The Big Picture - Noah Baumbach and Capturing the American Family | The Big Picture (Ep. 29)

Episode Date: October 16, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with writer-director Noah Baumbach to discuss his new film, ‘The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)’; creating a serious role for Adam Sandler; Netflix purchasing his film; and how he captures the American family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At the beginning of this whole thing, if I could have looked and said, OK, well, you'll be here when you're 48, it was kind of exactly what I would have hoped for and wanted. I'm Sean Fennessy, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and here's the big picture. Few filmmakers capture the anxiety of aging and family life better than Noah Baumbach. In his movies like The Squid and the Whale, Kicking and Screaming, and Francis Ha among others, Baumbach really gets to the heart of things that we have difficulty saying to each other.

His new movie, The Meyerowitz Stories, new and selected, is no different. It stars Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller as half-brothers, and Dustin Hoffman is their passive-aggressively domineering artist father. The movie's streaming now on Netflix, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's really one of my favorite movies of the year.

It's surprisingly funny and unusually deep about how we deal with our parents. So Noah and I talked about the making of the Meyerowitz stories, his long career, and the art of a great movie star performance. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Noah Baumbach. joined by one of my favorite filmmakers noah bomback noah thank you for coming in today thanks so no you have a new film but i when i was watching it i thought of your first film and there's a particular reason why in the movie dustin hoffman's character and adam sandler's character bond while watching the mets reminded me It reminded me a lot of Kicking and Screaming and Elliot Gould's character and Josh Hamilton's character bonding over the Knicks. I'm curious because of that, what kind of brought you back to Fathers and Sons and where this movie really started? Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't

thought about that. And to actually take that further in my failure of imagination, it was the Knicks in the first drafts of the Meyerowitz script. I realized that because it begins with Adam's character's daughter going to college, that actually this would have to be the fall. You know, the Knicks wouldn't have started until November. So anyway, so I made it the Mets. That's smart. It's synchronized, though. Did that occur to you that there's some, you know, 20 some odd years later, there's some recalling? Well, I think in both cases, it becomes a way to communicate that's maybe less complicated. It's a way to – in this case, fathers and sons to bond because you're bonding with this sort of thing that's outside you.

Yeah. It's an interesting thing as a, as a sad Nixon and Mets fan, I, I have a specific connection to it, but right. Well, actually when I also, when we were shooting it, you know, I anticipated that the Mets were going to have actually a better season than they did in the movie. It's, this is a, you know, a less good Mets season than probably the season they're going to have. But in fact, it actually turned out to be the prophetic, I guess. Yeah, you nailed it. In August 17, we were just as sad as Dustin's character. But specifically, where did this movie start? How did you land on doing another story about a family and fathers and sons and daughters?

It's always a series of little things and big things. And even in this case, it was sort of the idea of doing something with Ben and Adam together and that that maybe they could play brothers. And so that in a way, I was even kind of thinking, well, what would the story be for those two guys? I also wanted to write about I wanted to put in a movie a certain kind of aspect of hospital life, you know, being in a hospital that I felt I hadn't really seen in a movie before. And this intersection of the personal and the institutional and sort of incredibly vulnerable state you find yourself in and, you know, you're kind of like putting your heart in the hands of all these people that you don't know.

We all have a nurse, Pam, right, who we connect with and we're like, you have all the information. Make me feel better. Right, right. Exactly. And it even can be arbitrary, like who makes you feel better and who doesn't. So I wanted to find a place for that, too. But I had no idea. I mean, when I started writing, I thought, well, maybe that's a bigger part of the movie. Maybe it's a, and it was the structure

of the movie that, um, sort of breaking it into this, this like almost a collection of short stories that kind of helped unlock, I think a lot of the movie for me. Yeah. It's almost a Salinger-esque, I'm a little low to say that, but it's a Salinger-esque structure, right? Where you have this story of a family, but each part of the movie is almost a chapter or part of the collection. Was that from the very beginning? You knew you wanted to do some structure, something that specific way? No, I wrote a lot of scenes just between different characters, adult siblings, with their dads, with each other, with their kids. I just wrote a bunch of crap really.

