this again, now as looking back, it was changing things up in ways I was aware of and also in ways I wasn't aware of. What I was very aware of was the methodology of doing it. It was a movement towards maybe another phase in my movie making life, but I didn't look at it that way at the time.

• 45:13Sam Fragoso?

  Fascinating how so much of what we've talked about feels, I don't know, like subconscious, but is then made literal by me or other people in your life.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  That's what happens in this room. And when you do press, of course, it's the thing. You know, the question you get asked all the time in press is, What was the genesis of this? Which is the

• 45:33Sam Fragoso?

  Shithole.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  Delete, delete.

• 45:36Sam Fragoso?

  But it's not just impressed, right? Because the thing I'm getting at is in The New Yorker, your wife and now collaborator Greta Gerwig said that the opening lines of your films often serve as signposts of the story that's about to come. This is like her being a film critic.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  I know it is her being.

• 45:51Sam Fragoso?

  And she said, um, for Squid and the Whale begins with the family of four on a tennis court and a young boy saying, Mom and me versus you and dad. In Greenberg, can you describe the opening of Greenberg?

• 46:03Speaker 04

  The opening of Greenberg is, um, a title sequence with, um, Steve Miller's, uh, Jet Airliner playing under it. And it's, a lot of it's just Greta's face driving through Los Angeles. She's doing errands. She's, she's a personal assistant and she's getting dry cleaning and going shopping and yeah. And so she's traveling through the city. And, and the first line is, are you going to let me in? Which is, she's talking to a car behind her as she's trying to merge. But she's talking to herself, but she's the way we talk to herself while we're also talking to somebody else.

• 46:37Sam Fragoso?

  What I did seven times coming here.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Right, right. I think what you do a lot in Los Angeles. And I don't know if it's in that article or not, but that was, that line I absolutely just meant.

• 46:47Sam Fragoso?

  Literally.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, in its most straightforward manner.

• 46:50Sam Fragoso?

  But when it was pointed out to you, how did you feel about that?

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Well, when it was pointed out to me, actually in an interview, and I almost started crying because I, I felt like it was a, oh, I knew something I didn't know, which is, you know, it happens all the time in, in making movies. In The Squid and the Whale, I remember somebody saying, oh, I love, at the end, Jesse, when he leaves his dad in the hospital room and he, it's the very end of the movie and he goes out into the hallway. His dad asks for a pillow, you know, if he would get him a pillow. And he sees a nurse and he says, the man in that room needs a pillow. And somebody pointed out how they loved the phrasing of that because it was like he was distancing himself already from his father. He doesn't say, my dad, which again, makes me emotional thinking about that. But I meant it the way a kid who would be in a hospital

• 47:38Speaker 04

  and want to be polite and also sort of thinking, well, they don't know he's my dad. They, I'm being somewhat official by saying the man in that room. So it's clear what I'm talking about. Like, I totally saw it that way. I did not see it. As a emblematic of where he was in the movie, but of course I did on some level, but I didn't consciously.

• 47:58Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think that's often true, that the movies almost run ahead of your own understanding of your life?

• 48:04Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and I think writing is that way, filmmaking is that way. You do these things right, right is the wrong word, but if you arrange them in a way that has a logic for the thing you're telling, meaning will reveal itself. You're smarter suddenly. I think that's absolutely true. And like an example in Jay Kelly, when I was writing the early stage of Jay going to the airport to get on a plane to go to France and, and I had Ron and Liz, the Laura Dern and Adam Sandler's characters, and as the dialogue was going, I just had Liz say, this is why I could never marry you. And, and I think it's just like it reached that, like it was, I didn't plan for them

• 48:49Speaker 04

  to have had a relationship in the past and, you know, that that would also be connected to Jay and to, you know, to the story at large, the bigger story, but it was just sort of those things, they come and it's an example of it getting ahead of me.

• 49:05Sam Fragoso?

  It's like a magic trick.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it's a magic trick in retrospect, but in the moment I was just trying to be funny or something like I was just like, just seemed like a funny thing to say all of a sudden to people you had no idea that they actually had a relationship and then suddenly it's revealed. Then I even for a while thought, well, I don't know that I want that to be the case, you know, and cause also I, I like Adam with this family, I don't want it to, you know, but we found the way then to, to do it.

• 49:31Sam Fragoso?

  Speaking of marriage and marriage story, I'm thinking about what is maybe the least funny scene you've ever made, which is in that apartment over on Formosa in Los Angeles, dangerously close to where we are right now. That day where you shoot the big fight between Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, to jump ahead in your story a little bit, can you take us back to that? Do you remember shooting that scene?

