When Noah Baumbach debuted his fourth film, The Squid And The Whale, at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the chorus of raves came with questions, particularly "Where the heck has Baumbach been?" After debuting in 1995 with Kicking & Screaming—a funny, truthful study of college friends dealing with life after graduation—Baumbach quickly followed up with the underrated Mr. Jealousy, another funny (though less immediately relatable) story about the uncomfortable emotions that emerge with real adulthood. And then? The shadow years. There were reports that Baumbach had retained the Mr. Jealousy cast for a low-budget comedy shot over the course of a single week, but the movie never showed up in theaters. (It eventually came out on DVD a couple of years ago under the title Highball, with Baumbach's writing and directing credits removed at his request.) Otherwise, aside from the occasional humorous essay in The New Yorker, and a co-writing credit on Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Baumbach fell off the radar.
As it happens, he spent much of the last decade securing financing for The Squid And The Whale, a bare-knuckle comedy inspired by the divorce of his esteemed writer parents when he was a teenager. The movie stars Jeff Daniels as the aloof academic father, Laura Linney as the nurturing but distracted mother, and Jesse Eisenberg as Walt, the self-deluded, pseudo-intellectual high-schooler. It sports Baumbach's trademark witty dialogue, but it's tighter and more confident than his earlier work, with a raw vérité style and some lacerating observations about how a smugly unorthodox family can implode. Noah Baumbach recently spoke with The A.V. Club about his evolving style, his lingering fears of growing up, and life in NYC.
The A.V. Club: Your parents were professional writers, you're an occasional New Yorker contributor, and your early movies seem more dialogue-driven than visually dynamic. What made you want to be a filmmaker instead of an author?
Noah Baumbach: I see the careers as connected, really. I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write. I mean, I used a video camera, and shot on film cameras at school and stuff, but I had a lot more training as a writer. I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.
In terms of the early movies vs. The Squid And The Whale, I do think that I in some ways trusted my own voice as a filmmaker more on this one. I more thoroughly and successfully found the visual equivalent to what I had written. I think the other movies have visual interest—I don't think they're lifeless or flat—but I do think in this movie I did "find it" in a way that I hadn't before. And I think I also was able to communicate to the actors in ways that maybe I wasn't in the past.
AVC: Did you have any filmmaking models for your style before, as opposed to your style on The Squid And The Whale?
NB: Maybe I thought too much about other models on those early movies, and less so on this one. I mean, I did look at lots of movies for The Squid And The Whale, and thought about them visually. I looked at a lot of documentaries, and French New Wave movies, and John Cassavetes and early Martin Scorsese. Things that had a sort of raw feel. I think in the past I may have had a harder time because I had so many influences that it'd almost be overwhelming. Maybe I'd imitate shots too directly. With The Squid And The Whale, I was able to incorporate those influences and filter them through myself more successfully. Basically, what I'm describing is "maturity." [Laughs.]
AVC: Kicking & Screaming displayed a little Whit Stillman influence, though maybe that's just because it featured Stillman regular Chris Eigeman.
NB: Well, the influence wasn't direct. I'd seen Metropolitan by that point and really liked it. I was kind of excited by Metropolitan, not only because it was really well-written and well-directed, but because of the way it was made. It was made for all the right reasons. But to me, that group of people... I identified with them in broad ways, because the movie was identifiable in its specificity, but I never saw the guys graduating in my movie as part of that same social class. Sort of the point of Kicking & Screaming, I always felt, was that college equalizes people from different economic backgrounds, and once you graduate, you're put back where you were. I think Kicking & Screaming was perceived as being more about elites than I ever intended. I understand that even people who go on scholarship to good liberal-arts schools are part of an elite in terms of America at large, but they're different from people who are living a Fitzgerald-like existence on the Upper East Side.
That's a long-winded way of saying that while I really responded to the kind of ensemble feeling of Metropolitan, I was also thinking a lot about Diner, which was another great ensemble "friends" comedy.
AVC: Making The Squid And The Whale as raw-looking as you did was effective, because although the dialogue is still as funny as it was in your earlier work, it sounds harsher in this more claustrophobic atmosphere.
NB: Yeah, I was very interested in trying to make this movie as immediate an experience as possible for the viewer. I think you can tell the same person wrote all my movies, but in the other ones, the dialogue was in some cases maybe more "clever," and the movies were less emotional, or maybe more afraid of emotion. They're about people afraid of emotion. [Laughs.] With this movie, I became a lot less analytical, and went more on feel. That was true in the writing and in the shooting. I don't want to say that I wanted to make it feel as "real" as possible, because that isn't really what it is. I just want it to be an experience, you know? I think it requires audience participation, in a way. I think you have to enter the movie and live it.
AVC: It feels a lot like a literary short story, where readers dive in and out quickly, and are left with a little elliptical moment at the end.
NB: Right. I thought about that. At times I'd get scared while writing, like, "Is this even a movie?" But the more I thought about it, I thought, "Well, we accept this kind of material in fiction a lot, and in memoir, and in popular fiction, even." Why are movies more filtered? I feel like in a lot of cases, for this kind of subject matter, filmmakers often look for books to adapt. Which doesn't mean you can't make an incredibly immediate version of a book, but why not make something that is personal and emotional from your own perspective? Something that you feel directly, right from the screen? I never thought twice about writing this as a short story. Why not make a movie that gives some kind of equivalent experience?
AVC: You've said elsewhere that the movie isn't line-for-line autobiographical, but there are certainly some details that seem too precise to be invented, like the dad getting irritated about losing his parking space.
NB: Right.
AVC: Are you comfortable discussing which parts of the film come directly from your own experience?
NB: It's not that I'm not comfortable doing it, it's just that it doesn't really mean anything. Like, did my father get annoyed sometimes when he lost his parking space? Sure. [Laughs.] Do other people I've been with in cars also have that reaction? Yes! Do I sometimes feel that way? Yes! But the scenes in the car aren't precisely from my life. So, you know, it just becomes such a slippery slope. I understand—and I'm flattered, even, to some degree—that people care, and want to know what's real, and that the movie provokes that reaction. I think in some ways, it's intended to. But for me, "wondering" is what it's about, not "answering." Because there is no answer. These are people and places I know really well, but the movie's a work of fiction. There's no annotated script. [Laughs.] Nothing that says which word is real and which word is not.
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