Just call him The Fantastic Mr. Baumbach.
Director and indie golden boy Noah Baumbach has another critical darling on his hands with “Frances Ha,” the black and white ode to single-girl-in-the-big-city living he co-wrote with girlfriend Greta Gerwig, who also stars in the film. Frances, who readily admits that she’s “not really a real person yet,” fumbles — and sometimes dances — through her friendships and general life in a sometimes funny-ha-ha, sometimes funny-cringing manner.
The film is one of Baumbach’s more upbeat works after fare such as “Greenberg,” “The Squid and the Whale” and “Kicking and Screaming.” The writer/director has also been known to make bold choices: He penned both “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.” Yes, that “Madagascar.” The one with the CGI penguins.
I chatted with Baumbach in New York ahead of the May 17 release of “Frances Ha,” covering everything from trash-talkers to secret scripts.
FILM.COM Congratulations on the movie, I really love it. I saw it at the New York Film Festival last October and you did a Q&A after. Do you watch your screenings at festivals, or are you dashing in while the credits roll?
NOAH BAUMBACH: I did when I watched it the first time we showed it publicly, I watched it at Telluride, and I watched it, I’m trying to remember, maybe I watched it in Toronto. I feel like New York, I was going to watch it at the New York Film Festival, I thought that would be the last one. Obviously when you make it, you watch it so many times, and so I felt like I’ll watch it with a New York audience at the New York Film Festival. it was a great audience, so it was a great one to go out on. The plan is probably to never see it again.
Never again? If you see your work on TV or something, do you immediately change the channel? What’s your reaction to that?
Yes, but I also…sometimes there’s something kind of momentarily fascinating about seeing it on TV, because it’s so, like, to see it in the context of flipping channels, it’s almost like there’s another thing. It feels a little bit like, it’s something…the context of it is strange. So I might just linger for a second to see, how does that feel to me? That cut is too fast, I should have held longer. I’ve gotta move on.
It’s an interesting thing, that sort of relationship to something that you’ve spent so much time on and watched so many times, and then sort of let go of for a while. I did just like a retrospective, where I was doing a talk recently, and there were clips, so I had to see each clip. That was interesting to sort of see, and to see them in context, all together, as like a group of movies. That’s interesting. But, yeah, I can’t linger on that long.
It’s like flipping through a yearbook and seeing a picture of yourself that you’d forgotten.
Yeah. They also kind of turn into, like particularly my first movie, “Kicking and Screaming,” when I look at it, it really does look like looking at old photos of friends. It’s like college photos or something.
A sort of mix of nostalgia and embarrassment?
Yeah, that’s about right.
“Frances Ha” is a very New York movie too. Do you have a favorite New York movie or any elements of those you were trying to mirror?
Well, I have a lot of, I can watch any movie that has New York in it. I’ve gotten to that point. Particularly in the ’80s, because that’s my childhood, kind of the meat of my childhood, my adolescence in New York, and then the ’70s because it’s a New York that I feel a connection to but also sort of a New York gone by that I find so interesting. And then going backward it’s like New York before I was born is its own thing. It almost doesn’t matter what the movie is. If it’s on location, I love looking at it. Like, Oh, that street, that’s no longer there! There’s something that’s very emotional about it.
For this movie, I was kind of looking at it both from sort of my own emotional relationship with this city. I’ve kind of, because I was shooting it in black and white, I was thinking about “Manhattan” and Woody Allen’s New York movies in black and white particularly.
Was the decision to shoot in black and white clear from the beginning?
It was something that was one of the first ideas I had, even before I kind of knew why that was a good choice. I kind of just felt like I wanted to do it and it’s not like anyone was ever going to encourage me to shoot in black and white, so.
“You know what you should do, man?”
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was like, before you can talk me out of it, let’s do this! Before I regret this decision, let’s do it.
Do you approach a lot of things that way? You wrote “Madagascar 3? too.
Yes. Yes I did.
I like that you have range like that, and that you just seem unafraid of straying kind of off-theme, so to speak, and making unexpected choices. Did anyone talk s**t about doing” Madagascar?
Not to my knowledge. I mean, you know, I had a lot of fun doing it and it was really kind of illuminating to me too, because the whole animation, to really see how they do these things and all the kind of work and inspiration that goes into them. I love doing it. But no one talked s**t to my face, anyway.
But probably, I’m sure that if you and I took about a minute and a half right now, we could find some s**t-talking.
People were calling this a secret movie, since it came out of nowhere. Do you object to that?
Well, I guess it was a secret for a while. We didn’t set out to make it a secret, but we didn’t announce ourselves, either. The fact that we kinda gamed the internet in a way, I’m kind of proud of, but it wasn’t a goal. It kind of just happened.
I know it had a different working title, one that was purposefully…
Boring-sounding.
“Nothing to see here.” Who knew about it?
The script was never released. it was released to the crew, obviously, but like the actors only had their scenes. Nobody had a full script. it never went through like agencies. And it was a script that I didn’t, like, I made a deal to make it before I wrote it, so I never sent it out for financing. It never got into the system in any way. But, you know, those things were sort of partly by design. I wasn’t, you need so many people, and we’re shooting on location and everything anyway, so it’s not like we could hide and keep things that secret, it’s really just like nobody was looking. Nobody was asking, and we weren’t going to do their work for them.
This is like “Mad Men”! Secret scripts!
Mmmhmm. I think it creates a kind of nice focus for people, like we’re all doing this together. It’s like, you know, we can just focus on our work and not have to think about anything else.
And it doesn’t raise expectations
Right.
It’s like, hey, surprise, they made this movie and it was awesome!
It helps that it worked out. (laughing) Otherwise, who cares?
Is there something that characterizes friendships between women as opposed to between men? Do you have a different process for writing that voice? I thought this friendship in the movie was really realistic.
There definitely is, but I don’t…I think it’s like, once you’re writing women or working with actresses, I guess I don’t, there isn’t kind of like a deliberate shift I make where because I’m working with or writing about women I’ve gotta think this way. It’s like when you’re writing, you’re kind of androgynous in a way, you’re writing everybody.
It’s true of every movie I’ve done, so I don’t think, the thing about writing is that you only need to know enough to get it to the point that it needs to get to, if that makes any sense. You don’t have to know what this person’s childhood was like, you don’t have to be the person. You just have to know enough of the material, and that’s all I do know. It’s true for male or female characters. it’s true of the endings of my movies, when people ask what happens afterwards, it’s like, I only know up to here. The rest of it, you can guess as well as I can. But obviously with this one, because it was with Greta, she was kind of main point of inspiration for me, and a collaborator at the same time, so I was drawing from her, and understanding her, and in a way I felt like she could lead me and I could follow.
Categories: InterviewsTags: Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach, Noah Baumbach Frances Ha
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