When Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha hit cinemas last summer, the director spoke about wanting that picture to look and feel like a debut feature. Sure enough, the film – his first creative endeavour with new co-writer and domestic partner Greta Gerwig – turned out to be the filmmaker's sweetest, funniest and best reviewed film in years.
'Twas ever thus. Kicking and Screaming, made when the writer-director was 26, earned Baumbach a place on Newsweek's "Ten New Faces of 1996" list. Since then, making movies that might pass as first films is not uncommon for the native New Yorker.
It's not that The Squid and the Whale (his third feature) or Frances Ha (his seventh) feel like the work of an ingenue; it's that there's an undeniable freshness and verve about those films.
Does Baumbach's apparent talent for reinvention make him the Madonna of American cinema? We think so. "You've got me," says the 45-year-old. "I'm very surreptitiously modelling my career on Madonna. This is my Ray of Light period, maybe?"
Weirdly, the comparison makes a lot of sense. The filmmaker has just completed two strikingly sunny films: Mistress America, a caper about makeshift families and cat theft, and While We're Young, a hilarious culture-clash comedy that sees a childless couple (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) fall in with hipsters Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, in order to escape their baby-obsessed breeding friends.
Rediscovered vinyl
It’s not unlike an earlier, funnier Woody Allen picture. But featuring rediscovered vinyl.
"There is something comical about that idea," says Baumbach. "A lot of people I knew threw out records and analogue technology, only for a younger generation to reclaim them. And I have been re-exposed to music I never would have listened to as a kid. We use Lionel Richie's All Night Long in the movie. That's a good example. I hated that as a kid. I only heard it again as a rediscovery by a younger generation and suddenly realised how great it was. If for nothing else, I thank the youth for All Night Long."
While We're Young sees Baumbach teaming up again with Ben Stiller, who previously headlined the filmmaker's Greenberg, and who also voiced some of Baumbach's script for Madagascar 3. Yes, that happened.
"He saw an early screening of The Squid and the Whale, and called me up," Baumbach says. "I think we just recognised something in each other. He grew up in the Upper West Side, and we are roughly the same age. I think we find a lot of the same things funny. And we had a great time on Greenberg. So when I was writing this movie I had his voice in my head. I knew it was an opportunity to do something – more so than with Greenberg – that fitted in better with his comic iconography."
The presence of Stiller only serves to emphasise the psychogeography. Meeting Baumbach, a dryly humorous, well-dressed and decidedly urban-looking west-coaster, one is struck by a recurring theme in his work: this man couldn't be more New York if he was giant and green and holding a torch aloft. He is a graduate of Vassar College. He once worked at the New Yorker. And oh, he even has a therapist.
Aren't his films, which have frequently flirted with autobiographical themes – his parent's divorce inspired The Squid and the Whale – cathartic enough?
“No. I have therapy for therapy,” he says. “Films are more a byproduct of therapy.”
Therapy?
Why does he need therapy? “Well, I suppose it’s different in the culture than it used to be,” he says. “Pharmaceuticals changed everything. But my parents believed in it. And their friends believed in it. Growing up, I didn’t know filmmakers – that was like a profession that happened far away – but I knew therapists. I still find it useful. But it’s not something I’m cultish about. I won’t try to force it on you.”
Baumbach may not have known any filmmakers during his youth, but the son of novelist Jonathan Baumbach and Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown was steeped in film culture nonetheless. "Both my parents loved movies," he says. "And I was the perfect age for the first three Star Wars films and Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET. I loved Spielberg – he and Woody Allen were my favourite filmmakers. So that was a very big part of my life. Movies that my dad took me to or movies that my mom took me to. And the conversations we'd have afterwards. We'd come up with alternate ideas and endings, and what we would have changed.
“That was great. I’m still in that headspace. I feel I still do that in a way. It’s just that now it’s my job.”
Spielberg buff
When he was a Spielberg buff, did he see himself championing smaller, character-driven movies? "No," he says. "When I dreamed of making movies, I didn't necessarily think I'll make small character-driven movies. I thought I'd be making all kinds of movies. Like 48 Hours. Or The Road Warrior.
"But I seem to do what I do. And I don't know how good I'd be at making The Avengers. It takes a while to make a movie. You have to really invest in it. It's not something I'd feel motivated to spend that much time on."