• 49:56Speaker 04

  The day of shooting was, well, there's two days of shooting. So, because we had to, I mean, that, that whole scene is its own, in some ways has its own narrative. It's, it's both the blocking of it, because it starts with them in those chairs and that sort of bleak room. And then, you know, he kind of doesn't want a deal and goes into the kitchen and she kind of follows and is trying to get, almost like lure him out. And then he goes into the back and he goes into the bedroom and he's even off camera for a bit. And she's like getting fed up and then she says something that triggers him and he comes running back in. And so it keeps heating up and cooling down and, and, you know, then it ends obviously in a, in a hot way.

• 50:37Speaker 05

  I can't believe I had to know you forever!

• 50:41Speaker 06

  You're fucking insane! And you're fucking winning!

• 50:47Speaker 05

  Are you kidding me? I wanted to be married. I'd already lost. You didn't love me as much as I loved you.

• 50:55Speaker 06

  What does that have to do with LA? What?

• 51:02Speaker 05

  You're so merged with your own selfishness, you don't even identify it as selfishness anymore. You're such a dick!

• 51:11Speaker 06

  Every day I wake up and I hope you're dead. Dead like if I could guarantee Henry would be okay. I'd hope you'd get an illness and then get hit by a car and die.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  I mean, on one hand, it's like, the amazing thing about what I do is working with brilliant actors who are willing to give everything they have to the scene. And, you know, it was highly emotional and it was, it, it needed momentum because the scene really has its own, it's long, but it, again, its own story in a way. So it was hard to like punch into it and say like, let's just pick up when you're yelling at each other. So like, we kind of had to keep running it throughout and it was, so it was, it was an endurance thing too. It was really hard. We had to stop several times because things kind of almost felt like they were getting too much.

• 52:04Sam Fragoso?

  Too much for you?

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Too much for them. Whatever they were drawing on.

• 52:09Sam Fragoso?

  You said in one interview, it's the only time that I've lost the required distance as a director.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  I think in that case, I wanted to be protective of them at the same time that I want them to push the boundaries as far as they'll go.

• 52:23Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. How do you navigate that? That desire for them to push while also acknowledging that there's a person rattling around in there?

• 52:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I think we do it together. We talk about it. So certainly if I'm going to say, is there more there? I want to hear from them what they feel they have and can do. It doesn't mean I'll always listen to it. I might think they have more where they don't, or they might feel like they want to try something and I'm satisfied.

• 52:48Sam Fragoso?

  It's funny because this is very much part of Jake Kelly, the sort of meta conversation.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  Yes. I have such affection for actors. I love working with actors. I mean, take that scene, for example. That scene is so important to the movie, but you know, if we go to the day we're shooting that scene, on some level, we all know this has to be excellent and it means they have to really do it. And I'm not going to say that. They're not going to say that. But if it's okay, I don't know, maybe I can cut it together. I can adjust what I kind of hoped for it and you know, get a thing and there's one take that's pretty good, but you know, like, but a big part of my movie is riding on them. And so I've got all day for them.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Whatever they need to be able to do their job. It's nuts in a way. You think like what I'm asking these people to do is this. You think about the end of Jake Kelly, like what I'm asking of George and I'm there to help them, but I can't do it for them.

• 53:46Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think you're asking them to do? Like, what do you make of the ask itself?

• 53:51Speaker 04

  I mean, I think a lot of the time, this is not always the case, but a lot of the time in my writing or my work or the story I'm telling, what I'm asking the actors to do is play something that is close to them, but a character.

• 54:03Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  So it's not them, but it's close to them. So that's what I say when I say whatever they're using, I don't need to know it.

• 54:09Sam Fragoso?

  But is that any different from you when you're writing the script itself?

• 54:13Speaker 04

  No, it's just probably a version of the same thing. And it's why for them, it's in some ways. They know what they signed up for. They've read it. So they know they can do it on some level. I'm not that scared, but I also know we still have to do it. And every day is its own thing for all of us and also for actors, you know, you you didn't get a lot of sleep the night, you know, whatever it is, you know, you don't know how you're gonna be. And it's interesting, it's interesting to me about directing is, you know, over the course of a long shoot or even a short shoot, because all shoots kind of have their own journey, no matter how many days they are. There is the thing of, even with the best actors, you just get used to them coming in, being really prepared,

• 54:57Speaker 04

  knowing the character, knowing what they're playing and being pretty good right away. And then we get, you know. But there are days when you do the first take and you're like, who are they playing today? You know, like there's some, whatever it is, some distraction, something or just, or that scene, for whatever reason, they always saw a totally different way from you or something.