And then when I found this structure, I think it not only helped sort of tell – form a narrative for the movie but also it helped inform me I think even about the characters. By splitting the brothers up into two different sections, it spoke to maybe the sort of compartmentalization of this family and how the father has one relationship with one son and another with the other and having that sort of distinct differences helped me certainly write those sections but even kind of like figure out the – what the movie was about. This is your 10th film, I believe. And having gotten to that point,

I'm always interested in how much you're pulling from your life, your friends' lives. There's so much specificity in every character and in this like mountain of dialogue that you're really characterizing every person very clearly. Is a lot of this the imagination at this point or do you still find yourself plucking from your life and others? It doesn't manifest itself that way, or at least consciously for me. I'm plucking from everywhere. And I like to use,

particularly early on in the process, I like to use real names and sometimes real places. I think it just helps make it feel legit to me. You know, it's like, there's always that thing when you're like coming up with a name for a character and you pick this name and it just sounds so fake, you know, it sort of takes always like a few weeks before you kind of actually start to buy that this character has this name is this is a real name. Right. And it's not that I don't do that but i i do sometimes like to use you know names of friends of mine you know i mean never never in a you know a one-to-one way i'm never i wouldn't use someone's name of somebody you know and their personality i would do it in a removed way but it makes it feel personal immediately and i think that helps me then invent stuff because i i feel like I have a kind of base

that feels credible. Yeah when you create this New York artist world too you look at like LJ's character LJ the character of LJ who's played by Judd Hirsch like I found myself watching the movie being like who specifically is this supposed to be which modern artist are we aiming for is that a similar thing to where you'll be like I'm imagining a person that is like this and then I'll build off of that? Sometimes. And it also becomes like, you know, then for wardrobe, you know, you might draw upon a look of somebody that you – there's an artist, Bryce Martin, that we kind of looked at for LJ's – That is specifically who I was imagining. But I wasn't thinking of him at all for the character of LJ. He has the look though.

Yeah, I just wanted him to have something sort of specific and I always really liked how Bryce Martin looked. And again, it's no – the character of LJ himself was just sort of invented and we also meet him in some ways through Harold's eyes. So it's like you have a certain expectation of him and then he actually turns out to be, you know, a different sort of person. He's like a good man. We're expecting something different. So, you know, you mentioned that you wanted to put Ben and Adam together. I'm interested to talk about both of them in this movie. With Adam, there's been a lot of conversation about how this is a return to Adam working with an auteur and he gives a certain kind of performance. You've heard you say that Adam approached you and said, if you ever have anything, I'd like to work with you.

Do you know what movie or what thing inspired that to reach out in the first place? For him? Yeah. It's probably Squid and the Whale. And so often happens with actors too that they'll reach out and then you'll come back to them a couple of years later and then they will pass on the project. Of course. I just didn't respond to the character.

You're thinking like, why did you make me? I was saying in some ways it's like Hollywood in a nutshell makes you want something you didn't want before and then tells you you can't have it. How do you figure out the best character to write for someone like Adam? He's such a specific person in the consciousness of the country. But this is both I think some of the best of his comedic talent, but there's also the woundedness and the sadness that is going on. How do you figure out how to build something like that for an actor? Well, that was something actually in our rehearsal process that I think helped free him up was talking about that it was OK to be funny.

You know, that it was – that he could bring that part of himself to the character, that to not mistake the sort of responsibility he felt in sort of doing justice to this guy. You know, that – not to mistake that for like dead seriousness, you know, that the character was funny too. And he's doing a lot of Sandler yelling, you know. There's still his essence. And I thought that we should have that. It's like, you know, you're not – I think when you cast somebody, you know, sometimes you want them to transform into the part,

but you also want to, you know, bring out what's special about them or things that you like about them. You know, it was interesting because also when I wrote it, Danny very specifically for Adam and Matthew very specifically for Ben. And then when I showed people the script for the first time afterward, people assumed that they were playing the opposite parts. But I'd never thought of it that way. I mean it wasn't – it didn't even enter my mind.

