Noah Baumbach
Danny Lee: [Welcome to one of] our international
screenwriters series in conjunction with Lucy Guard
and the JJ Charitable Trust.  These lectures form part
of BAFTA’s amazing year-round learning and events
programme that aims to educate and inspire and we
are hugely proud that thanks to all the technical staff
here our lectures are online on BAFTA Guru website
for anyone anywhere in the world. Thanks also to
Curzon who have so graciously hosted us this year.
 
Tonight we are honoured to be hosting one of
America’s foremost writer/directors, Noah Baumbach.  how other directors do their job is how all the rest of
His screenwriting credits include ‘The Squid and the
Whale’, ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, ‘While We’re Young’,
‘Mistress America’, ‘The Meyerowitz Stories’ and his
triumphant new film, ‘Marriage Story’.  Noah
Baumbach’s gift for narrative subtlety, the deft and
authentic way he weaves together the story of his
characters’ imperatives, the need that drives their
behaviour, marks him out as one of the world’s great
storytellers in film.  I’m sometimes asked, in relation
to hosting this series, whether I consider the fact that
the screenplay is eventually manifested in a perform
and film to be in some way a diminution of its artistic
significance in comparison to say a novel or a play.  and a director must take this responsibility very
I’ve always thought the question missed the
fundamental point, which is that all narrative fiction
begins and ends with characters in action and the
stories that unfold from each of their singular
dynamics, so I make no apology for saying again and
again that without the controlling imagination behind
every screenplay, narrative film would not exist.  Show
me a great narrative film, whatever the journey of
production, whatever the reshoots, recasting, hiring,
firing, editing and special effecting, and I will show
you a great screenplay.  So we will begin, as we always
do, with a montage of the work by this year’s
lecturers.  Noah will then talk, followed by a Q&A
with writer and broadcaster, Danny Lee, after which,
as we always do, we’ll open it up to the floor.  Could
we please have the montage, thank you.
 
[Applause]
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
Ladies and Gentlemen, Noah Baumbach.
 
[Applause]
 
Noah Baumbach:  OK.  I’ve never given a lecture
before.  So, since I’m going to sit and talk about my
own movies for a while in conversation I thought I’d
start by talking a little bit about other people’s movies. 
Mike Nicholas said about directors, “Speculating on
us think about sex, which is does everybody do it this
way?” I’d also wanted to focus in particular on the
beginnings of certain movies, the opening sequences,
you know the way we’re first introduced to the
characters, to the story, and how directors and writers
choose to begin.  I think as many filmmakers are in
the audience you know that this is something we’re
tasked with inventing all the time.  My friend Brian de
Palma, who is also the subject of a documentary I
made, emphasises that it’s your only chance to
introduce the audience to your characters and to your
movie. It’s your opportunity to do anything you want
seriously.  He said, “Think about how many movies
start with generic aerial shots of the city.  Why would
you blow this opportunity?” With drones it’s even
easier now to do.  But then you think about the
opening of The Shining where the aerial shots say
everything, those gliding images with that music, that
strange haunting feeling, so of course there are no
rules or when we make them for ourselves we need to
know when to break them.  Greta Gerwig pointed out
to me that my movies tend to tell you what they’re
about at the very beginning.  I wasn’t aware of this, but
it’s embarrassing when you go back and look.
 
[Laughter]
 
Mum and me versus you and dad is the opening line
of The Squid and the Whale.  In Greenberg Greta
Gerwig herself says to the unseen car in the lane next
to her while she’s trying to merge “Are you going to let
me in?”  Interestingly, when I was doing press for
Greenberg an interviewer pointed out this line to me

and that it told the whole story of the movie and of
her and Ben Stiller’s characters, that the movie was
about letting people in and I started to cry, because I’d
never thought about it this way.  Honestly, I just
thought she was changing lanes.
 
[Laughter]
 
So, as filmmakers we are aware of some things and not
of others and I’d like to keep it this way, if I may.  I
find in general that if you’re successful in telling the
story the other things take care of themselves.  I pick
four movies and beginnings that I love, I mean they’re
movies that I love, but they’re also particularly special
to me because of the ways that I came to them when I
first saw them, so we’re going to look at a couple of
clips.  The first is from ‘Jules & Jim’, directed by
Francois Truffaut, and the second is from ‘Goodfellas’,
directed by Martin Scorcese and this is how both
movies open, so I’m supposed to make this very
obvious, so now we should play the clips!
 
[Laughter]
 
[Clips play]
 
