Director Noah Baumbach is an independent filmmaker who loves telling stories of rebellion. Beginning with his debut feature Kicking and Screaming, he has carved a unique way of storytelling that few have been able to recreate.
His latest is the adult comedy While We’re Young, and it reunites him with his Greenberg leading man Ben Stiller. In the film, he and Naomi Watts play a married couple whose midlife fears are made even worse when they befriend a younger hipster couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. The generational gap between the two groups makes for interesting commentary, something that Baumbach is used to and embraces. In fact, he constantly jumps between age gaps in real life, directing adult stories like Frances Ha and The Squid and the Whale on one side and co-writing animated films like Fantastic Mr. Fox and Madagascar 3 on the other.
Baumbach recently traveled to San Francisco to promote While We’re Young, and we talked about filmmaking, age gaps and adult stories. This is a transcription of that conversation.
Q: I was able to see this movie last year at TIFF and your new movie Mistress America at this year’s Sundance. Was the plan to always make these movies back to back?
Noah Baumbach: The plan initially goes back further to make While We’re Young first, and it didn’t happen for various reasons, so then we made Frances Ha and Ben was making Walter Mitty. Greta and I had been working on Mistress America, a movie we really wanted to make, so we thought we’re not going to have enough time to fully finish it, but let’s do it as far as we can do it.
Q: It’s interesting how many moving parts depend on actors’ schedules and availability.
Baumbach: Yeah, sometimes in interviews you’re asked to make sense or order of things and they don’t turn out the way you plan them.
Q: There’s a generational conflict in some of your films. This one seemed like Generation X versus Millennials. Is that something you were conscious of as well?
Baumbach: I wasn’t conscious of the notion of young and old as I was of the notion of characters that were interesting to me, subsequently in stories that I was interested in telling. Obviously in While We’re Young I was thinking of different couples and how they interact but I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of the other work.
Q: You’ve got Adam Horvitz (one of the Beastie Boys) in this movie. Do you think he’ll keep acting?
Baumbach: Yeah, I hope he’ll do it for me again. I love Adam.
Q: I noticed in the credits you thanked Dreamworks Animation. Any particular reason why?
Baumbach: Because I’ve done work with them like Madagascar 3.
Q: That’s a very underrated movie! It was the best of the three but obviously the biggest surprise was seeing your name on it.
Baumbach: (laughs) Underrated is a very interesting way to describe a movie that made three quarters of a billion dollars.
Q: Critically underrated.
Baumbach: I’m joking. They’ve been great partners and I wanted to acknowledge their support even though they’re not involved with this one in any way.
Q: Are you and Greta still doing the animation project at Dreamworks?
Baumbach: I don’t think that’s going to happen. For various reasons it’s not going forward.
Q: Since Ben is a filmmaker himself, how closely did you two work together on the script and how much of that character is Ben?
Baumbach: I don’t always write with someone in mind but in this case I started writing it after Greenberg came out and I had a really great time and connection with Ben on that. I also wanted to make a comedy of a certain type; I wanted to make a movie that connected me to my adolescence. Comedies that could be mainstream and broad but also character oriented.
Q: In your portrayal of hipster culture, which I’m hot and cold on, I like that you kept a balance between keeping your characters likeable and not too annoying. How did you maintain that balance in the script?
Baumbach: The thing is in the movie we’re meeting them through Ben and Naomi, another couple. There are also arguments in the movie about art and music that are subsets of the bigger story I was telling. The story of a marriage and how sometimes you have to come apart to get back together, which is also a very traditional comedy structure. That allowed me to tell the story without taking sides and that’s good because I wouldn’t know which side to take anyway.
Q: The last time we spoke you mentioned you were trying to get The Squid and the Whale into the Criterion Collection. Has there been any progress on that front?
Baumbach: Yes, but it’s more dealing with a rights thing right now.
Q: Since they have access to some of the Sony catalog, it would make sense licensing wise.
Baumbach: I hope so, yeah. Everybody wants it to happen.
Q: You’re traveling from city to city answering a lot of the same questions. Is there one question you wish would go away?
Baumbach: Not on this one. The responses to the questions on this press tour are of a range that I can answer.
Q: What about on press tours in general?
Baumbach: On Frances Ha you get tired of answering why black and white, but at the same time I understand why everybody asks it. I would want to know that too. But when you have to answer that 600 times, it gets tedious. The real answer is I don’t know, I just decided to do that. (laughs)
While We’re Young is now playing in limited release.