On working with legendary collaborators.
Baumbach explained that the level of talent and experience that the cast brought to the table allowed him to discover more in scenes. “I really loved it, it made it fun in a way, in all cases that you can just do more, you can always just explore more, just press down on the scene more,” he enthused. “Dustin is just ferocious and loves going over everything and talking about it and I love that to. I’m really grateful for what he gave me, I cant imagine many of his contemporaries committing to what he had to do in this movie. It’s not easy for anybody, these long takes and scenes that go on and on. To also be so uncompromising with the portraiture. The same was true, it was such a great thing to be able to write Candice Bergen and say ‘Would you come do this?’ and have her come and just do that monologue and be so moving. I cry a lot more in my life now just anyway, but the first take she did I cried and with Judd [Hirsch], same thing. So it was a remarkable group of people.”
Another charming aspect of the film is a soundtrack from the great Randy Newman, which fits the tone of the movie like a glove.
“[Working with] Randy Newman was just a great experience. If you get to work with Dustin Hoffman and Randy Newman in a lifetime, let alone one movie. It was a knock your socks off kind of experience and when we first met, Randy and I had breakfast and we had a conversation with a mutual understanding that until you really don’t know until you see the movie. We can talk about kind of what we think, he said maybe piano, because Danny plays piano, so that kind of score, but we won’t know, he kept saying, until you start sending me stuff,” Baumbach said. “And then the next day he sent me what was the main theme of the movie, so he knew. And most of it is him playing live to the movie. We did almost no edits so when he came up with the theme, he would play it live. And I thought it was an important element to have this, its almost like a narrator in some ways, but to have this other personality, these hands on keys that were also accompanying the movie, it felt like the Super 16 to me, it felt like the movie, and when that person is Randy Newman it’s a special thing.”
On Emotions Informing Technical Aspects
Baumbach shot his last few movies digitally, but he explained that he felt an emotional need to return to Super 16. “I had shot ‘The Squid and the Whale’ in Super 16, but in a kind of different way though, we handheld the movie, it was more, for lack of a better way to define it, more documentary like, less structured in terms of the blocking. Starting with ‘Frances,’ I shot digital, but I shot it on the Canon 5D and we really did a whole thing with that and I was happy with how it came out. And then I tried the Alexa on a couple movies and I realized, so much of my making movies is connected to my childhood,” he said. “It’s not just the subject matter of the movies, it’s also the going to movies, and seeing movies, and going back to that just all the time, and it’s both conscious and unconscious. Watching something on film has a totally different emotional effect for me and seeing it projected on film, which you didn’t today, also has another effect. I kind of realized that having shot digitally, I needed to do these things on film. I had tried to make an argument for digital, just to sort of try it out and it’s fine, but it doesn’t have the same meaning for me.”
Scene transitions are not something on every filmmaker’s radar, but Baumbach had a detailed thought process for their use in this movie. “It was kind of an emotional decision. All of the cutting away from people and what they’re saying was in the script and I was almost thinking of it as a version of an iris or a fade out or a dissolve and then at the end, I always thought of the end as the short story that’s added, that’s the new story at the end that was written maybe when the author was older and maybe trying a different technique in a way, so not that I expect everyone else to know that, but it just felt right ot me. I liked those abrupt fades, I’ve seen movies in the past that have done that where you feel something go into your throat or your heart in a way, it just envelops,” he said. “It was hard actually, to do those fades, because digital fades are all just uniform and we had to find a way to recreate digitally what used to be a film optical, because it was very specific, the kind of fade I wanted, I almost wanted them to just close out. But I also did them close to the action in the way that I’d cut off people, so I wouldn’t hold with the scene and then it would fade, it would fade almost as the scenes still going. Kubrick does those great dissolves into another scene while you can feel that scene continuing on. In terms of the script it was really emotional, it just felt right.”
The camerawork in Baumbach’s films rarely calls attention to itself in the way of some directors, but it’s very deeply thought out and grounded in the work of some of the medium’s greatest directors.
“People ask me a lot if my movies are improvised at all and I kind of take it as an insult. I think, ‘Come on, I’m working on these things!’ But I’m trying to take it as a compliment, because the dialogue is highly stylized and the blocking is highly stylized in the movie, it’s all very choreographed, the way of those [screwball] comedies, which I’m interested in because I love the energy of those movies,” he stated.
“But I also was watching Max Ophüls movies with [cinematographer] Robbie [Ryan] who shot the thing, beautifully, with of course the great camera movement and of course they’re dramas, not comedies,” Baumbach continued. “But they’re shot almost like comedies and was interested in that and we were thinking a lot about that, if we’re in the restaurant and Harold and Matthew and Gabe are out of the restaurant and then they come into the restaurant and we take them all the way around to their seats, that it would have the energy of a ‘His Girl Friday,’ even as there’s this frustration and Ben’s just trying to get through this day. So I was thinking about Lubitsch and I was thinking about Ophüls and about what I was doing in other movies and seeing if I could go further with it and how much can you push the stylization and keep it in this realm of reality. But it’s not reality at all, I mean the effect of the movie is an emotional true experience and a real experience in some ways, but if you break down the movie, it’s all living kind of above it. Watching like ‘Scenes from a Marriage‘ I was thinking about that, where it’s totally crazy and heightened, but you would say, ‘Oh I connect so strongly to this, it feels so real and true to me,’ and it’s just living in this theatrical world if you actually think of it, and so that’s why I feel insulted when people sort of refer to things as sort of documentary like or improvised, because I’m going for total artifice here.”
“The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” hits Netflix on October 13th.
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