Noah Baumbach, the writer-director most associated with Brooklyn, explains how he made an (almost) cliché-free movie about L.A.
Los Angeles magazine, March 2010
» The Filmmaker’s Back Story
Noah Baumbach’s first movie was shot in Los Angeles, and you weren’t supposed to know it. The writer-director had wanted to set Kicking and Screaming, his 1995 film about a group of friends struggling to get moving after college, at his alma mater, Vassar. He made do with Occidental College but worked to make Eagle Rock evoke an upstate New York vibe. Since then the 40-year-old New Yorker has depicted ’80s Brooklyn (in his 2005 film, The Squid and the Whale, which nabbed him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay) and present-day Long Island (in 2007’s Margot at the Wedding).
In collaboration with his friend Wes Anderson, he has also imagined whimsical worlds (he and Anderson cowrote the scripts for 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and last year’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is up for a Best Animated Feature Oscar this month). Now Baumbach has made his first film about Los Angeles. In theaters March 26, Greenberg stars Ben Stiller as a former musician who has returned home to L.A. to recover from a breakdown after living for years in New York. The city on display in Greenberg is less iconic than familiar. It is the L.A. that Baumbach has gotten to know thanks to his wife, the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, who grew up here.
Baumbach and Leigh, who are expecting their first child this month, split their time between New York and L.A. “I would say we live in New York and have a house here. Jennifer would say something else,” he explains. “I think of it as, like, our country house in Los Angeles.”
-Amy Wallace
» Baumbach talks about Greenberg (as told to Amy Wallace)
I don’t know which came first—wanting to set a movie in L.A. or wanting to do a movie about a fortysomething guy who can’t get out of his own way. I had an idea of this character, Roger Greenberg. I wanted to tell a story about a guy who in these very particular ways is trapped in a false sense of himself. Someone who is still hung up on being perceived a certain way and is under the impression that people still care how he’s perceived. And the older he gets, the more this becomes an issue. It makes his life very hard to live.
I had wanted to do something for a while, too, that touches on a trend in a lot of American male novelists’ work: books about men at crisis points in their lives. Sometimes these novelists revisit these men over and over again, like in John Updike’s Rabbit series or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. I thought it’d be interesting to do a movie in that vein.
Greenberg grew up in L.A. but has lived in New York for years. He doesn’t drive. He can’t really swim. He can’t do the things that L.A. is ideal for. Even when he goes on a hike, when it’s hot, he wears his down vest. I mean, why would you come to a place where you can’t function? Setting the movie in L.A. enabled me to put the main character in a broader landscape. We shot the movie in wide-screen. Greenberg is so caught up in his own mythology that I liked the sense of putting him in a city that wouldn’t indulge that.
Before I met my wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, I had spent a lot of time in L.A., but I didn’t know the city at all. Through Jennifer I started to feel at home here. I started to see the city in the way she saw the city: as a place she’d grown up in, as a real city. So I just started to see the city differently, and I felt like it’d be great to do something here that approximated my and her experience of the place.
On Kicking and Screaming we were trying to hide L.A. I picked locations, but I didn’t know what any of the neighborhoods were. I still try to figure out where those locations are. While we were shooting Greenberg, the female lead—Florence, played by Greta Gerwig—goes with her friend to the Machine Project gallery in Echo Park. When we were shooting there, next door was a coffee shop where a lot of us would go between setups and hang out. And while I was sitting in the coffee shop I became convinced that it was the coffee shop that was in Kicking and Screaming. I don’t know if it’s true or not because they’d changed a lot of it, and I asked and nobody had been there long enough to know.
There is a point in Greenberg when Greenberg looks around a backyard pool party in L.A. and exclaims, “All the men out here dress like children, and the children dress like superheroes.” A pleasure in writing the character was coming up with these rants. I don’t always disagree with him—and I maybe agree with him more often than not. Sort of like I felt about Bernard, Jeff Daniels’s character in The Squid and the Whale. When Bernard dismisses A Tale of Two Cities as “minor Dickens,” he’s arguably right. But in Greenberg’s case, his rants somehow run out of steam. He’s too tired to finish some of them. He has so many different criticisms going at once. And they’re all really about protecting himself or feeling out of place or insecure. But because there’s plenty real and imagined to take L.A. to task about, because there’s plenty in the culture to criticize, he can hide behind that. It’s like railing against the Bush administration or something. You can mostly be right. But there’s a certain point where if you’re Greenberg, even the most staunch liberals would get tired of listening to you.
The opening shot of the movie is a place I often walk my dog—he’s a shepherd-collie mix—near Runyon Canyon. The shot begins with the city and tilts over to find Florence walking a German shepherd. I didn’t actually intend that to be the opening of the movie. The script opened a different way. But when we were cutting the movie, I thought, This feels like the movie. You see the hazy city—you see West Hollywood and downtown in the distance—and then we find this woman in the midst of this serene dog walk in these mountains. It seemed so Los Angeles. So I said, “Why don’t we start the movie like that?” And we ran credits over it, like movies did in the ’70s. It wasn’t until later that I realized how it captured this real sense of Los Angeles: this city-country thing happening all at once.
Then you go from there to Gower Gulch. Florence is doing errands for the family along Sunset. I think the feel for this movie wasn’t what felt beautiful but instead what felt personal. I’d done this in Brooklyn when I made The Squid and the Whale, and I suppose I followed a similar track with this, which was to pick locations that had meaning to me. I love how odd Gower Gulch is. Where else can you find a Rite Aid with a western theme?