So in some ways maybe I was willfully ignorant to kind of public perception or iconography as I wrote it. I kind of wrote it more for the guys I knew. Yeah, and you've said that this is the closest character to the real Ben that you know. Is there a reason after Greenberg and While We're Young, you wanted to do something that felt closer to the person that you've come to know over the last 10 years? You know, Greenberg for Ben, it's a really deeply felt performance and he clearly found a lot of himself in that guy, but it was a transformation. The character was very different from him. And with While We're Young, in a way, I was – what I was thinking was I was sort of bringing my world and his sort of iconography together in a way.

Like he was playing a kind of Ben Stiller-y character in my world. And then in this one, I felt like, well, this is something maybe he could really play close to the bone because now I know him very well. And so I wrote it sort of with that in mind. Did he respond to or recognize that this was something closer to him? Did he ID that? Eventually. OK. I think when he first read it – I mean Ben jokes about it.

First he had to get over the fact that he doesn't show up 50 pages into the movie. More star management. Yeah. But I think Ben would be fine with me saying this. I think he initially wasn't sure he wanted to do it even. I think he felt like, you know, I don't know that I recognize this guy, which is funny because I – or he felt that it wasn't a challenge to him. But once we got into it, he really gave himself over to it and I think it's a very vulnerable performance. I saw you and Dustin speaking together recently too and he talked a little bit about how much he worked with you on the movie. I'm hoping you can kind of explain some

of that, what that means when you have an iconic actor, someone who's very invested in helping to build a character, but also, you know, what the level of collaboration is like, how invasive something like that might be too, because you're obviously someone who has created stories over and over again. And I don't know how often you have somebody coming close to you and saying like, how do we build this together? Well, I wanted it as much as he did because I wrote the character very specifically. I mean, they're all written specifically. But that guy had, I felt, a really particular cadence to how he spoke. And Dustin really zeroed in on that. And I think, you know, he plays it very much from the inside out,

but he also recognized that in some ways, if he could get the musicality and the cadence of the guy, it would actually help give him the character as well. So our meetings and our rehearsals were far ranging. I mean, there was a lot of just talking and talking about family and our lives. And he had a lot of, he recognized a lot of things in the character reminded him of his father. Yeah, I heard him say that. There's something interesting there too, about the failed artist, you know, it's like a trope that you have returned to a couple times to the father who had never quite got to where he wanted to go and how you then – how the children then position their lives after that, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that was helpful for him. It made sense of a lot of things for him to think of his own father. But then also we would read it and we would just – like I said, he would always like me to say the line first as I imagined it, which many actors don't necessarily. You hear the opposite usually, right? But it was almost like getting the note on a harmonica or something. It was just like – and it really was helpful to him. So, you know, and a lot of it is we created a kind of shorthand so that when we were shooting, we could cut right to what let's get down to solving this, which is sort of what I try to do with every actor. But sometimes, you know, sometimes an actor just sort of, you know, maybe has, you know, one or two blocks that they need to kind of get through or things that they need to kind of, you of – things that they need to unlock, whatever it is that's going to help them find the part.

Sometimes they just sort of slip right into it. And then other times – it's true of like Ben with Greenberg and Dustin with this character, Harold. I do think it really benefits from a kind of long runway. So this movie made me realize that you're kind of sort of the maestro of American divorce now. You know, like that is the notion of the fractured family is something you're very good at. What keeps drawing you back to stories about these kind of mixed families that are coming from different directions and new marriages and new starts? Obvious answer is I have divorced in my life, both in my childhood and in my adulthood. So I know it.

But I guess I don't think of it – I think I'm writing about family. And obviously the specifics are going to be unique to whoever is watching the movie. But they might recognize their family or they may say, oh, boy, my family is nothing like this family. But I think, you know, essentially what I'm trying to document is true of everybody, you know, I mean, and with this movie, this sort of also this notion of family stories and stories we tell ourselves and, you know, stories our parents tell us, you know, either directly or indirectly, and how we kind of imbibe those and take them out into our own individual lives. And then sort of, I think part of growing up is realizing, you know, maybe I actually don't believe this thing that I thought I believed.

