In adapting “White Noise,” filmmaker Noah Baumbach often felt like a “translator,” reaching into Don DeLillo’s epochal novel and pulling out as many elements of its expansive plot as possible while also finding “cinematic equivalents” for its distinctly postmodern style.
In conversation with actress Emily Mortimer this past Saturday during the 60th New York Film Festival, which had opened with “White Noise” the night before, Baumbach discussed the challenges of doing so, also touching upon his experiences working with younger actors and getting screenwriting advice from the Coens.
Starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, the ambitious dark comedy (in theaters next month, then on Netflix in December) follows Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies at midwest College-on-the-Hill, and his wife Babette, as their family navigates the information overload of modern life, at one point also fleeing an industrial accident and the “airborne toxic event” it unleashes.
“With a book like this, where there’s so much, I was drawn to include as much as I could in the script,” Baumbach said, speaking to a packed Amphitheater crowd inside Lincoln Center’s Francesca Beale Theater. “At a certain point, once it’s a script, and in a way it’s mine, I have to find a way to be faithful to the script and not the book. What does this movie require, in my mind?”
Working as “an interpretive director,” rather than originating his own script, took Baumbach outside of his comfort zone, but he said he leapt at the opportunity. “It frees you up and allows you to personalize something that’s exterior,” he said of the adaptation process, naming Mike Nichols, Peter Bogdanovich, and Brian de Palma as directors who frequently bring a personal touch to scripts written by others.
Baumbach recalled asking filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen about their approach to adaptation. “Joel said, ‘Ethan holds the pages open, and I type,’” Baumbach recounted, laughing. “There’s a little bit of that in beginning to adapt a book; you’re typing the best bits into Final Draft and seeing how it fits.”
Given the novel’s more elliptical style in its first and third sections, as well as the wide array of characters and plot elements at play throughout, Baumbach began by adapting the relatively linear middle section, in which an “airborne toxic event” caused by a chemical leak forces a middle-class family to flee their bucolic Midwestern domicile. “It’s the first time I’ve started a script in the middle,” he said. “I didn’t even have the rights to it. As I was getting into it, I thought, ‘I’d better figure this out.’”
One stamp of approval on the finished script came from DeLillo, who signed a copy of “White Noise” for Baumbach. His inscription, according to the director, read, “Your movie, my novel. We’re now partners forever.”
In addition to Driver and Gerwig, “White Noise” stars Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, and May Nivola as their precocious children. The latter two are Mortimer’s children (with actor Alessandro Nivola), which made her involvement in the NYFF Talk the first time a filmmaker had been interviewed by “the on-set chaperone,” she said. Mortimer apologized in advance for asking questions Baumbach might have heard before since sensations of déjà vu are considered “surefire signs of imminent death” in the doom-laden consumerist satire of “White Noise.” “I wish I could tell him my familiar questions aren’t a sign he’s going to die,” she added. “But I can’t tell him that, because he is, as are we all.”
Throughout the conversation, Mortimer often acknowledged her family’s connection to “White Noise,” calling her son and daughter’s roles in the film “life-changing” and asking Baumbach about working with young actors throughout his career. “In all the structure and the professional world around a movie, when you have children [on set,] you get something that is totally out of your control,” Baumbach acknowledged. “When you find the right ones, that’s amazing and beautiful.”
In one aside, Baumbach compared working with young actors to working with animals, recounting that the “best professional advice” he’d ever received came from Ethan Coen, after he told the filmmaker that he planned to cast his friend’s cat in “The Squid and the Whale,” his semi-autobiographical 2005 comedy-drama. “And Ethan said, ‘Cast a professional cat,’” Baumbach recounted. “Because even the difference between what a professional cat can do, versus what a regular cat can do, is slim.”
Reteaming with long-term collaborators Driver and Gerwig (who’s also his romantic partner) was one of the easier decisions Baumbach had to make around the project, he said, explaining that he’s come to think of them as members of an ongoing repertory company.
“In a basic way, I think Adam is one of the most exciting actors working right now,” he said. “Adam is incredibly skilled, but he’s also constantly surprising me. It’s like listening to music; there’s the song in my head, but Adam will change the rhythm.” Driver quickly conveyed his interest in “White Noise” after Baumbach sent him the script. Gerwig, meanwhile, cast herself as Babette as Baumbach was writing, much to his delight.
“White Noise” was first published in 1985, cementing DeLillo’s literary reputation. At the time a film-obsessed teenager living in Brooklyn, Baumbach was already seeking out independent film at movie houses around the city, he said. “Blood Simple,” “Blue Velvet,” and “She’s Gotta Have It” were three memorable early discoveries for Baumbach, who dreamed of making movies but never saw this as a practical aim.
“It seemed impossible, like it happened far, far away,” he said. “It was a split ambition I had: this won’t happen, but it must happen.”
Free and open to the public, the one-hour event was organized by Talks programmers Devika Girish and Maddie Whittle, in association with NYFF executive director Eugene Hernandez and artistic director Dennis Lim.
“White Noise” will be theatrically released in the U.S. on Nov. 25, before streaming on December 30.