There’s a scene in a movie I made called ‘While We’re
Young’, the character played by Ben Stiller is giving a
lecture, I had to imagine this because as I told you, I’ve
never given a lecture before and he has a PowerPoint
presentation and it stops working and he tries to figure
it out and we tried to get some laughs that way.  I
know now that experience because in my dream of
this moment it would play through the entire montage
at the beginning of Goodfellas but there was some
breakdown in the communication so you only got that
first part.  That first part doesn’t really relate to Jules &
Jim as much as the part that comes after, but it’s
probably on YouTube, maybe someone could get it up
on their phone and pass it around and maybe you
guys remember it, Tony Bennett sings Go from Rags
to Riches and after he says I want to be a gangster we
see him as a kid, it’s always great when people talk
movies.  In 1990 I was at Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie New York, it’s about 2 hours outside of
New York City if you don’t know Poughkeepsie.  It’s
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also immortalised in The French Connection where he
says, “do you pick your toes in Poughkeepsie”.  I grew
up with parents who loved movies, who sometimes
wrote about movies and who introduced me to many
kinds of movies, but it wasn’t until college that I began
to truly appreciate international cinema.  It was at
Vassar that I saw Jules & Jim for the first time.  And
it’s great when you see, I imagine people in the
audience have had this feeling, hopefully many times,
but it’s great when you’re younger and you see the
right movie at the right time.  I felt elated when I saw
that movie from the very beginning of that montage
and it seems so contemporary to me.  The ideas of
friendship were very relatable to me, although the
specifics were totally out of my experience and weirdly
the sub-title of “pros” I thought was, p, r, o, s, but and
even the central love triangle, really the main story of
the movie, was mysterious to me and it really remains
that way to me to this day, but none of that matters
because the movie had such feeling and such energy
and I’ve returned to it many times over the years and
it’s meant different things to me every time I see it and
if pressed to say my favourite movie, which is always
an annoying question, just because I never feel like I’m
going to do it right for myself, but I will often say Jules
& Jim.  I’ll also say E.T.  The same week I went to the
Poughkeepsie Galleria, which was a mall 30 minutes
from school where we’d go to see new movies and I
saw the new Martin Scorcese movie Goodfellas and it
blew me out of my seat.  And as a teenager in the
1980s I was discovering a lot of great artists from the
seventies and the sixties and before that and often on
VHS (I was told I should take a moment to explain
what VHS is [laughter]).  Before it came out of the sky
you had to put tapes and things to play things, you
could record on them, you could record for 6 hours
but the quality was terrible.  My parents got divorced,
my father was dating a woman who lived in
Manhattan, which was very glamorous for all of us for
many reasons, but in Manhattan they had cable. 
Again, for those of you, before it came out of the sky,
it came from under the earth [laughter].  But in
Brooklyn we had no cable, they didn’t give us cable. 
Now Brooklyn has everything, everyone loves
Brooklyn, but then we weren’t worthy of cable, so she
would record things on these 6 hour extended play

tapes and she’d just run it on Showtime and my father
would bring them back and we’d be so excited.  also come back to that scene in a new context later so
Actually I put this, a version of this in the Meyerowitz
Stories, that we would get things like Gorillas in the
Mist, Scanners, Beverly Hills Cop.  So we would have
these sort of triple shows that made no sense except it
was just what they ran on the thing.  That’s a
digression.  But often these filmmakers that I was
discovering from the past when I would see their new
movies, things, you know that were coming out
currently in the movie theatre it sometimes wasn’t
considered their best and I would think oh I was born
too late, I’m not getting the best moment of this stuff,
my Bond was Roger Moore, uh, my Rolling Stones was
the album Dirty Work, which doesn’t get much of a
laugh because nobody knows what I’m talking about.  them I feel like I’m kind of participating in them, it’s
But here in Poughkeepsie I was seeing a classic in real
time.  My Scorcese was Goodfellas, and in
Poughkeepsie I felt like Truffaut and Scorcese were
speaking to each other in some way, because if you’d
seen the rest of the clip this would make a lot more
sense.  But, so, ‘cos he tells the story similarly in the
rest of the clip, in that it’s, but it’s with Henry Hill’s
voice instead of the sort of omniscient narrator of
Jules & Jim and as it tells you very deliberately what is
going on, and I would just like to add as a matter of
fact-checking when I moderated Martin Scorcese’s
DGA screening a few weeks ago and I brought this up
to him, his response was “Goodfellas is the opening
sequence of Jules & Jim for 2 hours”.  I feel in both
these sequences the excitement of having the idea is
expressed in the execution of it and this is one of my
favourite feelings in movies and something I often
from both Truffaut and Scorcese.  My friend Wes
Anderson does this as well.  There is an economy and
an energy in both.  We’re introduced to the characters
in a very direct way as I pointed out, the use of the
voice over is musical.  We’re told Jules & Jim became
friends, there’s no question about it, we’re told ‘I
always wanted to be a gangster’, it’s not ambiguous.  feeling.  It gives a sense of both present and past tense
The sequences are almost complete in their way like
short films, but they suggest so much more to come,
particularly in Scorcese’s movie, the scene you did see
in the car (the accordion player is not supposed to
come for another five minutes [laughter]).  You know,
the scene that we see in the car is mysterious, it’s
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thrilling, it’s violent, it’s horrible, you know and we
it means something to us differently later.  But there is
also the thing of being in such, they’re like announcing
themselves as well, that you feel in such great hands. 
We also have that experience in movies where, I
particularly don’t like this in horror movies, where if I
don’t feel like I’m in good hands and I have that
feeling that anything could happen in this movie at
any time, but in the worst way, because I feel taken
advantage of, I feel manipulated, versus when you’re
with a director where you feel like anything could
happen in this movie and I love that feeling because I
will go anywhere with this person.  Watching these
sequences feels physical to me, I mean when I look at
the way my father used to be when you’d sit on the
couch watching Nicks games, he would always kind of
do this wiggle with the action of the thing, and I feel
that way watching these sequences.  It’s so important
too because what the movies are about is how this
visceral giddy propulsive feeling can’t last forever, it’s
fleeting.  In Jules & Jim it’s innocence, youth, early
friendship, early love, in Goodfellas it’s the rush of
success, power.  I always think this movie is as much
about success as it is about the mob.  It’s the party and
then what comes afterwards.  I’d also, just to say also
about the music in Jules & Jim, Georges Delerue’s
score is such an important part of it and perhaps we’ll
talk about later, for Marriage Story, Randy Newman
and I listened to a lot of Georges Delerue and we
looked at a lot of sequences, particularly in Truffaut
movies because of the way he uses it.  In Frances Ha I
used many of these scores actual, we used the scores as
a kind of collage to create a similar feeling of
exhilaration.  The music is big, it’s beautiful, it’s
romantic, it’s melancholy.  It doesn’t underscore the
scenes or push for feeling, it reacts, it almost springs
out of the movie itself and it plays the bigness of
and the editing, the energy I feel like is what’s so
present in these sequences but the music makes it feel
like past, and there’s something very sad about that.  I
think, why don’t we look at… there’s two other clips
that I’d like to introduce and talk about. The first one
is from ‘Blue Velvet’, directed by David Lynch, and the

second one is from a movie, ‘Trouble in Paradise’,
directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  So let’s play those 2 clips,
now, please.
 
