Director Noah Baumbach has been perfecting his particular brand of witty, acerbic indie cinema for over a decade. And his career seems to have had two stages: the early phase, generally a comedy of errors mien populated with erudite collegiate urbanites (like the clever ’90s malaise and ennui sufferers of “Kicking and Screaming”) and a slightly more personal phase that began with 2005’s “The Squid In The Whale,” continued through 2007’s “Margot At The Wedding” and into his latest, “Greenberg,” where his focus has turned to fractured families, the emotional violence within those dynamics and the crushing disappointment of dreams that remain unfulfilled.
And it appears that perhaps Baumbach is coming full circle again with the newly announced, “The Emperor’s Children,” which almost appears to pick up where his alienated aesthete 20-somethings have left off, tracing affluent, educated Caucasians now approaching their 30s full of the anxiety of failed ambition.
Is this just us projecting? Possibly. Before “The Emperor’s Children” was officially announced — though we did speak about it briefly, Baumbach had already pegged it as a directorial project he had taken over from Ron Howard — we spoke about the matter at hand, “Greenberg,” it’s music by James Murphy and the process that brought Baumbach’s latest project to the screen, for what may possibly be looked back on as his trilogy of lost, acidic and self-involved protagonists behaving badly.
Starring Ben Stiller, Rhys Ifans and Greta Gerwig, “Greenberg,” was released in New York and L.A. on three screens last week and this weekend, Friday March 26, it begins to spread across the country, expanding into approximately 200 more theaters. While this writer didn’t particularly love the film (see review), some of our Playlist staff felt very differently and at the very least we can all agree it’s definitely worth seeking out at your local arthouse.
The Playlist: Tell us about the impetus for making the film.
Well, it was the characters that — particularly Greenberg (Ben Stiller) and Florence (Greta Gerwig) — were characters that I found myself writing about and I didn’t know much in the beginning but I knew I wanted to write about these two characters and I knew I wanted to put the movie in Los Angeles. And everything else really came out of a lot of work and sweat.
Is there a compelling force that says, “I wanna do this in Los Angeles” or “This character has been in my head for a long time”?
Yeah, I try to follow different threads. If I find myself in the beginning stages of writing a script, if I don’t have something I already know I wanna write or have written, I just try to follow what’s interesting to me. I mean, a lot of these things don’t go anywhere or end up getting folded into other things later. In the case of “Greenberg,” though, it was a character I’ve wanted to write about for a while and I’ve written versions of it — of different Greenberg-like characters in the past. So for whatever reason, it came at a time where I felt like really pursuing it.
So it’s an organic route then.
There’s always things that stay with me or recur to me that feel like movies. I find very early stages of writing scripts, I feel like I see the movie, I know the movie but I have no idea what it is at the same time. So I’m trying to follow that. Sometimes I get impatient because I feel like, well, ‘why aren’t we there yet,’ you know? But I try to just go with it and see where it takes me. I also have written things where I have bigger story elements from the get go but I try not to know too much about it because the fun of it in a way is when you write things you didn’t see coming.
You strike me as someone who writes daily, regardless.
I try to. If I’m in the middle of something, I do. Sometimes it’s hard if I don’t have anything particular to work on it can be difficult. Usually what I do is take notes in a Final Draft document. So if I decide to hit the character key, I can usually start writing a script.
Music seems to be a key component here.
Yeah, in the case of “Greenberg” I heard the LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver record while I was writing and it was, I don’t know so much of an influence as an inspiration. I was playing it all the time and I felt like the stuff that James [Murphy] was tackling on that record, a lot of it felt similar to what I was trying to get at with Greenberg.
Were some of the aging themes on that record, like “New York, I Love You” and “All My Friends,” an influence?
Well, I already had a lot of the script. It dovetailed and probably got in there in ways that I don’t realize too. I even stole a line from James himself, when I first sat down with him to talk about doing this he had actually just come back from LA — we were in New York — and he was saying how he had identified with a lot of the stuff that Greenberg says in the script and he added that he was at a sushi restaurant and someone was really making themselves at home at the restaurant. Like, they had their legs out, splayed out, and he said, “you know, just treating the restaurant like it’s your living room.” So I ended up putting that in the movie.
LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends”
So you approached him with the script and sort of went from there?
Yeah, I sent him the script. I had it in my head that I would investigate his interest level in doing a score from an early point. But I also felt like “you never know” and if nothing else his record has gotten me to this point. But I sent him the script and we had coffee and we really connected right away. We’ve become friends and it was a really great way to work because I think we both work similarly. I think we both like to work with friends, we both work very hard, but we also like the social aspects to engage with the work aspects.
