Noah Baumbach
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“Blue Screen? Process Trailer? LED Screens?” DP Lol Crawley on White Noise
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise was for years considered too difficult to bring to the screen. With its jaundiced view of academia, intimate domestic melodrama, obsessions with cults and an eerily prescient pandemic, the novel spans genres and styles. Working for the first time in his career on an adaptation, writer and director Noah Baumbach started shooting primarily in the Midwest in June 2021. Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, White Noise premiered at Venice and opened this year’s New York Film Festival. This is the first collaboration between Baumbach and cinematographer Lol Crawley, BSC. They faced enormous […]
by Daniel Eagan on Dec 9, 2022 -
NYFF 2022: White Noise
Can product placement ever transcend advertising? Pepsi’s vintage logo—a comically over-present staple of ’80s and ’90s commercial Hollywood filmmaking—is continuously conspicuous in Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. As a period marker, this makes sense: the novel was published in 1985 and the film’s production design places it in the early ’80s. Thematically, it’s obviously relevant: DeLillo’s first-person narrator, J.A.K. Gladney (Adam Driver), regularly has his thoughts interrupted by lines that simply list corporate names or interpolate overheard advertising chatter. DeLillo originally thought of naming the book Panasonic, writing to his editor that “The word ‘panasonic,’ split into its component […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 30, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise
Netflix has released a teaser trailer for White Noise, Noah Baumbach‘s adaptation of author Don Delillo’s 1985 novel of the same name. Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a local liberal arts college, while Greta Gerwig plays his wife Babette. Both must confront their profound mortal fears when an “airborne toxic event” threatens their family and livelihoods—a catastrophic occurrence that reveals moments of mind-numbing mundanity. Once terrified of death, Jack becomes obsessed and consumed by it in the wake of this environmental crisis. Driver and Gerwig have collaborated with Baumbach extensively in the past, with […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 25, 2022 -
Venice Film Festival Announces 2022 Lineup
The lineup for the 79th Venice Film Festival is now live, one day after Noah Baumbach‘s adaptation of Don Delillo’s novel White Noise was announced as the opening night film. The films announced today include Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, Joanna Hogg‘s The Eternal Daughter, recently jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi‘s No Bears, Frederick Wiseman‘s narrative turn A Couple and more. White Noise marks the first time that a Netflix film serves as the festival’s opening night film. The streamer is also present with Dominik’s Blonde, the Nicolas Winding Refn mini-series Copenhagen Cowboy and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo (or False […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 26, 2022 -
The Whistlers, The Room, Marriage Story and Cannery Row: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
My first two recommendations this week are two excellent thrillers from last year that are newly available on DVD, The Whistlers and The Room. The Whistlers, which premiered in competition at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, is a gleefully twisty, darkly hilarious Romanian crime film that recalls movies like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in its jigsaw structure and fluid loyalties but finds a unique tone all its own thanks to director Corneliu Porumboiu’s approach. He adopts a whimsical attitude toward his eccentric group of cops playing both sides of the law and the criminals they’re […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 17, 2020 -
“Something with Your Therapist”: Noah Baumbach on Marriage Story
Marriage Story depicts the love two people can find in separation. It is not a rekindling, it is stepping back to respect the boundaries you crossed in your strangling embrace. The original love hardens. It dies and returns as something like an actual reverence. At this distance, you might actually be able to see each other again. If the separating lovers in question, Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), can learn to walk away from each other with nothing more than that knowing glance—“I accept that we will not be together. It is sad, but you are great. I […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 13, 2019 -
TIFF 2019, Day 6: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Marriage Story
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is the inspiring story of a magazine writer, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who filed way over word count (by 9,600 words!), which delighted his editor so much that Vogel got the cover. It’s 1998, and Vogel, on staff at Esquire, has developed a reputation as a savage profiler no one wants to talk to anymore. Editor Ellen (Sakina Jaffrey) throws him a softball: 400 words on Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for an issue on cultural heroes. Vogel tries to beg out of the ill-fitting assignment, but no dice—as Ellen correctly notes, “Didn’t I hire you to do […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2019 -
The Search for Black Rock: Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary, Part Two
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here is his second entry; click here for them all. Day 3 I’m now feeling foolish, and looking foolish too with my cherry red nose. Without Black Rock things went from bad to — […]
by Sam Kuhn on May 23, 2017 -
Working Through Fear: An Interview with Blumhouse’s Jason Blum
Driving down Beverly, you head opposite Hollywood, away from Studio City, toward the nondescript, single-level, brown-bricked building that’s the literal Blumhouse — the offices of horror movie maestro Jason Blum. Since founding the company, Blum has produced dozens of films that have made varying degrees of impact on the zeitgeist: the found-footage scares of the Paranormal Activity films, the reinvented haunted house of the Insidious pictures, the social violence of The Purge series. And then, of course, there’s megahit Get Out, Jordan Peele’s ferociously intelligent satire on racism that, despite its share of lobotomies and knifings and violently applied white […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2017 -
A Talk with Manchester by the Sea Editor Jennifer Lame
Jennifer Lame is the editor of Manchester by the Sea. She’s best known for having edited all of Noah Baumbach’s narrative films since Frances Ha and is currently in postproduction on his next film, Yeh Din Ka Kissa. At what point did you join the project? I had been following it for a while, since I am a big fan of Kenny’s work. Between my agent and others, I got sent two or three drafts of the script and read them all, but I couldn’t seem to get an interview, I think because they were looking for someone with a bit […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 20, 2016