[Clips play]
 
In 1986 my friend Bo and I took the subway into
Manhattan from Brooklyn and saw Blue Velvet at the
Waverley Theatre in Greenwich Village.  I fabricated
this episode in The Squid and the Whale.  In that
movie Jeff Daniels, who plays the father, chaperones
his son on a date to go see Blue Velvet, as I imagine it
would be uncomfortable, and David Lynch was very
kind in lending me the clip from Blue Velvet.  If you’ve
seen the movie, Isabella Rossellini is naked and bloody
and says he put his disease in me and then Laura Dern
gives a kind of indescribable, it’s almost like an
inhalation and exhalation at the same time, in
reaction, and I realised recently that that was my first
collaboration with Laura Dern.  All the time I’d been
thinking that Marriage Story was the first time, but
again, it came when an interviewer asked me about it,
and I said “no, that was Laura Linney” and she said,
“no, but in Blue Velvet”… anyway so that made the… I
didn’t cry in this interview.  As I said before, this was a
time when I was discovering great movies and a lot of
directors from the past, but I was also lucky enough to
be seeing these amazing new filmmakers of the
moment in the theatre, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch,
Spike Lee, the Koen brothers, Alex Cox, Jane
Campion, it was a really exciting time for me to be
discovering movies, and I think the sequences speak
for themselves, they’re very clear in certain ways.  The
Blue Velvet clip you start with something sort of
familiar and something we’ve seen a version of before,
but then, but something is off and unfamiliar, and
then of course we go underneath to this horrifying,
disgusting, bug life and it puts you in a mood for
what’s to come, although what’s to come in Blue Velvet
is totally unpredictable.  But it also expresses how
these things live side- by-side all of the time.  In
college I took a screwball comedy class, which was
comedies of the thirties and forties, which had huge
impact on me and I saw movies by Preston Sturges
and Howard Hawks and Leo McCarey and Frank
Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, who directed Trouble in
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Paradise, and I’d never heard about Trouble in
Paradise, I didn’t even know who the actors were,
Herbert Marshall, who plays the baron,  Miriam
Hopkins, who we see briefly playing the ukulele in the
gondola, Kay Francis, all wonderful actors, but not
well known, at least in the 1980s.  And my teacher, Jim
Steerman, because you were in a learning environment
they would point out these things to you, pointed out
the genius of starting with the trash gondola.  And it
immediately reminded me of Blue Velvet at the time
which I had seen already and setting you up right
away for this idea that nothing is exactly what it seems
and beneath the surface a kind of glossy surface there’s
a darker underbelly, and that these things are ever
present and live together always.  But at the same time
both these movies are so inviting. They, I mean all 4 of
these clips you can’t stop watching.  I mean if we could
we could just watch all of them and rather than talk I’d
actually rather watch the clips.  But Lubitsch I find
really one of the best directors, I mean ever.  And I
drew upon Lubitsch a lot for Marriage Story, his
blocking particularly, his camera movement, which
you saw some of there, the notion of performance,
often his characters are performing in some way,
which you learn about that character.  ‘To Be Or Not
To Be’ which is another great one that he did about a
theatre company in Nazi Germany.  There’s also often
a sense of façade, but mostly his incredible energy.  I
mean I picked these clips just as a way of introduction
in a way sort of to talk about, even to get into talking
about my movies is because I feel like those are really
exciting moments in life when you start to see
connections or invisible conversations between works
of art from different time periods.  And these 4 were
particularly illuminating for me at the time, when I
was growing up, and I feel like unfortunately this
happens less frequently as an adult.  But when I watch
movies by these filmmakers it brings me back to that
sense of discovery and as a creative person that’s a
kind of headspace I want to be in as much as possible.
 
I’m going to now show you the opening of my new
movie Marriage Story and afterwards we’ll have a
conversation and talk about that movie and perhaps
some others.  The clip should be shown now.
 

[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
Danny Lee:  Noah, that was fantastic. I kind of feel I
just want to listen to you talk more, is that
permissible?
 
Noah Baumbach:  Well yes, if you ask me direct
questions I’ll talk.
DL:  Fine, let’s do that and we won’t queue up any
more, oh no we are going to queue some more clips
aren’t we?
NB:  Right, we have more to show.
DL:  It was fascinating to listen to you talk just now, it
put me in mind of a couple of years I spent teaching
English and at that point in terms of teaching young
children to put one sentence in front of the other, it
felt like there were 2 ways to do that, you could either
teach them grammatical devices and teach them from
the blackboard, or what turned out to be much more
effective, you could throw a pile of fascinating books
at them, which they would never have heard of
otherwise and they would make their way through
them and they would become people who were
comfortable and who were joyous with language.  It
sounds a little bit like you were doing both at the start
of your career but it was veering towards the latter, it
was veering towards just bumping into a huge amount
of great films.
NB:  Yeah well I had, I had the sort of luxury, but also
the challenge I would say of having parents who were
cinephiles and who would put these movies in front of
me, often movies too early.  That’s what I was saying
about Jules & Jim,  like I had seen other French
movies or Italian movies in high school and I kind of
knew I was supposed to like them but I didn’t, I just
couldn’t get there yet, and I always feel like, and this
still happens with certain filmmakers where I’ll revisit
them every few years with that hope that something is
going to open up – American directors too. I mean
like John Ford.  Like, I know he’s a great director, I’m
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still waiting to be, to totally enter in, not all of his m…
I love ‘My Darling Clementine’ and ‘The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance’ but those, for whatever reason
were more accessible to me, than ‘The Searchers’
which, you know, I know to be great, but I haven’t yet
had that feeling of its greatness and I think, you know,
but it’s exciting when that happens, when those, like
you say, it is like learning a new language.  Eric
Rohmer, I was just in Paris yesterday so I was trying to
say Rohmair
DL:  You said Rohmair the second time
 
NB:  What’s that?
DL:  You said Rohmair the second time
NB:  Yeah but Eric Rohmer in America, I couldn’t, I
saw a couple of his movies, I think I saw a movie of
his in college, and I saw a new movie of his right out
of college and I really struggled with them and then it
was at a film festival, it was a retrospective of his at the
Film Forum in New York, and I decided to give it
another chance, I think I was in my late twenties, and
it was like a drug, I kept going back, I kept going and I
felt like I was learning a new language, so much so
that there was actually when ‘Pauline at the Beach’,
they were showing them sort of in order, and that
one’s in the eighties, and I, when it came, they had
shipped a print without subtitles and it didn’t matter, I
felt like I knew, I mean I speak some French, but I felt
like I was so inside the movies now and his rhythms
and now he’s one of my favourite filmmakers.
DL:  I wonder is that do you think just a result of
getting older and actually watching more films or is
that a result of becoming a filmmaker and actually
knowing that world from the inside out?
 