And, and, uh, you know, and I think everybody can relate with that. Do you find yourself either taking your scripts or your movies to your family, or do they come to you and say, Hey, I noticed something in here or what is happening with this? Everybody who is my family or my friends is at this point kind of used to the fact that they might recognize a thing or two in movies. These things transform so much though so that like I might use something, a name or a situation that's very sort of – that's true or specific to something that's real. But then it really is so that I can kind of create and invent off of that. I said to – I had a friend actually come to a New York Film Festival screening we had a couple of weeks ago and I realized just before the day of, Greta reminded me that I had actually

taken a couple of things from him that were in the movie. So I called him and I was like, I just want to – it's nothing. I don't think you're – I just want to let you know that a couple of things are in there. And he said – he's like, it wouldn't be one of your movies if I didn't recognize a couple of the things I've said or done. Yeah. You almost have to keep a checklist of the small notes that you've taken so you can warn people ahead of time. So I saw this movie in a packed movie theater for the first time and it really played. And people were laughing and it was it's also a great New York movie and I felt a lot of New York a lot of walking the streets feeling

but the movie is obviously premiering on Netflix as well this is the first time you're doing that I'm interested to hear how that experience has been for you and kind of what your expectation is for something like this rolling out this way it's important to clarify. I made the movie independently and with the same intention that I make all my movies, which is to be seen the kind of spectacle movie or like, you know, movies like Dunkirk that are, how important it is to see them in the theater. And it's absolutely true. I mean, a movie, I saw that in the movie theater and it was amazing. You were like the fifth consecutive filmmaker to come in here and be like, you know, Dunkirk really in the theater was amazing.

It's just interesting that it keeps coming up. Well, I think, but I think what gets lost in the conversation too is just what you – the experience you were just recounting is that it's equally important I think to see movies of more intimate scale in the theater. It's funny because Greta was asked this similar question in a Q&A she gave for her movie at the New York Film Festival now a week after I had done mine. And she had this amazing answer where she quoted Walter Murch who talked about the – Famous sound designer. Yeah, yeah. Editor. And wrote a great book about editing in the blink of an eye.

And I guess this was an addendum he had added to a later printing. But he was talking about the home viewing experience versus the theatrical experience. And what he was saying is when you go into a theater, and so I'm paraphrasing Greta, paraphrasing Walter Murch, just to be clear here. When you go into a theater, you're giving yourself over to the experience. It's a vulnerable experience. And that's true whether you're in a packed house or you're alone. You're going in and you're going to be there for this thing. And that vulnerability is lost at home because now it's your slave.

You can turn it on. You can turn it off. Even if you don't, you know you can. I think it's absolutely true. And I think it's an important experience for my movies, this sort of balance between laughing and crying or discomfort or, you know, there's – I edit them. This one in particular, there's a kind of fractured, you know, almost sort of experiential aspect to them, you know. Even the way you cut on dialogue throughout the movie is a very specific choice that, as I said, like in the theater, it gives you a jolt. And you feel it around you.

I mean I've seen it with The Crown. So I also believe that experience, you know, it's unique. And even as all this stuff changes, and it's not going to go away, and it's not going to go away for these movies. And I feel very strongly about it. If three or five or 10 times as many people see this movie, though, because of the way that it's being delivered to the world, does that balance that feeling out for you? No, it doesn't balance it because it's not – I mean if you said to a photographer, we're going to skip the gallery and the museum and we're just going to put you on the internet and do you know how many more people will see your work?

I know that's maybe an exaggeration. But of course you want people to see. I want as many people to see. I make these movies for an audience. And all movies end up there anyway. You're toggling around. You want your movies on these platforms because people will find them later in a way that when I was a kid you couldn't. I think that's great.

