Noah Baumbach
Q&A
Noah Baumbach
By Jake Perlin
In December 2019, Noah Baumbach was in residence at Metrograph. He joined the theater to present his debut feature Kicking and Screaming, part of a retrospective of his work to date, paired with companion films that inspired him.
JAKE PERLIN: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my great pleasure to be able to welcome Noah Baumbach.
When you were writing Kicking and Screaming, and you’re a few years out of a school, was there a sense that it would eventually become a film? Especially at that moment in the early ’90s when movies still required to be shot on film and needed crews and stuff like that, it must’ve seemed very far off?
NOAH BAUMBACH: I imagine people can relate to that weird disconnect of this will never happen, yet we’re trying to do it anyway. I’d never looked at a screenplay before—the only screenplays I could get my hands on were things I would buy that were often like transcripts. I didn’t know how to format it, but I just kept tabbing always. There was so much tabbing. And because I’m a Virgo, I didn’t like it when it was unaligned. I think I spent more time formatting it than anything else. A lot of time went into that. And I think you see the result.
JP: It’s evident from the very first shot of the film that you’re having certain ideas about how you want things to look. There’s a very long tracking shot of Grover entering, dropping out of frame at the beginning, when it’s the two shot of him, they drop away, and you kind of leave it on nothing, then they come back up into the frame. So it’s really clear from the first five minutes of the film that you’ve watched a lot of films.
NB: Yeah, I had lots of ideas. Maybe too many. I don’t know, it’s funny to think about myself. The basic idea I remember having was that I never wanted to indulge in their lives. I always wanted them to be in the frame with the world. I mean, I did this again in Greenberg (2010) in ways, too. I had affection for what was going on, but I wanted it to be clear for the audience that they were seeing it within the world, and it wasn’t like, we weren’t cutting that part off. There’s barely any close-ups in the movie for that reason.
JP: And when you’re writing the film and then start putting it into script form, and it starts to inch closer to a reality, had you had experience—were you a kid who made films on a camcorder?
NB: I made films on a camcorder, which I edited between two VCRs. One of the VCRs just finally gave out during an editing session because it was a top loader and you could still see, like, the rainbow between every edit—you know that old rainbow that would come when you tried to pause and un-pause?
JP: Sure.
NB: This was more sophisticated. But I cut it on film. What was nice is that I had the whole experience. We shot on film, but I actually cut it on a Moviola and did the whole splicing, that whole thing. I think there’s a leisurely vibe to it, which comes from that, because it didn’t have that thing you can do now, where you can see so many options right away.
JP: No Avid.
NB: No, no. At the time, too, I think Avid and Lightworks were still in the running. It was maybe going to be one of them, which didn’t make it.
JP: Of course.
NB: But I didn’t have any idea of what we were saying. I had an idea that there’s like an official way a movie’s made. How could we get to that way, I really didn’t have any idea. I would just send the script out. I had friends of mine at the time, Jason Blum, who now produces a lot of movies. And Jeremy Kramer, who also works at—
JP: Jason Blum was a friend from college?
NB: They were my roommates at Vassar, and we all lived together outside of college as well. They were hugely helpful in getting the movie going. But none of us had any idea how this would ever get done. You get like a nice response from somebody, and you’d be like, “I think we’re probably shooting in about six weeks, you know?” A year would go by and you’d get another nice letter. It went like that until something started to gain traction. And then it all fell through, and then I ended up writing Eric Stoltz a part to get the financing at the last minute from Trimark… This is a unique period in independent filmmaking. It was a very small window that I think probably existed, where if you put Freddie Prinze Jr. in a movie, you could get it made.
JP: But also because it was this auxiliary market.
NB: Yeah, it was. I mean, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) had been a movie that I saw that had been made sort of reverse engineering the financing, where you make a deal for the home video, which finances the movie, and then you hope somebody classy buys it. That did not happen here. I ended up making the deal with the home video company who also wanted to distribute it, Trimark.
"Richard Peña and the [New york film festival] selection committee at that time started my career in a way by taking that movie."
JP: The film premiered at the New York Film Festival.