• 55:15Sam Fragoso?

  And it's your job to detect them.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is. And sometimes when I was younger, I could kind of get lulled into another day of shooting, you know, here we go, you know, like check. And I mean, obviously I was working hard, but I mean, I would accept things and then look later in the editing being like, I never really, I should have pushed them to do this differently or do.

• 55:36Sam Fragoso?

  What is something you would accept that you no longer accept now?

• 55:40Speaker 04

  I think sometimes an actor does something that's really interesting, but isn't necessarily what I imagined. And some of the time, it's the better thing. But not all the time. And sometimes I've been seduced by an interesting take or performance that isn't what I when I'm putting the movie together, it's not telling the story the way I want to tell it. And I didn't get it another way because I could tell they liked that they were, you know, like, I didn't want to push them off it because I knew they were proud of it and I liked it too. And convinced myself in the moment, it was the right thing and, and wished I had, you know. Not that I would always give them the opportunity to do it that way.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  Because again, they might be more right than I am at that point, but I, the way I hear things in a scene, it's, it's how I know I have the scene or feel like I have the scene is by how I hear it. And often before I hear it, a version of how it is in my head, that's often when I'm having them go again and try other things. Because it is, I think there's a kind of musicality to my writing and. But also, I think it's partly the way I work. It's, it's, you know, it's like hearing something off key or hearing an instrument that you didn't, I didn't imagine a tuba here, you know, but they've brought the tuba. And so I'm, you know, and sometimes, again, the long answer is sometimes I accepted the tuba and then wished I could cut it out.

• 57:06Sam Fragoso?

  The title of your forthcoming book, I've, I heard is going to be called Noah Baumbach, Intermittently Accepting the Tuba, parentheses, and Regretting It.

• 57:14Speaker 04

  My Life in Movies.

• 57:15Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, that's, that's the book that Knopf just bought, right?

• 57:18Speaker 04

  On the title alone.

• 57:19Sam Fragoso?

  There was a bidding war, I heard.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, once the title came out.

• 57:23Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, before the title, they were like, I'm a little skeptical.

• 57:28Sam Fragoso?

  All right, after one last break, the end of my conversation with Noah Baumbach.

• 57:47Sam Fragoso?

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• 59:16Sam Fragoso?

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• 59:42Sam Fragoso?

  So winding our way back to Jay Kelly. It's funny how much of the meta-conversation we're having about making movies finds its way in this new movie of yours. And there's a line, speaking of the music of it all, where Jay says, "How can I play people when I don't see them?" And I was thinking, if we were to look back on the kicking-and-screaming 95 kid that you were to now post Barbie, post all these films, everything we've talked about.

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  Now that I live in a mansion on the hill, you mean?

• 1:00:13Sam Fragoso?

  100%. I mean, your house is being renovated, apparently. But success, I mean, it does have a way of shrinking. Do you feel some of that in writing? Trying to write people when the world becomes smaller for you?

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  Good question. Let's think.

• 1:00:28Sam Fragoso?

  I figured we'd stumble on one of them.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Sam Fragoso?

  We're about 80 minutes in.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  80 minutes in where we point out that Bound Back is now out of touch. One question that stumped me. I mean, of course, I could go and talk about all the ways that I haven't changed how I live in any significant way. I still can go out in the world. I can still ride the subway. You know, Jay Kelly can't ride the subway. I remember saying to a friend of mine, like about a director we like, like, "What happened to him?" And my friend said, "I think he just stopped feeling concrete." And I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "I think he just stopped walking on concrete." You know, the- It's just like going from vessel to place, but it's, I think I would have a hard time doing what I do in living in Los Angeles because I find Los Angeles does isolate you.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  And I can walk in New York and go out. I can, you know, sit in a coffee shop and I can hear people talk and I can, I can get on the subway and I can be in the world.

• 1:01:29Sam Fragoso?

  So concrete.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Concrete's the answer.

• 1:01:31Sam Fragoso?