But I think people should be given the opportunity to see them the way they should be seen in the theater beforehand. Do you have a measure of success now with a movie going directly to a platform like this? Does it change the way you think about the end result of the movie? Well, it didn't for me because I didn't make it for that. It was acquired in post. My producer sold it to Netflix. And I want to be clear, they love the movie and have been great and are really supportive of it. But I disagree with their model. You mentioned Greta, and Greta obviously has a film happening. You guys worked closely

together on a couple of films. Have you learned anything specifically from working closely with her and then going back and doing something on your own? I'm interested to hear about what the post Greta working experience is like, too. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm not even sure I can quantify it. It's it's it's but I know it's there. You know, I mean, it's something actually I you know, I made with Jake Paltrow, we made this documentary about Brian De Palma. I love it. For him, he felt – he wrote and directed a lot of his early movies but he felt he needed to work as an interpretive director on things like Scarface and The Untouchables, that it helped free him up by getting outside of his own material, like that he learned something. And so when he went back to writing his own material, he had sort of – things had changed. And I think

I don't do that. I don't – I mean I haven't done that I should say. I directed somebody else's material. I generate it all. I kind of consciously and unconsciously look to do things that sort of take me – even in stuff that I'm writing in a way, take me outside of my own stuff. And I think working with Greta on those two movies did sort of both – they're extremely personal movies and I feel very connected – as connected to those movies I do to any of my movies. But working with her and having this sort of other voice both in the script stage and also as a performer kind of changed how I make movies.

It was also with Francis. We also – we kind of changed the model of shooting it in a way too on that one and I think that – it was almost like making a first film I never made when I was in my 40s. And it freed me up in some way and changed then how I would approach movies that when I went,

while we're young was the one after that, but movies that I was making maybe in a more traditional fashion. Did you guys find yourself, she directed her first film, Lady Bird, and you're making this film. Did you guys find yourself – she directed her first film, Lady Bird, and you're making this film. Did you guys still kind of collaborate in that way? Did you show each other's work and give notes? Totally, yeah.

We're always very – whether we're officially collaborating or not, we're very – we're showing each other things all the time and drafts and cuts. How do you feel about your career these days? I mentioned it's 10 films. You have been able to maintain your voice pretty consistently, especially in the last 10, 15 years. Are there things that you haven't been able to do that you want to do as a filmmaker? Are there bigger projects or smaller projects that you want to pursue?

I mean, there's lots of things that I want to do. But I feel lucky. I have very much the career I would have at the beginning of this whole thing if I could have looked and said, okay, well, you'll be here when you're 48. That was kind of exactly what I would have hoped for and wanted. Movies and making movies and that kind of expression has always been something that, you know, I looked at as this sort of personal sort of conversation with an audience in some way. And, you know, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. Jason Blum was here last week talking with my boss and I, Bill, and they talked a lot

about the making of Kicking and Screaming and how long it took to get that into the world and, you know, some of the personal connection to that story. And Bill, my boss, is quite obsessed with that movie. And, you know, you could see him placing his life onto the lives of the characters. There's a whole other generation of people that work at this company that have a very similar relationship to Francis Ha, where they say, like, that is my movie. That is my life. I feel so connected to that.

Do people approach you and say, like, you captured this part of my life on a regular basis? Yeah. I mean people do say that. I mean it's always nice when people say that. I mean it's what – I think back to movies that did that for me and how important they were in my life, you know, and still are. You know, I mean, I remember when I was a kid and I saw Diner, you know, and I thought like, oh, I am those guys, even though I was younger and not living in the 50s in Baltimore. And I remember thinking about that movie.

It was sort of everything. I felt like, oh, I totally relate to all those guys and that kind of conversation, my friends and things. And then I also thought like that's the kind of movie I'd like to make. So it sort of was inspiring and sort of all fronts. And there are so many movies like that. I mean people like ask me like, oh, like it seems so – what an odd thing for you to be Brian De Palma fan or think that – why? It's not odd at all.

I mean there's an interview I heard with Tom Petty where he, they asked him what his influences were and he said the radio. And I feel that way, you know, that my influences are movies. That's part of the reason why I asked you about sort of the direction of your career, because after seeing De Palma, I was like, I wonder if he'll make like a thriller at some point. But do you still feel like this sort of the personal stories that you're telling and the familial stories that you're telling relationship dramas is kind of your bread and butter and where you like to work? It's not – it's even something I'm in control of. It's like I – these stories and characters and ideas come and I don't want to make it sound magical either. It's just – but it's like I follow what is interesting to me and what I want to do and what feels like cinematic to me, what feels like a movie. And this is the expression. I mean I get asked the question sort of within the movies like are you aware of like when you want things to be

funny and when you want them to be serious? And it's not that I'm not aware of that in some ways, but I'm also don't care. I think that they these things live side by side within the movies. And it's kind of something I'm in control of and not in control of. And and that's the same thing with the material. I mean, I have ideas for things and things I want to kind of express and put in a movie. And and this is how it's come out so far. You know, do you still go to a lot of movies? You talked about the theatrical experience. express and put in a movie and, and this is how it's come out so far, you know. Do you still go to a lot of movies? You talked about the theatrical experience. I'm wondering if you are still like an engaged viewer of them.

