🎧 Noah Baumbach: How a Gen X Director Bounced Back from Burnout
The Oscar-nominated filmmaker tells me of ‘Jay Kelly’: ‘There’s such beauty in things that are real and tactile’
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Noah Baumbach loves a soundstage. That’s obvious from the opening moments of his new film, Jay Kelly, which uses a gloriously long tracking shot to tackle the bustling activity on the set of the titular character’s latest project. The scene culminates by going eerily quiet while Jay, whose character is mortally wounded, delivers his final line: “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to leave this party.”
Jay Kelly is, in many ways, a reflection of the actor who plays him: George Clooney. Like the fictional Jay, Clooney achieved stardom in the ’90s and is now so famous that his name stands for more than just a single person. But the character is clearly also significantly linked to Baumbach, 56, who also started his career in the ’90s — with Gen X staple Kicking and Screaming in 1995 — and later achieved broad success, including four Oscar nominations (his last being for co-writing the $1.44 billion box office juggernaut Barbie with his wife, filmmaker Greta Gerwig).
In interviews about Jay Kelly — which focuses on the title character at a personal and professional crossroads as he receives a lifetime achievement award from an Italian film festival — Baumbach has been open about how all that success couldn’t prevent him from creative burnout. In fact, despite acclaimed movies like Marriage Story and Frances Ha, Baumbach was often left feeling like Jay does in that opening line. Two things brought him back: following up on an idea he’d had for a script about an actor on a train and teaming up with actress Emily Mortimer as a co-writer. (Baumbach had cast Mortimer’s children, Sam and May Nivola, in his 2022 movie White Noise.) There was also Barbie, which had sets that rivaled even what we see in Jay Kelly.
“There’s definitely an old Hollywood feeling to it,” Baumbach tells me about the way he used soundstages for Jay Kelly on today’s special Saturday edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast. Early in his career, he never worked with that level of production design, he says, “because we couldn’t afford to build anything.” Even in 2019’s Oscar-nominated Marriage Story, for instance, Baumbach was somewhat limited in the scale of his vision. During the much-memed confrontation between stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, Baumbach says he thought it would’ve been great to have built a set, rather than use an existing space. “It was really hard to find a real apartment that satisfied what I was looking for.”
Jay Kelly isn’t quite the lavish fantasia of Gerwig’s Barbie, which was the third movie Baumbach co-wrote with her after Frances Ha and Mistress America. (Gerwig has appeared onscreen in five Baumbach movies: Greenberg, the two she co-wrote, White Noise and she has a small role in Jay Kelly, playing the wife of Adam Sandler’s character; unsurprisingly, she crushes it.) But it exists impressively within the physical world, from Jay’s Malibu mansion to the set used for the Italian train, where, thanks to Jay’s memories, doors can open into whole other worlds. Those flashback sequences were all pulled off practically, but still conjure a sense of magic. “Even having done this as long as I’ve done it, I’m always just knocked out by what the art department can do,” Baumbach says. “There’s such beauty in things that are real and tactile. There’s definitely an element of celebrating that in this movie.”
In our podcast conversation, Baumbach talked about some other surprising connective tissues between Barbie and Jay Kelly, but also got deep on his writing collaboration with Mortimer, how Clooney made the casting process probably far easier than it should have been and how he wrote killer parts for Sandler and Laura Dern — but also deliberately left the audience wanting more of them.
The Prestige Junkie podcast will be continuing through the holiday break, so make sure you’re subscribed, and also join us for even more over at Prestige Junkie After Party, where you can revisit our year-end holiday mailbag episode recorded yesterday on Substack Live. Thanks for listening!