NB:  I don’t know that being a filmmaker has a lot to
do with it because when a movie connects it connects
viscerally, emotionally, I’m not thinking about…
usually if I’m thinking about how a movie is made it’s
‘cos I’m not, it’s not a very good movie, or it’s not a
movie I’m responding to.  I think, I mean certainly age
helps, experience helps but I think it can also just be

timing, you know, you could maybe, if you didn’t get it
on a Tuesday you could get it on Wednesday.
 
DL:   Right.  We’re here to talk about script writing
specifically so I want to talk about you as a filmmaker,
but in terms of script writing I wonder what kind of
writer you are.  Are you the kind of writer who is
happy with the first draft when something delights you
on every page and every scene sings to you, or is it a
question of getting to the point where nothing appals
you or makes you want to shoot yourself?
 
NB:  Is anybody like the first part?  The idea of
everything delighting me seems like… uhh, but that’s
why I keep trying, looking for that moment.  Well,
when I think about script writing it really is
intertwined with directing for me, and editing too, I
really do experience the whole process as one and I
don’t, and I want  to talk about screenwriting, but I do,
I do find a script that isn’t a movie of my own
somewhat useless.  Like, I don’t find, I don’t think
scripts are somewhere, I don’t think scripts are
complete things, they’re by nature potential and, you
know, they’ve been called blueprints and some
directors use them very much as just guides that, you
know, Robert Altman would make an entirely new
movie out of the script he was given.  I follow my
scripts quite closely, I’m interpreting them as a
director, but I’m following, the lines are the lines and
the scenes are the scenes, but even so on their own I
don’t get a lot of delight out of them, I guess I should
say.  But, the way I work is, and I edit the way pretty
much the way I write, which is, um, often, now
anyway, I sit down to write when I kind of feel like I
have enough to start and I take a lot of notes always,
and often there’s a few different things that are sort of
going on at once and one thing kind of announces
itself and when that wire, kind of electricity, goes
through that wire, I try to follow it and, but once I
have scenes or a beginning or something I tend to
work forward and go back and revise and go a little bit
further and then go back and revise.  So by the time
I’m done with the script it’s close to being ready.  location it’s always very much the essence of the film,
Which is the same way, I don’t have a rough cut, I start
at the beginning with my editor Jim Lane, and we cut
the movie, we go a little bit, then we go back and then
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we revise, same thing.  So that when we’re done,
doesn’t mean, of course we make changes throughout,
but and once you see it all together it gives you other
ideas, but the, but it’s generally in very good shape.  I
don’t, I don’t sort of throw it up there roughly and
then, I’d find too disheartening I think.
 
DL:   It’s funny I remember going to Manhattan for
the first time in the nineties, and at that point I think
it was that kind of Tarantino moment, and you had
scripts which were being sold on the streets, you had
like bootleg scripts.  It doesn’t sound like you were the
kind of person that was seeking those out as those
almost fetishistic objects of the script itself.
 
NB:  I’d never seen a script until I wrote one and it
was before Final Draft or any of these screenwriting
programmes and my first movie ‘Kicking and
Screaming’ was the first movie I’d ever seen which I
had to actually write it to see it and I had so much
trouble with the tabs getting the formatting because
you know it was before, so my whole experience
mental memory or emotional memory I should say of
that process was just hitting tab and trying to centre
Grover with the line and I spent so much time trying
to get it to look like a script..
 
DL:   That was the important stuff
 
NB:   Yeah, yeah and then I looked at some scripts just
for the formatting, I bought scripts you could buy not
on the street, I didn’t know about those, but I bought
published scripts, but they were often, or the ones I
had were all kind of transcripts of the finished movie,
they didn’t look like scripts as I’ve now come to
understand them.
 
DL:  In terms of looking at the scenes you played just
now and finding sort of connective tissue to your
work, it feels like place is a very obvious one.  Whether
that’s Venice or whether it’s Lumberton, there’s this
sense of place, which is more than just, it’s never just a
and that really feels like something that you’ve brought
through in your work as well.
 

NB:  Yeah, yeah and what’s interesting about Blue
Velvet it’s very specific but it’s very generalised at the
same time.   Lumberton, you know, where is that? But
it seems we all know where it is but we have no idea
where it is, which is amazing.  Yeah, place is a big part
of it and I like to know the place when I’m writing, I
mean I need to know the place, but I mean I like to
even have visual ideas of the streets, the locations, if I
can, when I’m writing.  For the same reason I often
use real names in my scripts of people I know.  Not
because I’m writing about them at all, I would never
do that, but because it’s immediately a real person to
me, I believe it. I know that, I know who Roger
Greenberg is because I grew up with Roger
Greenberg.  He wasn’t Roger Greenberg in Greenberg
but he, also because I hadn’t seen him since I was like
15, but I had deep affection for him and for that time
in my life and even though the movie had no literal
connection to that, calling him Roger Greenberg made
me love him, and also it made it real to me.
 