  Greta said that Squid and the Whale and Greenberg have these signposts. J. Kelly opens with, we're coming to the end. And it does feel like the film is about legacy in some ways, thinking about the imprint and the time spent on work and how much of work consumes life to a point where there's hardly any distinction between the two. And I was thinking about how you were holding all that in this moment.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  Well, I think it was on my mind more before I wrote it and before I made it. And now I'm writing something else. And so I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about, you know, what that is and, you know, what's the best way to tell this story and what's, when we do this conversation in five years, 10 years, there'll be a narrative in front of me that we'll figure out, you know, and J. Kelly was this, it was this to that.

• 1:02:19Sam Fragoso?

  And just to be clear, you want me to help put the pieces together?

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes. You can tell me what we got right and what we got wrong.

• 1:02:26Sam Fragoso?

  Do I get a percentage of the next movie if I, if I do this?

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  If you get it right, yeah. But I don't think, I guess I don't think that way. I really, I mean, it doesn't mean I don't, those feelings and thoughts didn't go into this movie. But of course, if you, when you get a tribute, you're, you're put in a position to watch a clip reel and think about the narrative of your work and life. And you get up there and say, thank you. And it's nice. It's, it's an honor. But it's, when I go home, I'm, I'm working on the next thing. I'm not thinking of it in the context of that clip reel.

• 1:02:58Sam Fragoso?

  Right. Within the context of this film, I guess I want to try to get something closer to the bone and more present. In this new film, J. Kelly's career is jumpstarted by a director named Peter, a man whose death is kind of the springboard for the movie.

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:03:13Sam Fragoso?

  And having known him myself, it's impossible. For me to not think about Peter Bogdanovich in this film. I mean, the Jay Kelly character calls him Pop.

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Sam Fragoso?

  Which I believe is what you called him.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Sam Fragoso?

  He gives him a neckerchief, which Bogdanovich was famous for. The only thing you swapped out was Toluca Lake for Encino. What I'm trying to get at is some part of me is thinking how you want the third act to look.

• 1:03:39Speaker 04

  I mean, it's interesting with Peter because I met Peter in 97 or something. And he had two scripts he was trying to make and those were the two scripts essentially he was trying to make, you know, for the entire time I knew him. And, you know, he was already at a place where he was, you know, not where he wanted to be in terms of his career. I mean, he was, he was in a place where he was, you know, it was a struggle for him to try to get a movie made. And when Peter died, it was very affecting for me and I was very close to him. And it also came in the heels of COVID too, where I hadn't seen him, you know, in person for a little bit. And before that I would see him, whenever I was in LA, I would see him, we'd have dinner.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  And yeah, I mean, I didn't even hide it, you know, I could have done that scene and called him something else and not had a neckerchief and done a whole other thing. And it could have been Peter, you know, Mike Nichols I was also close to and I didn't know him as long as I knew Peter, you know, but,

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  and I miss him as well, but the character is nothing like Mike and, and Mike had a different kind of third act or whatever we call it. But I'm often interested in how roles shift in relationships and, you know, and it doesn't mean they shift and stay that way. They can shift back. I mean, the scene in Marriage Story, the roles and the power dynamic shift all throughout that one scene, let alone the whole movie. This sort of notion of somebody, you know, we meet him first, sort of coming hat in hand to Jay. Jim Broadbent plays Peter and brilliantly, and I'm sympathetic to both sides. I understand the feeling that the character has of, you know, I made you, you should be able to do this for me.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  And the other side of I'm who I am now and I can't do something like that. Now, for me, it was very different because Peter asked me to, and Wes Anderson to, you know, if we would give our names to his movie, Squirrels to the Nuts, it came out as she's funny that way, but then they restored the title later, but. And that was easy. I mean, we were a course, you know, but we don't have to appear, you know, it's it's different. It's like we're not Jay Kelly's in a different position. And I know Peter had those role reversals with Orson Welles and, you know, Orson Welles was living in his guest house or his, you know, above his garage, you know, and then later Peter found himself

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  living at Quentin's and several different places. I mean, Peter had success that was, I mean, it was in a different time where, you know, a director was a guest host on The Tonight Show. I mean, Peter had such major success with Last Picture Show and Paper Moon and What's Up Doc. And it's a kind of different story, I think. And his sort of relationship to Hollywood and Hollywood at the time and all that. Maybe this is not what you're asking, but here's an interesting, going back to the therapy. I'll say what I really recognized in Peter and in a way in a corrective form, but also in a very familiar way was my father. I mean, the pop

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  thing, he would call Wes and me his sons and we would call him pop. We were talking in the kind of film family way. But I also really did recognize, I think Peter struggled with having defined himself at some point as being the giant success that he was. And obviously that came at a point where it must have been very hard for him to handle. And that when he didn't have that success, I think it was hard for him to recalibrate and redefine, you know, how he was going to make movies. And also, you know, I think who he wanted to be as a filmmaker, given the opportunities or options he had. I mean, I think it's actually interesting. I mean, if you look at Saint Jack and and they all laughed, I think he, he actually was finding,

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  I'm sort of contradicting myself, he was finding a kind of new way of making things and a kind of looser sort of Cassavetes influence way of making movies that was quite different from Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. And I think, you know, if he hadn't had the tragedy with Dorothy Stratton and everything that Maybe that path would have taken him somewhere very interesting.