And interestingly enough the material he delivered is very different from his usual material.
I know! We joked a lot about that. I kept saying we would invent an imaginary hipster talking to me saying (adopts annoying yet amusing adenoidal voice): “So let me get this straight, you got James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem and you made him sound like solo Paul McCartney. You played him Steve Miller band? I don’t quite understand, why did you get James Murphy!?”
So did that come out naturally?
No, I played him solo Paul McCartney [laughs]. I mean, it was a little of everything. He was in LA while we were shooting because he had started recording his new LCD record out in LA. So he was on the set — he actually appears in the movie briefly. So I would show him stuff while we were shooting; I would show him dailies. And then, his studio is a block away from where I was cutting in New York, so it was really ideal. I could include him from the earliest stages. He must have seen like 90 cuts of this movie and some things he would look at footage and then he would write something that maybe just felt like the movie to him but wasn’t for a particular scene. And other things were specifically written for specific moments. And as we refined things and got further along, obviously the work gets much more specific and you’re working with timings. And he would make me other CDs of music that he was listening to and I would do the same thing and we would find sounds or themes in these other songs that might come into play.
You have this great knack taking really well known actors and sort of subverting what they’re known for. Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, and even Ben in this delivers a really great performance that we haven’t really seen from him in a long while.
Well I felt like it seemed — I understand it’s not something people have seen him do a lot — but to me it seemed like it didn’t feel totally different from, at least, my kind of feeling of Ben as an actor. I had actually written the character younger, about ten years younger initially. So I really had a hard time thinking of who could play it. Funny thing, I kept on wishing Ben were ten years younger; I kept thinking well Ben would be great if he was younger. And I finally gave it to Ben because I thought well maybe we could split the difference, he could play a 35-year-old or something. But it was Ben’s reaction and Ben’s engagement in the character, I mean at that point he also felt it was too young but he clearly connected to something in it and that inspired Jennifer [Jason Leigh] and me to rewrite the whole thing and then make the character older. It’s funny because you work very hard and long on something and suddenly you change something significant and it really broadened the movie.
You have a fondness for, I know it’s sort of a pejorative term, but some of the “mumblecore” actors that have been in your films and you’ve been producing some of their work as well.
Three or four years ago I first started to become aware of Andrew Bujalski’s movies were the first that I saw, and then I saw you know Aaron [Katz’s] movies and I saw “Hannah Takes The Stairs” and then later “Nights and Weekends.” Jennifer and I were both so taken by Greta [Gerwig] and I just felt like these kind of incredible performances that are happening to some degree under the radar, I mean obviously people who knew about those movies knew how good she was. So Jennifer and I had Greta come to our apartment to read Florence. I didn’t know at that point if she was capable of doing something scripted because I don’t improvise or encourage it; I mean I don’t do much of it. I do so little of it, but not the way those movies are made; this a very different way of working. And so that was really my only question. In some ways she’s so convincing I also wondered, ‘well, Is she just that girl.’ So it’s a very literal way of looking at it. She was so good, immediately, she was gonna read two scenes – we had her read the whole script. I don’t know that I’ve ever had that feeling in an audition where I wish I could just shoot the movie right there and then. Her performance in some ways is so unacted or so seemingly un-acted in Greenberg that some people might be unaware of what a performance it actually is. And I mean that complimentary.
I agree, much of the movie feels loose and unrehearsed — which felt like a major departure — and then I was shocked to hear there was no improv. Did Ben have difficulty with that approach?
No. In my experience with actors who maybe have worked differently, either budget-wise or style-wise and in other areas, if they sign up for what I’m doing and how we’re doing it then they love it. I think it just might be a slightly different experience — why not, you know? And I look for that from actors. I mean I am totally open to changing lines if I feel like they don’t work. My feeling is that I work really hard on these scripts and I want to give them their due and I want these great actors to give them their due. It’s a pleasure for me to hear these things done by these people and get them right. If it starts sounding right and they can say them honestly, that’s a major part of what I’m trying to accomplish.
There’s a mental illness theme in “Greenberg” and it feels kind of vague, like maybe people are making small excuses for his behavior? Maybe that’s just the way I read it.
He had a real breakdown. I feel like it’s only vague in that we don’t know what he was diagnosed with, but I think it’s clear Greenberg is — whether it’s actual mental illness I’m not sure about that but I think Greenberg has built up so many… he’s so defended, that something had to give. And I think that was always, I mean Ben and I were very specific about what happened and talked about it a lot. But in terms of what brings you into the movie what’s important is that you know that something in him — his psyche, his body — let him know that he couldn’t continue doing things the way he was doing them.