DL:  I mean you mentioned Brooklyn in your lecture
and Brooklyn obviously has this pivotal role and again
it’s this sense Brooklyn is not just a place it’s a source
of drama, a source of conflict sometimes, you have
that relationship between Manhattan and Brooklyn
which comes up in your work. I know you have in
Marriage Story, New York and LA, so it’s less Brooklyn
specific, although it is Brooklyn but it’s also New York
and it’s the coast as well.  Frances Ha before we look at the clip because again
 
NB:  Yeah, it’s also home and I think notions of home
that come up in my movie, even my first movie
Kicking and Screaming, they are by design not at
home but they’re in college but it’s become a kind of
surrogate home that they don’t want to leave and it’s
sort of being fixed and associated with a place that can
be, that can hold you back or it can propel you
forward, you know, and you know, place and family
and home, I mean all these things then can become
versions of each other.  In Marriage Story New York
and LA in some ways become stand ins for, once the
lawyers use them as arguments in their divorce, they
become representative of the characters themselves
you know, and that’s true but it’s also not true.
 
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DL:  Yeah, we tend to think of our places the kind of
person we are, but as you say, that’s sometimes a
mistake.
 
NB:   But Brooklyn, to what you’re saying, I mean I
have a strong connection.  I feel like a lot of what I’m
doing as  a creative person is a conversation or maybe
a sort of silent conversation with my younger self who
loved movies.  I mean I think it’s why I was drawn to
talk about what I talked about is that I’m always
talking to that person who is discovering movies for
the first time who is excited about them and so often
I’m drawn to the world of that time as well, even if I’m
not…Squid and the Whale was actually that time in
my life, but the even when the movies take place say in
the present, it’s still, in some sort of cinematic way I’m
sort of still conversing with that boy.
 
DL:  We’re going to shortly queue up another clip
from Frances Ha and that’s a particularly fascinating
thing I want to pick up a thread really because Frances
Ha is seen as not about you, you know it’s a different
generation, it’s a different gender, but I would be
fascinated to know in which way Greta and you kind
of merge on the screen. 
 
NB:  Sure
 
DL:  I mean do you want to say anything about
New York is vital.
 
NB:  Again, I think it’s the beginning of the movie,
right?  Well, again well Frances Ha was also I think
even more directly inspired in my mind anyway by
Jules & Jim’s opening.  And you know it is about
friends and it’s also about you know friendship as love,
sort of a love story between friends and the story of
course is about that bond but also it’s about
individuals and a pair at the same time, which
Marriage Story is too.   But show the clip and see how
I was sort of introducing again the sort of language of
the movie that you were going to later see.
 
DL:  Absolutely.  Well let’s look at this clip from
Frances Ha.

 
 
[Clip plays]
[Applause]
 
NB:  I haven’t seen that in a while actually.  I just
quick, uh, the world premiere of Frances Ha was at the
Telluride Film Festival, which is an amazing festival,
um, we were there with Marriage Story and I love it.  and you get the trash gondola which is like, you know,
But we were premiering the movie and no-one knew
we’d even made the movie ‘cos we kind of made it sort
of under the radar, and so it was very exciting and so
here it goes and there was some, um, the movie began
and there was music and picture, but I knew ‘cos there
was also a low dialogue soundtrack, you know,
ambient track underneath, that wasn’t playing, and
there was no way anyone who didn’t know the movie
would know, so I turned to the person, you know,
friendly person with the headset who was next to me
in case there was a problem and told them “you got to
turn it off, you got to turn it off” and it sort of takes
the mystery and drama out of showing a movie when
you have to restart, and so they stopped the movie sort
of part of the way in and then, a few minutes and then
they show it again and it’s the same problem again and
so then they stop it again and you’re really losing the
momentum of your worldwide premiere.  But I did
have to explain to people that the movie is actually in
black and white [laughter] because at that point I
think they were all like oh the colour’s off [laughter].
 
DL:  So third time lucky did it play?
 
NB:  The third time it played as it was supposed to.  this script but it really did, I think also shooting in
Of course in my imagination there was somebody like
“oh!” you know, plugging in the thing, you know that
thing in movies when the thing’s just not, but I’m sure
it was more sophisticated than that.
 
DL:  It’s such a beautiful scene though because it feels
so haphazard and it feels so random, it feels like a sort
of box of snapshots that you’ve sort of stumbled upon
and then you realise by the end of it you have, you’ve
given us so much information.  Information is a very
unsexy word but it’s also vitally important in movie
8
storytelling and it’s this incredibly, again, I mean it’s
just high praise, it’s a very functional scene.  You know
you’ve told us a lot.
NB:  Well that’s, you’ve just, again, going to the clips
that we looked at in the beginning, which are, I mean
they’re poetry, but they’re also just as you say, they’re
absolutely functional, they really just tell the story.  In
that Ernst Lubitsch clip you learn so much so quickly
it’s like amazing and it’s you know, as I was saying
about Goodfellas and Jules & Jim, they actually just
tell you exactly what you need to know.  I mean we
don’t use voiceover here because we didn’t need it and
it wasn’t the style of the movie but the, yeah, of course
I’m even watching it now looking at them fighting in
the beginning and it’s a play fight but they’re fighting
and I’m like, that of course is sort of what the movie’s
about too.  But, I mean this movie was in some ways
as I was making it, it was a movie I needed to make
but almost didn’t know it.  I wanted to make a movie
in a different way than I had before and in a sense I
felt like I wanted to make the first film, my first film all
over again or a first film I never did make and I was
also exploring working digitally for the first time.  I
mean I’ve since gone back to film.  Marriage Story is
shot on film.  Meyerowitz Stories before it was also
shot on film.  But I wanted to shoot with a very small
crew and kind of not, the sort of notion that like we
don’t need to tell anybody, why do you always have to
like tell everyone you’re making a movie, let’s just go
make something.  The conversation we’re having right
now could be in the movie if we were recording it and
filming it so let’s just do that and Greta and I wrote
black and white sort of going to your sense of place, I
was shooting in New York again I had shot Greenberg
in LA before, so I was coming back to New York, and I
think seeing New York with kind of fresh eyes literally
in a different, with no colour, and in a different way,
and in a different medium with digital instead of, it
freed other things up even in the storytelling and I
love that about making movies ‘cos what I was saying
too about the things you know and the things you
don’t and I find more and more if you focus on the
storytelling the really, sort of what you’re saying, the

functionality of things, then you’ll back into some
more magical or things that can be misconstrued as
profound.
 