• 1:07:52Sam Fragoso?

  But he had a hard time recalibrating.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  I think so. I think he did, and I think he wanted on his terms. And I think for a while, he had it on his terms.

• 1:08:00Sam Fragoso?

  And this is, this is in Jay Kelly, the actor's desire to go out and get it, take the opportunity.

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  Yes, as, as a kid. Yeah, he did. And he did it, though not on his terms.

• 1:08:10Sam Fragoso?

  The same way you did leaving Vassar, going to make kicking and screaming.

• 1:08:13Speaker 04

  Yes, in a way my father was not able to do. And I think also you see it in the character Jay, even in the present, you know, for all Jay's sort of mad wanderings in the movie, he is, there is another aspect of him that's looking to change his life. He is doing it again in some way. He's looking for a new way of doing it. He's not, wouldn't say that to you. He's, I don't think he's conscious of it, but he's motivating his own journey. He didn't have to get on that train with all those people. He doesn't have to do any of that stuff. You know, he could just wait till his daughter comes back from her summer holiday.

• 1:08:51Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't have to make this movie on the other side of having a quiet crisis.

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:08:55Sam Fragoso?

  Post White Noise. And yet some part of you needed to get back on that train.

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, that's absolutely true.

• 1:09:02Sam Fragoso?

  As we leave, I'm thinking about the third act nature of this conversation, the interplay between what we're talking about and the actual text itself. And when your mom left The Village Voice, she wrote a goodbye piece. It was called The Long Goodbye.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  I came up with that title.

• 1:09:19Sam Fragoso?

  Did you?

• 1:09:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:20Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I have a passage from it, and I wanted to see where it landed with you before we have to go.

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  Uh, okay, should I read the whole thing?

• 1:09:28Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, this was in The Village Voice, October 29, 1996.

• 1:09:33Speaker 04

  For the susceptible, movie going may be hazardous. Under the influence, I've been destructive and self-destructive, though unlike those poor kids who perished on a highway's yellow line, I've escaped physically intact. There's no doubt that movies have cost lives. Better perhaps to die in films this way than the way most people do, killing precious time. What reviewers do over time is reveal their own secret, private film, allowing readers to choose critics whose secrets and lies lie closest to theirs. The secret film is distinct from, but shaped by favorites. In my favorites, brides run off to see city lights, distressed wives are drawn to volcanoes, men search their whole life through for something they've left behind.

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  Characters sleep deeply but sidewalk lightly, slip through crowds against the flow, navigate their little boats through the densest fog. They point to rings on the giant sequoia and say, "It was only a moment for you. You took no notice." Because the essence of the flickering image is instability, appearance and disappearance, coming and going, birth and death. Great films are charged with grief. Looking for what was lost, we can settle on what we are. It's good writing. It's good.

• 1:10:44Sam Fragoso?

  What do you make of that?

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  I think it's interesting about criticism in that way of like that she's acknowledging this bias that by design is not supposed to be acknowledged, that these are people who have their own favorites and their own.

• 1:10:56Sam Fragoso?

  But not dissimilar to filmmaking.

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  But filmmaking, I guess it's, I feel like it's more front and center, you know, this thing of when I'm making a movie, of course it's mine and of course these are my choices and, you know, you're gonna go or not go based on how you feel about, you know, whatever, it might be the trailer or it might be, you know, my previous movies or it might be, um, I suppose that is the story of J. Kelly in a way. Maybe not in a way, that is the story of J. Kelly.

• 1:11:24Sam Fragoso?

  That's kind of uncanny.

• 1:11:26Speaker 04

  I mean, what's interesting too, I mean, the sort of subtext of this is that she, she didn't need to stop reviewing, she chose to do it because she felt that she'd run her course, which is again, a lot of people, I mean, certainly a lot of critics don't do that, but it's hard to get anybody off the stage once they're on it. And it's interesting that she decided to, to stop.

• 1:11:47Sam Fragoso?

