Before “Barbie” did the Box Office history and got him to his fourth Oscar nomination, Noah Baumbach Still enough from its last solo writing/directoring effort.
Baumbach’s 2022 Netflix film “White noise“Shared critics and failed to get a strong audience at release. The Don Delillo source novel is of course almost to be almost impossible to adapt to the screen. In a new interview for the Venice premiere of his next film, “Jay Kelly”, Baumbach now reflects how difficult the filmmaking process was when asked about the “sharing” answer to the film.
“It was a really hard time for me. I’m very proud of that movie, but I had a really hard time to do it,” Baumbach told Vanity. “I had this feeling of, which,” do I do this just because I always wanted to do it – do I even like to do it anymore? ”
The author/director added that he had a “silent crisis”, which led to him wondering if he would even continue in Hollywood. Still, “White Noise” offered him a new source of inspiration: Baumbach became friends with Emily Mortimer on Set, as her child May and Sam Nivola (who would later start in “The White Lotus”) acted in “White Noise.” Mortimer and Baumbach went on to write “Jay Kelly”, Baumbach’s first directing since “White Noise.”
“I don’t really know why I asked her to write it with me,” Baumbach said about 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 more fun and more charming and more depth than I might be without her.”
When it comes to the action of “Jay Kelly,” Baumbach said, “It’s about falling in love with what you do and falling in love with yourself.” George Clooney plays as a title character, a veteran actor who balances paternity with fame. Baumbach is reunited with his “marriage history” partner Laura Dern for the film and Adam Sandler.
“Movie stars are our avatars. They are people we invest in and project on and live through,” Baumbach said. “And a movie star needed to play the movie star. It was in DNA for what this thing should be: What if a movie star mainly played one and reflected our own vulnerabilities and our own questions about life? What would it mean? I don’t know I knew exactly, but it seemed interesting.”
And all is well that ends well: it was too “white noise” led to “Barbie.”
“I wrote ‘White Noise’, and then, when I had it in a place where I thought, OK, I have done much of the heavy lift, Greta and I started working with ‘Barbie’, Baumbach said before Entertainment every week. “So it happened everything during the first year of the pandemic. They are kind of connected to a fun. The execution is different but there are aspects of the world of” white noise “that actually informed about how we looked at” Barbie. “