DL:  I mean was the writing process kind of a question
of relearning as well? Because filmmaking is
collaboration of course but I mean writing at least at
first draft stage, isn’t.  If you’re writing solo you’re
there, you are at that moment the executive, but here
you were collaborating with Greta from the word go
with the script.  How much of a change did that
represent for you?
 
NB:   I collaborated with Wes Anderson on the movies
he directed but this was the first time I collaborated
with somebody where I was directing it and um, yeah,
it was, it’s less lonely for sure and what’s nice about it,
it is about conversation, and although Greta and I
weren’t  in the same place very often when we wrote
Frances Ha, a lot of it was done individually and then
emailed back and forth and then we would revise each
other’s and then I would collect this bigger script as a
whole and start putting it together.  It’s funny ‘cos I get
asked the question a lot you know about
autobiography in my movies and the one I get asked
the least, you were alluding to this in your
introduction to it, the one I get asked the least about is
Frances Ha because people don’t see me as a 27 year
old female.  But it actually, I think a lot about, there’s a
lot of how I’ve, I went through a period after I made, I
made 2 movies when I was quite young, I made
Kicking and Screaming when I was 24 or 25 and then
a movie, Mr Jealousy, when I was 27.  And then I
didn’t make another movie till I was 34 or something,
34/35, Squid and the Whale, and that period for me
was a period of real struggle and in my conscious
mind I was trying to get another movie made, I was
writing things trying to get another movie made, what
I was doing unconsciously was growing up and I felt
very much like, I mean Frances talks at some point
someone says “what do you do?” and she goes “well it’s
hard to describe” and they say “why” and she goes
“’cos I don’t really do it” and I felt that way.  I’d made 2
movies but I didn’t feel like I could call myself a
filmmaker ‘cos I wasn’t doing it and I wanted to do it
again but I wasn’t doing it and it was a very hard
9
time.  And I emotionally reflected a lot on that time
from my point of view, I mean so much of Greta’s in
the movie too obviously, but in that sort of what I
guess they call quarter life crisis.
 
DL:  No, it’s just fascinating hearing you talk ‘cos also I
think people do think of Frances Ha as Greta’s film but
from what you’re saying it almost feels as if there’s a
timeless quality, both to the change in Brooklyn, and
also you know to Greta at 27, and then there is still
part of you at 27, a little further down the line and, it’s
so culturally specific.  It’s about, and While We’re
Young is, the same thing happens there, very culturally
specific about Brooklyn now but from what you’re
saying it’s still…
 
NB:  But with Frances I feel like it is culturally specific
you’re right but it is… part of the choice to do it in
black and white was to put it out of time too, and
While We’re Young is like, I feel, more in time,
culturally specific and maybe even has some
limitations because of that.  Frances I do feel like, and
also the use of the music, it is all Georges Delerue
music, there’s some other songs, Paul McCartney,
there’s David Bowie, there’s Modern Love that she runs
to, but it was all by design to kind of I felt in a way to
sort of honour her, that you have this, you know, in a
certain sense an ordinary life and but for all of us
living it it’s extraordinary and I wanted the movie to
kind of to react in kind and give back to her and that’s
what that music does.
 
DL:  We’ve got another clip of Marriage Story to look
at but I wonder just before we play it, ‘cos it speaks to
this point, did the character of Frances and also
working with Greta, did it improve you as a writer?
 
NB:  Yeah, absolutely.  If for no other reason I was
trying to impress her.  I, she would send me scenes
and boy it was so good it was so exciting to the point
that I’d just like, if I knew maybe a scene was coming
I’d just be like refreshing email hoping it would come
through.  But yeah it would always make me feel good
if she liked what I sent her or laughed at a thing or
something like that.  So certainly on those movies, but
I think, I know, I’ve improved as a human being

because of her and as a director at least in my eyes
from watching her, from working with her and
watching her movies now too.
 
DL:  Let’s pick up this thread after this next clip from
Marriage Story.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
NB:  Do you want to show the screenplay clip?
 
DL:  Well, let’s just pick up the conversation there, ‘cos
I think it’s worth saying actually it’s interesting you
applauded then.  I mean I think when the film’s been
on the festival circuit for the last few months, I mean
there has been quite a lot of spontaneous applause at
that scene in particular.  I mean I wonder do you feel
like you could have written that without having co-
written Frances Ha first?
 
NB:  Probably not, I mean I, also without knowing
Laura was playing it.  A lot of the impetus for that
scene came from talking to Laura ‘cos Laura and
Adam and Scarlett I’d had involved in the movie even
before I was writing it, and one thing that I was
talking to Laura about in playing this character, if you
haven’t seen the movie, is the divorce lawyer, and was,
and we were talking about it even from an actor’s
perspective, of like, what got her into this job in the
first place, what is you know, it wasn’t always
Machiavellian, you know she’s obviously very good at
working within the system and the system is
Kafkaesque in a way, not to quote The Squid and the
Whale,  but it, so it was the sort of notion that she got
into it to crusade for people and for women in
particular, and so that was kind of the thought, and I
thought well then we should hear that, that should
come forward, and working on that scene with Laura
was amazing too because there were so many ways to
envision it.  And I would just say, why don’t you say it
now like you’re having these ideas for the first time,
why don’t you say it now like it’s prepared, why don’t
you try it now like you get angrier as you tell it and
one that it’s almost cathartic as you…and she could
10
just dial it in and out and so that was just one of those
fun days at work.  But Greta is very much in that too. 
I mean in writing it too it was like I’d talk to her about
it as well and throughout this whole movie and we’re
very much involved in each other’s work, even the
ones that we’re not working on officially together, you
know we’re always very involved in each other’s work.
 