  My last question, I guess it's what I've been trying to get at. Looking for what was lost, we could settle on what we are. And I was thinking about how you said in multiple interviews, when you started working with Greta and then eventually built this life together, you said, I think I always recognized something in her, the way that I would like to be, both as a person and now as a filmmaker. And I guess as we leave, what does that person and filmmaker look like? It's the most sentimental question I can ask. I've avoided it for most of this conversation.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  Oh. Well, it's unanswerable, isn't it? I mean, let's say.

• 1:12:25Sam Fragoso?

  Isn't it fitting that we would end a conversation talking about your work with an unanswerable, tough question?

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  Well, I think the answer is always that, that I have a feeling for something and this is the way I figured out how to express it. And partly, I think, it's probably true of every artist, is I'm making the thing to find out what I'm saying. Because, I mean, again, it's like I was saying about going into therapy. You go in thinking, I need to work on, you know, my father issues or whatever. And then six weeks later, it's all about your mother. You know, it's, I go into a movie with a certain set of conscious ideas and things that I want to communicate, a story I wanted to tell, a character I want to put in a movie, a last line, in the case of J. Kelly,

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  that I'd like to reverse engineer, an actor I want to work with, whatever the things are. I mean, they're, they're often fairly concrete. But somewhere in the midst of working on it, you know, I'm talking about my mother. You know, I don't mean literally, but I mean, the thing has moved in, into some other thing. And, and sometimes, you know, I'll start a movie about, writing about my father and I finish writing about my father, but, but, but other things.

• 1:13:39Sam Fragoso?

  This is getting dangerously close to that scene in Chinatown.

• 1:13:43Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. I think that's, that's the thing. It's like you've, again, it makes you smarter than you are. If you do the things, certain things, well. Other things come. And so I can't answer all the sort of meaning things. You know, I remember filmmakers or artists or people I've admired over the years. And I'm like so let down by their like way of describing what they've done. Or people I've met, you know, or musicians, you know, you say like, oh, my God, this is so clearly. And they're like, well, I like, like that rhyming scheme or something like that. And it's frustrating for me because, you know, I want, I want from them what I get from the thing.

• 1:14:23Speaker 04

  But I understand that it's like, you can't, the person who did it can't be as smart as what the thing is. So what people are getting from it is they're getting from the smarter, better, prettier version of the, of the creator.

• 1:14:37Sam Fragoso?

  The best version of you is the one on the page on the screen?

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  On the screen, in the finished movie, you know, hopefully. And certainly the one who, who knows more.

• 1:14:48Sam Fragoso?

  Well, fittingly, as I said, whatever E T. Did for you as a kid, Squid in the Will did the same for me and so many more. So thank you for the time. We started this conversation talking about a quiet crisis. We ended in a totally different place.

• 1:15:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, sometimes like the writing of a movie and, and then the making a movie like a conversation. You don't, again, it goes to the question of like, if someone said, well, what started that conversation? You don't, you don't remember it. Just, it was part of it. It was the beginning part, but it, you know, if it was a good conversation, it goes into a, it takes on its own life.

• 1:15:21Sam Fragoso?

  Thank God we have the tape for posterity.

• 1:15:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, where we can go back and look.

• 1:15:24Sam Fragoso?

  Noah Baumbach, thank you for the time.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:16:00Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Noah Baumbach, do us a favor, share the program on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod, so we can reshare it on our end. If you want to go above and beyond, you can leave the program five stars on Spotify, you can leave us a review on Apple. All of this really does help us continue making this podcast each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to Liz Mahoney and the team at Narrative PR. I also want to thank Netflix and of course, our guest, Noah Baumbach. His new film, Jay Kelly, is now playing in select theaters. It premieres exclusively on Netflix Friday, December 5. For more episodes, I'd recommend Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Laura Dern,

• 1:16:43Sam Fragoso?

  and my talk with the late Peter Bogdanovich. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for exclusive bonus content and ad-free listening. Just hit subscribe on Apple or head to lemonadapremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Abraha. Today's talk was edited by Finn Nowlin and Corey Etad. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. Video is by Red and Green Gaskell and Alex Leo Garcia. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Illustrations, Chris Shannell. Photographs today come from Ethan Newmeyer with research

• 1:17:27Sam Fragoso?

  assistance from Ben Eisen. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here later this week with a very special two-part series featuring Renata Reinsve and director Jokum Trier. Until then, stay safe and so long.

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• 1:19:11Speaker 07

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  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

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