NB: Which was huge—I mean, that kind of saved the whole thing, because they got cold feet when they saw the movie, and I think they were just going to put it onto video. They had ideas that they could be like Miramax or someone, and sort of broaden their business—because their whole thing, they made the Leprechaun movies. But then, the New York Film Festival took it, and they kind of rushed it out immediately after that. I mean, I said this actually just recently at the New York Film Festival: Richard Peña and the selection committee at that time started my career in a way by taking that movie.
JP: Yeah, and it’s extraordinary. It just goes to show a very different time, taking the film by an American, putting it in the context of those other films.
NB: Even more impressive because my mom, who is a film critic, had totally destroyed the festival a few years earlier saying how they needed to be riskier. Mom is here, right, somewhere?
JP: Here’s Georgia.
NB: Yeah. The great film critic for The Village Voice, Georgia Brown.
JP: Another thing that I totally used to take for granted watching the film, because I just assumed it was the way things were, were the performances. It was watching it this time that I realized Josh Hamilton was an actor—he wasn’t a friend who you put in a movie. You became friends with him later. But it’s everyone. Some people, perhaps more recognizable than others, but particularly Josh Hamilton, who plays Grover, and Chris Eigeman, who plays Max, are terrific and don’t seem like people who just wandered into a film that a friend of theirs happened to be making.
NB: Carlos, who plays Otis, who was and still is my good friend, a friend from Vassar. And there are a lot of friends from college and my childhood throughout the movie. Jason Kassin, the one who’s with me, the cow fucker, we went to high school and college together. Yeah, Josh, the others did it for real. So Josh, I wanted Josh—and that was the thing where I ended up writing the part for Eric Stoltz because I insisted on Josh, and they wanted somebody that they felt they could sell again on home video or something. So Eric, I’d met Eric, he’d read the script somehow. I sort of invented that part just to justify his presence in the movie. I even wrote it in a way that I thought, well, “I could cut it out kind of, if it didn’t work,” because it was sort of like an adjunct to the story. But it’s good for the movie. The movie’s better for it.
JP: What was that time like post-release?
NB: What’s it been like since? Post-release, I mean, the release was funny because at the time it felt like they rushed it out. I dreamed of more happening. But of course, in retrospect, it was very nice. I mean, it got good reviews and it played at the Angelika for a while. And I mean, it’s fantastic to be here, 25 years later… I watched it a few years ago because we did a Criterion [release], and did we do an event at BAM for that, maybe?
JP: You’ve done a few things.
NB: We have done a few things. I remember that being a good one.
JP: Did it go well?
NB: Yeah, yeah. But I had to watch it then, because we looked at it to re-color and stuff. I’m very open to people’s reaction to the movie because whatever my—when I was watching it again, it was like watching something from when you’re 24 and thinking, “Oh boy, you know, I’d do that differently.” And you know, “We could really cut now, but we’re still going. And even though I know what you’re doing, you still could cut now.” I also felt that there’s all this stuff in the movie that only a 24-year-old me could do, and I wouldn’t have done now, and it wouldn’t be as good because of that.
JP: What kind of—dialogue or characters or camera movement?
NB: It’s just the spirit of it. There’s something really—I felt very affectionate towards it for that reason. And proud of myself in a way. Even though it wouldn’t be what I would do now, I loved that it was made for that reason then.
JP: I mean, it distinguished itself very much to my 19-year-old eyes from other things that were being released at the time that were sort of the same budget range, or same type of indie film of the moment. I also found it very moving watching it tonight, because it does feel like there are a lot of things in that film that perhaps, upon reflection, you might not have done, and the fact that you did them and it exists this way is just very special. A lot of things in the film just have a youthful hubris to them that yeah, I guess could only happen when you’re making your first one.
NB: Thank you. As you’re saying this, though, thinking about, actually, there was a draft of the script that went around for a while where there was a professor who went missing. And Grover is searching for him. I don’t know why I did this, but someone I showed it to was like, “Maybe you don’t need that part?” I remember finding it interesting. He’s looking for answers from this teacher that’s gone. It’s hard to imagine it in this actual movie, but yeah, that got cut before we made the movie. In a way, Eric’s part filled what I thought that served.
JP: Are there some questions for Noah?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Your dialogue is very distinct and purposeful in all your work, but especially this movie. I was wondering, when working with actors, if they ever want to change around the dialogue a bit, do you compromise with them? Or do you want them to stick with what you wrote?