DL:  I’m going to hand over for you.  Thank you for
bearing with me.  I’m just fascinated in your career I
could sit here and ask you questions all night.  Just one
last one before I do that, I mean in terms of your
relationships with actors, how much of a joy is it for
you to almost, just for a second, relinquish control to
them, ‘cos obviously you can control what’s on the
page but then once it’s with an actor it can’t help but
become something different.  I mean is that a pleasure
for you?
 
NB:  Yeah, absolutely.  And I find that I mean in some
ways working with actors is not dissimilar to what I
was saying about writing in that if you get the basics
right, you know, again the storytelling, the efficiency, a
sequence, other things start to reveal themselves in the
work and suddenly you see, oh that’s in there too, well
now I can detour a little here because you’ve got the
framework, you have the structure, I can now do this
little aside and this little thing here and maybe break,
like I said, break a rule here.  And I find that that’s for
me in a way, I mean Elia Kazan always talked about
being a prop, you know people would talk about what
a good director he was with actors, he said “I’m a prop
director, you know I come up with good props for
them and things for them to do and that gives them
ideas and it opens them up” and I know what he
means, I think giving them a framework and a
structure.  All scenes are very blocked out and we have
it really down to every little moment and the dialogue
is all precise but then just as you say, then they, I feel
like it gives them all the freedom in the world to be
present, to just be, you know, to find the truth of
what’s going on and find their truth and working with
actors like this too who are alive to everything that’s
different in the moment and everything that they give,
if they’re in a scene with somebody else, even if they’re
off camera, you know they’ll change based on the

reaction that they’re getting.  You know, Adam Driver
in the movie will, he’ll say, we’ll do a few takes and I’ll
be feeling pretty good and he’ll say “I’m going to try it
not crossing my legs this time” and I know to him that
means something else is going to happen because he’s
changing his reality and changing his physical posture.
He’s so aware of how all of these things factor into
performance and I try to give actors as much of that as
I can, that I think of, and I might say to an actor
“maybe don’t cross your legs or maybe stand up this
time” because I feel like it’ll change something.  And
that’s exciting and I do relate it to writing in that way.
 
DL:  Thank you for your patience, letting me ask my
questions.  If you have a question, a hand went up very
quickly in the front row, I’ll try and get round as many
people as I can. The microphone will come and find
you.
 
Q:  A few years ago Liv Ullmann was sat exactly where
you are now, different seat but same spot.
 
NB:  Who sat there?
 
Q:  Sorry?
 
NB:  I missed the beginning.
 
Q:   A few years ago Liv Ullmann was sat where you
are now, different seat but same spot, and apparently
the film Persona came about because Ingmar Bergman
thought that Liv Ullmann and Bebe Anderson looked
incredibly alike, which I’ve never seen, but anyway, but
I remember seeing the trailer for Marriage Story the
first time and as soon as Scarlett Johansson appeared
on the screen I thought Bebe Anderson, so the
question I guess is to what extent is Scarlett
Johansson’s haircut written into the script and can you
perhaps talk, especially in light of Laura Dern’s speech
about absent fathers, about the whole Bergman
influence on this film.  so the movies that I was looking at and thinking of
 
NB:  About the, say the last bit again?
 
11
Q:  The whole Bergman influence on this film. There’s
an explicit reference to Scenes from a Marriage in this
film, so
 
NB:  Well, I mean Bergman is one of my favourites,
and another, I mean talking again about movies that
directors and artists that reveal themselves more to
you each time you see them and also at different
times.  I saw Persona in college and I couldn’t really
make heads or tails of it, and now it’s a movie I watch
frequently, I watch it before every movie really.  But I
particularly looked at Persona for this movie because
of the close ups  and the framing of faces and, I mean
that’s a movie also about, I mean it’s about everything
in a way, but it’s about, one of the things it’s about is
the sort of duality, parts of the same person in a sense,
and it’s also it has about performance, she’s an actress
who loses her voice, I felt that, you know, what
happens to these performers is they lose their voices
when the lawyers take over and we shot those scenes
very deliberately as if they’re conversing but they are
not saying anything.  It’s almost like voiceover, internal
monologue, but it’s the lawyer’s talking next to them. 
So Robbie Ryan, my DP, we looked at that movie a
lot.  In terms of Scenes from a Marriage, it’s funny ‘cos
people brought up, at one point it’s a clipping from a
magazine that Scarlett’s mum, played by Julie Haggerty
has framed and put up and it was a magazine clipping
about Charlie and Nicole, I just thought it seemed like
the obvious title for a magazine piece about it because
they are married and they’re in theatre, so of course
you’d call it Scenes from a Marriage.  I didn’t mean it
as a direct reference to Scenes from a Marriage,
although of course I did.  But it’s a movie I love.  I
didn’t look at it again in particular for this. I didn’t
really look at movies with similar themes for this
movie because many of them, Kramer vs Kramer
being one, Shoot the Moon, I love The Awful Truth by
Leo McCarey, uh, E.T. I think of as a great divorce
movie in a sense, I mean about the aftermath of it, and
were really more specific to the task at hand of.  You
know, I looked at Dr Strangelove for the courtroom
and for the offices because there were so many people
at tables and rooms and that movie both has obviously
the sense of absurdity and also the sense of menace. 

And it’s both a horror movie and a comedy at the
same time and I feel that this movie in some sense is
that too.
 
DL:  That’s so true actually, there’s that sense a darker
energy has taken hold.
 
NB:  Yeah, and Kubrick’s framing is so he, you know,
captures that, and the sort of way we shot the offices
was also in some what inspired by him.
 
