Before “Barbie” made box office history and earned him his fourth Oscar nomination, Noah Baumbach was still reeling from his last solo writing/directing effort.
Baumbach’s 2022 Netflix film “White Noise” divided critics and failed to gain a strong audience upon release. The Don DeLillo source novel was famously understood to be nearly impossible to adapt to the screen. In a recent interview ahead of the Venice premiere of his next film, “Jay Kelly,” Baumbach now reflects on just how difficult the filmmaking process was when asked about the “divisive” response to the film.
“That was a really hard time for me. I’m very proud of that movie, but I had a really hard time making it,” Baumbach told Vanity Fair. “I had this feeling of, like, ‘Am I doing this just because I always wanted to do it — do I even like doing it anymore?’”
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The writer/director added that he had a “quiet crisis,” leading him to wonder if he even would continue in Hollywood. Yet “White Noise” offered him a new source of inspiration: Baumbach befriended Emily Mortimer on set, as her children May and Sam Nivola (who would later star in “The White Lotus”) acted in “White Noise.” Mortimer and Baumbach went on to co-write “Jay Kelly,” Baumbach’s first directorial effort since “White Noise.”
“I don’t quite know why I asked her to write it with me,” Baumbach said of Mortimer. “But I liked myself with her. I liked how I felt inspired. She brought so much of herself to this, but I also felt that I was funnier and more charming and more profound than I might be without her.”
As for the plot of “Jay Kelly,” Baumbach said, “It’s about falling back in love with what you do, and falling back in love with yourself.” George Clooney stars as the title character, a veteran actor balancing fatherhood with fame. Baumbach reunites with his “Marriage Story” collaborator Laura Dern for the film, as well as Adam Sandler.
“Movie stars are our avatars. They are people that we invest in and project onto and live through,” Baumbach said. “And a movie star needed to play the movie star. That was in the DNA of what this thing should be: What if a movie star was essentially playing one, and reflecting back our own vulnerabilities and our own questions about life? What would that mean? I don’t know that I knew exactly, but it seemed interesting.”
And all’s well that ends well: It was also “White Noise” that led to “Barbie.”
“I wrote ‘White Noise,’ and then, once I had that in a place where I thought, OK, I’ve done a lot of the heavy-lifting, Greta and I started work on ‘Barbie,’” Baumbach previously told Entertainment Weekly. “So that was all sort of happening during that first year of the pandemic. They’re kind of connected in a funny. The execution is different but there are aspects of the world of ‘White Noise’ that actually informed some of how we looked at ‘Barbie.’”
