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. Click to continue »
Sharon Stone is shameless. The actress considers it a skill to have no shame. She thinks everyone should try it, though she cautions that if you’re female, shamelessness can cost you. Her refusal to feel guilty, she says, has gotten her labeled difficult, or worse.