Lucy’s El Adobe is a place Jennifer loved growing up, and she still loves it. Some people see it as just the Mexican restaurant near Paramount, but she really has an emotional connection to it. So we go there sometimes. That was our first day of shooting, the scene of Greenberg eating at Lucy’s.
And then there’s the orange blow-up man—you know, that huge flailing figure that seems to move when a fan blows air into it. I’d seen a bunch of them while driving on La Brea. They’re kind of dreamy, and then they’ll convulse in a way that feels unpleasant. When I went to a car dealer on La Brea where I’d seen one, they didn’t have the guy I wanted anymore, so I found him—the orange one—and brought him back to re-create the scene.
Sometimes a location is true to you, but it’s been overshot. I went back and forth on Musso & Frank because I thought, Is it too classic? But because it’s Greenberg’s birthday in that scene, I liked the majesty of Musso’s working in contrast to his anxious mood. And then of course it all ends with him storming out after the waiters sing him “Happy Birthday.” We used all the real waiters there. And real regulars. We tried to do that everywhere. At Musso’s, Lucy’s, the Sake House, we used real people.
Any errands Ben Stiller does in the movie, we shot for real. We had a van with curtains, and we hid the camera and put Ben out on the streets. When he’s running out of Jons Market on La Brea, that’s real. When he’s mailing letters, he’s really at the post office. When he’s walking on La Brea with the Hasidim outside a Jewish temple, those are all real people.
In L.A., oddly, that kind of stolen shot is easier to get. Even with Ben being so well known, in L.A. no one is on the streets because everyone’s driving, so no one’s looking at you. In New York that’s more difficult. I think with stolen shots you get something that you don’t get when you hire extras and have them pretend to talk—an energy that you can’t fake. I mean, in Midnight Cowboy all that stuff of them walking through the city was stolen, and it feels that way. I like it in movies when people look in the camera, and you realize, Oh, they were shooting this for real.
Have you ever noticed that you see the bases of palm trees—the parts at eye level—more than you see the entire thing? I tried to show that in the movie. You don’t go around looking up that much. It’s the same thing in New York. I’ve spent my whole life there, and I still see parts of buildings that I can’t imagine I never noticed before.
Harris Savides, my cinematographer on Greenberg, also shot Margot at the Wedding with me. To capture the look of L.A. we talked about our own experiences of the city and the light at different times of day and the seasons. We also had film references. We looked at totally disparate movies, like Heaven Can Wait and an adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, which is hard to find, but we got a print of it and screened it. I think Jordan Cronenweth, a great cinematographer, shot it. And it’s beautiful. It doesn’t work, really, as an adaptation of that book. But the look is really beautiful. And I’ve always loved how The Long Goodbye, the Robert Altman movie, looked. Before I even knew L.A., it felt like such an interesting glimpse of L.A. They flashed the film in that movie, which softens the contrast and somehow enhances its L.A.-ness.
So we shared a lot of L.A. things that we liked. But then it came down to telling the story we set out to tell. You go into it with a lot of ideas—“We should shoot this ideally at this hour!”—but in the end, you shoot when you can.
At the risk of revealing too much, Jennifer and I had a dog who did get this illness that was similar to what the dog Mahler gets in the film. And while our dog was at the veterinarian—a vet’s office where, by the way, we would later shoot some Greenberg scenes—they sent us to a pharmacy to fill a prescription. And the song “It Never Rains in Southern California” was playing in the pharmacy. I must have heard it before, but I felt like I hadn’t. I said, “This is a really good song.” And Jennifer said, “Are you kidding? They used to play this on the radio in L.A. every time it rained.” Ben says that in the script, and he also says what Jennifer said next: “And what’s the other song? ‘Burn Baby Burn (Disco Inferno)’—they’d play that during wildfires!”
Initially I thought “It Never Rains” would play in the beginning, when Florence is driving. But then I used the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” instead and had Ben play “It Never Rains” for Florence later in the film. I just had a moment that happens every so often—I’d imagine it happens to you—where I realized, Steve Miller was good.
Another night, driving back from Lucy’s El Adobe, we were listening to some alternative radio station and the LCD Soundsystem song “New York, I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down” came on. And the voice of the song felt like another version of Greenberg. It’s a great song. That whole record—the Sound of Silver record—is great. I ended up getting the record and listening to it while I was writing, and it became another voice of Greenberg and an inspiration.
So I went to James Murphy, whose band it is, and asked him if he’d be interested in scoring a movie (he ended up writing songs and the score). This is before we shot Greenberg. And we really hit it off. We met in New York, but he had just been in L.A. He said he shared a lot of Greenberg’s observations. He said, “I was at a sushi restaurant the other day in L.A., and this guy had his feet stretched out in the aisle and he was just making himself at home. And I was like, ‘Just treat it like your living room!’ ” I thought that should go in the movie, so I put it in.
I think in part the movie is about loneliness. And L.A. can be lonely. In New York, when you set out to go just to meet somebody for coffee, you’re either on the street with other people or the subway with other people. In L.A. it’s you and NPR in your car. In the opening minutes of the film, Florence is driving and talking to the person in the car behind her—“Are you gonna let me in?”—and thanking them when they do. But she’s really talking to herself. In L.A. you’re really having the conversation with yourself, not with everybody else.