I do. I do. And also in New York now, I feel like we're in this, like the midst of a, of a kind of, you know, great, I don't know, we call it a renaissance, but it's like a, you know, there are all these great theaters that are opening up. Yeah. The Metrograph has been a very cool thing i love the metrograph and my friend jake is the programs there and this is just you know so good at at it there's always something i want to see and and also they show so much on 35 millimeter and it's an incredibly emotional thing something i kind of rediscovered on meowitz was shooting on film again, you know, that because I sort of tried digital on the last three between Greenberg and Meyerowitz.

Have you flipped back now? Are you now not going to work in digital? Because you had established something, I think, with Francis and, you know, Mistress of America in particular, I felt like it looked like a new version of an old film. Yeah. I mean I like what we did on those movies, particularly on Francis, and I'm glad I tried that. But so much of what I'm doing is a kind of conversation with my younger self who went to movies and loved movies. And sometimes it's even more thematic in the movie itself.

But it's also even just like spiritually true. A big part of that was watching things on film and things that were shot on film. And I have – it's a kind of an emotional connection to that. So you've made this, the Palma film, you know, you may now made a film with Hoffman. Are there other, is there another hero or iconic person that you'd be interested in working with? Well, I would say Randy Newman, but I got to work with him on this,

on this, on this movie too. Also my guy, how did that happen? He had reached out to me. I'd heard that he like if that, that he had sort of, you know, liked my movies. And so I sort of was like planning it, but didn't have yet the movie yet. You know, I haven't had like even that many movies that have had like full scores, you know, original scores written for them. So yeah, I just sent him the script and we had breakfast and talked about how that we could kind of theorize what kind of score it would be. We really wouldn't know till he saw them, at least saw the rushes and started to have a visual component.

And it was a great experience. I would come out here and go to his house and we'd go to his studio and I'd sit next to him and he'd play piano while the movie ran. Mind-blowing. Yeah. All the music in the movie also is him playing live to the movie. I mean we would work on it. He'd get it. He'd figure out what the theme was and then – but then he would play it again and play it while the movie ran and that's what you hear. I usually like to wrap with the question about the last great thing you've seen.

And since you go to the movies, I'm curious what you've seen recently that's blown you away. Well, like, yeah, I could – some things I saw at the Metrograph. I took my son to Popeye at the Metrograph, which I – Yeah, they just reissued that soundtrack. I know, yeah, with the demos, which I had always liked also. Really good. It's one of the great bootlegs. Yeah, it was odd actually.

It came out like a week after we actually happened to go see it. I didn't realize that they were reissuing it. And, yeah, I loved Popeye as a kid because I loved Robin Williams. And then later, retrospectively, I would also be into Altman and Nielsen. But when I first saw it, it was the Robin Williams thing. Trevor Burrus Did your son respond to Popeye? Jason Kuznicki I don't know that he quite loved it. Trevor Burrus Get the tone?

Jason Kuznicki We saw Popeye and we saw Bugsy Malone also in successive weeks because they – actually Jake did this as a – I asked him if we could actually just show Popeye because I wanted to show my son. Really greasing the wheels there. Yeah. So he created a kid's musical thing. So we ended up seeing – in three successive Sundays. We saw Bugsy Malone, Popeye, and the Great Muppet Caper, which does not hold up. That's a grody one, though.

Yeah, it is. Well, that part's alright. Are you trying to show him your youth? Is that part of what's happening? Well, I see plenty of the things he wants to see, too. But yeah, it's a way to give these movies their best chance, too. Well, that's a great place to end by recapturing. Noah, thank you so much for doing this.

Noah Baumbach, Jr.: Yeah, thank you. It was fun.