NB: I have them stick.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about the retainer?
NB: Again, no, no. No, I wrote that into the script. We had it made for her, yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What is your rehearsal process like generally with actors?
NB: Even with this movie, I tried to get as much time in advance to rehearse. I liked the actors to get the script early and have time with it. To the other question, where I was glib, you know, they do have the script, but in rehearsal if an actor has trouble with a line, if we can’t make it work, we’ll come up with something else. I find having structure gives the actors freedom. You give them parameters and it gives them a space that they can then improvise emotionally, but not with the script itself. This comes from rehearsing. Generally, I work like two weeks beforehand. But usually, if it’s actors I’ve worked with or we’ve had many conversations in advance even of that, they come and they know their lines when we start and a lot of that is just getting used to the language and the blocking. On this movie, I was making it up as I went along.
JP: Every film of yours that we’ll be showing here over the next couple of weeks is paired with another, but not necessarily films that directly influenced the film that we’re pairing it with. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Can you say a word about the film we’re going to be looking at after this, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979)?
NB: Yeah, actually there are two movies that are post-influences in the series, but the first one, Chilly Scenes of Winter, which is a wonderful movie, is when I was trying to get the movie made, or I should say when I made the movie and I first started showing it to people, I kept hearing people say, “Well, the structure reminds me a lot of Chilly Scenes of Winter,” which I had never seen. I even got kind of annoyed hearing it. But when I was done, I finally thought, I should watch Chilly Scenes of Winter—and I did and I loved it. I mean, the structure they’re referring to is the Jane and Grover story that plays out in flashback. And so, I do think of it as an influence, even though I didn’t know it at the time. And Joan Micklin Silver was a really interesting, great director. She made Crossing Delancey (1988), which I love, and she made this movie. Yeah, she’s really terrific. And her husband was her producer for most of the movies. And you know, and John Heard was so great, and Mary Beth Hurt, and Griffin Dunne, and Amy Robinson produced it. It’s such a great, like, I don’t even know what genre you’d put it in, it’s sort of unclassifiable in a great way.
JP: Yeah. It’s a film that has now continued to find new audiences. I mean, I think a lot of people in this room did not see Kicking and Screaming when it first came out, and I know I certainly didn’t see Chilly Scenes of Winter when it first came out.
NB: Right.
JP: But there’s this cinematic universe that they both exist in.
NB: There’s that thing with certain movies—I remember feeling it actually here when I saw Miracle Mile (1988) again, like where you kind of can’t understand why you’re so drawn to it, it’s so compelling. You get it on one hand, it’s good, but there’s something that stays with you that you can’t quite figure out why. I mean, it goes to what I felt when I watched Kicking and Screaming again. Something wins out, and there’s a heart in there and a thing that defies breaking it down in any kind of way. And some performances maybe are better than others, you know? But also what I love about Chilly Scenes of Winter is that the cast is so the best of New York at that time.
JP: But it’s not New York.
NB: It’s not New York in the movie, but it comes out of that.
JP: The reason the pairing made sense to me is because both of these films very much have the sort of courage of their convictions. They’re not films that can be summed up easily. I mean, you could say kids stay behind an extra semester in school, or a couple breaks up. But like you said, it’s more than the sum of its parts. I think both films, Kicking and Screaming and Chilly Scenes, keep gaining admirers with every passing year.
NB: Yeah, I think that’s true. And it’s nice. To see that these things have lives is great. There’s so many movies, I mean, even movies like The King of Comedy (1982), where I remember seeing that at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema and I heard from Scorsese it was pulled, like, two weeks after it came out. Now you can’t even believe it. It’s a classic.
JP: Yeah. Amy Robinson, who produced Chilly Scenes of Winter and Mark Metcalf, who was in Chilly Scenes of Winter, will introduce the screening shortly. And I’m very grateful that you’re going to be with us for the next couple of weeks, as we sort of move through all your work and watch a bunch of films that you admire. Tomorrow we’ll be showing The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Crooklyn (1994). And then on Sunday, Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Pauline At The Beach (1983). So anyway, Noah, thank you so much.
NB: Thank you. Thank you, everybody.