DL:  Just here, about 5 rows back
 
Q:  Hi, so you talked a lot about fallibility and also the
extraordinary ordinary a little bit earlier and I,
especially when I went to see Marriage Story I saw a
lot of that where characters were really just incredibly
human and they make mistakes and there’s
misunderstandings and sometimes they’re likeable and
sometimes they’re not.  How do you go about crafting
your characters in such a way that they seem like
people you relate to and you root to but are also, like
you say, fallible, and don’t always get things right?
 
NB:  Yeah, well in this movie in particular I thought a
lot about perspective, also.  About, I mean it’s become
such a part of divorce because you actually have
people arguing 2 different perspectives of the same
experience and then even the opening of the movie is,
on one hand it’s beautiful and romantic, it’s someone
saying what they love about someone and it’s all the
ordinary little moments in life, but it is selected by the
person who’s talking so it is selective too, and those
moments we see come back later, or variations of them
come back later and mean different things in different
context.  And the movie is also structured in a way
where we start with both of them together but then
when we go to Los Angeles with Nicole, Charlie’s not
in the movie for a little while and it’s all very much her
life and her experience of her life and we’re never with
any other character except Charlie or Nicole for the
whole movie.  Even when the lawyers are talking in
front of them we never go over their shoulders and get
inside their world, we’re always over Charlie and
Nicole’s shoulder, so, you know, so that if we were
talking and then we turned to the audience we would
12
stay over our shoulder, we’d never go down and shoot
from over the audience’s perspective, we would always
keep them, you know as part of our experience.  And
then that becomes true when Charlie re-enters the
movie and we stay with him, so it’s almost like they
almost appear as characters within each other’s little
movies at times.  And then when they kind of enter
the process, the sort of legal process, we then are
always with both of them.  So that was a way, that was
both built into the script and very specific, but also
something that then we found visual counterpoint for. 
I mean I find often with the material I’m drawn to,
very true of Marriage Story, that humour and drama
and sympathy and fallibility and sympathy, that kind
of exists side by side and part of my job is to be aware
of it and to let it in where I see it.  And I don’t think
about writing comedy to lighten a dramatic scene or
adding drama to you know because things are getting
too silly, I think of it that they always exist, not unlike
the bugs and the waving firemen.  They always exist
side by side and so I need to be aware of that and
acknowledge that and it’s sort of how I see things, I
mean it is how I see things and how I approach
writing.  I sometimes thought you know what I think
I’m just going to go funnier on this, I’m just going to
make this a full out comedy and then I, you know, it
just suddenly is so sad.
 
DL:  I think we’ve go time for one more question and
we’ll try and go, is there someone at the back?
 
Q:  I just wanted to ask you about the Mumblecore
movement, because I know you got involved in
producing some movies during that and I wanted to
see how it affected your writing process because it felt
from the outside that your work almost became, or
seemingly, more improvised as a result of working
with those filmmakers.  That might not be the case,
but it seemed like that as before it was very kind of
almost Woody Allenesque crisp writing and then it
kind of became a bit more I guess human and natural
seeming. I don’t know if working with them affected
your writing process?
 
NB:  No.  I mean every movie is absolutely scripted, I
mean no different, I’ve never, I don’t improvise on set. 
 13

It doesn’t mean I won’t change something if it’s not thinking anymore and you’re not… it doesn’t mean it
working, but I mean we rehearse everything in doesn’t need to be revised and figured out later but it’s,
advance so then we’re you now, if an actor has an idea it’s that kind of daydreaming mind that so much
on something that’s not working I’m totally open to creativity comes from.
that but a lot of sometimes how I relate to when we’re  
shooting a scene is also in the musicality of the DL:  It’s like parenting your own talent almost.
dialogue, it’s hearing it, it’s seeing it of course, but it’s  
also hearing it.  It’s like music in that way, for me.  So I NB:  It is, it is.  And it is about, and it is why, it’s so
often find if an actor, if a scene’s not working, if I interesting the way people work to, you know, or what
actually recheck the script it’s ‘cos maybe an actor’s they need to work to find themselves.  Cos some
inverted two words or has dropped a line or people love, Greta loves being in like she’ll go to a
something, because and something has fallen off and I coffee shop to work because she loves sort of entering
find that usually if we go back then they, then it starts, this world with life around her.  I think it feels safe for
doesn’t mean it works immediately, but then it starts to here, whereas I like quiet, I like to be in an office, I
click in a little bit more.  I always think a very like to be in my own environment and that to me feels
interesting thing about actors and directing actors, safer to slip into this mode, which again if you’re lucky
sort of to what we were talking about before the sort you get for a few minutes…
of conscious and unconscious thing that these, I mean  
many of the actors I’ve worked with do so beautifully, DL:  Every now and again.
but then Adam and Scarlett could both be totally lost  
in a scene but also doing all the specific gestures and NB:  Every now and again yeah
movements that we had already choreographed.  But is  
sometimes I’ll find when, and this has been true of DL:  No-one’s sadder than I go have to do this but
amazing actors, is I’ll do, you know we’ll start shooting we’re out of time, we’re going to have to leave it there,
a scene or something and you do a couple of takes and but please, Noah Baumbach.
it isn’t, you know, it hasn’t quite found itself yet, or  
whatever, and then suddenly, you know, I’ll find myself [Applause]
leaning forward behind the camera like here we go  
and the actor will say “sorry, sorry, can I start again?” NB:  Thank you.
and I’m like you know. But I totally sympathise and  
understand that because I know I do that as a writer.   
It’s like when you’re falling asleep and you realise
you’re falling asleep and you jolt yourself upward and
you’re like oh God I was there, and I’ve got to you
know do this again, you know.  And I think there is
that thing, that fear of going into the unconscious and
sometimes I see it happen with actors it’s like they
catch themselves getting lost and it’s, and um, again,
you know, my job is to create  an environment where
they can slip into that and not jolt awake, but I also
find it’s our job as writers, is to try to find that place
too because it’s so easy to decide to look at how much
money that movie made at the box office or whatever
you’re going to do on your phone instead of working
and you know I’d find the best writing is when you
find yourself you know slipping into it and you’re not
14