Noah Baumbach: interview

The new film from the maker of ’The Squid and the Whale‘ is sharp, funny and neurotic but – as its writer-director Noah Baumbach explains to Jessica Winter – it throws its audience in at the deep end

Rewind to 2005, at the Q&A for a Toronto Film Festival screening of ‘The Squid and the Whale’ – an acerbically funny coming-of-age-story by writer-director Noah Baumbach, loosely based on memories of his parents’ divorce. An audience member wants to know why the arrogant, jailbait-chasing father played by Jeff Daniels (forgive me for paraphrasing) had to be, well, such an asshole. Why couldn’t he be just a little more sympathetic? Baumbach’s response (again, I’m paraphrasing) was perfectly pithy: sympathetic characters don’t need our sympathy; unsympathetic characters do.

By that logic, there has seldom been an on-screen figure who has demanded more of our compassionate understanding than the title character of Baumbach’s hilarious, sometimes shocking new film, ‘Margot at the Wedding’. Margot (an imperious Nicole Kidman) is a successful, stunningly self-involved and excruciatingly insecure fiction writer in a crumbling marriage who attempts a shaky reconciliation with her estranged sister, Pauline (Baumbach’s real-life wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh), on the eve of Pauline’s nuptials to a bemused slacker (Jack Black). The arrival of Hurricane Margot and her adoring, put-upon son, Claude (Zane Pais), sets off a chain reaction of indiscretions, betrayals, rank stupidity, and operatic emotional explosions.

Much of the US reception of ‘Margot’ was bound up in that same question posed in Toronto: are these characters just too mean, too neurotic, too unsympathetic? ‘It’s hard for people, especially those who are parents, to admit that they don’t always do things right, so they defend themselves from the character by judging her,’ Baumbach says in a telephone conversation. ‘To empathise with Margot means that you have to identify with her. But I don’t think of these characters as either sympathetic or unsympathetic.

In ‘Margot’, as in the autobiographical ‘Squid’, Baumbach draws on the power of family ties to pulverise our inhibitions and unmask our messiest, least-flattering selves. ‘When you’re around your family,’ says the 38-year-old filmmaker, ‘and you have that history and that shared language, you say things you’d be embarrassed to hear quoted back to you later.’ Baumbach’s ear for astringent wit and his eye for everyday mortification are as sharp as they were in ‘Squid’, and the pace is even faster – in fact, the editing is unusually speedy for a film driven by dialogue and (often pitiless) characterisation. ‘We accept that kind of pace in the “Bourne” movies, but can you do it in a movie about human interaction?’ Baumbach asks.

For added compression, he borrowed a page from ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘pre-lapped’ the dialogue; before one scene has ended, the audio from the next scene has already kicked in. ‘It creates a certain tension and unease, like: Where is that coming from? And it creates momentum, because no scene really has an ending – one is always bleeding into the next. There’s no fat in this movie,’ Baumbach continues. ‘Scenes begin in the middle and end before they’re over.’

Its title nodding to Eric Rohmer’s ‘Pauline at the Beach’, ‘Margot’ has a deceptively pastoral out-of-town setting, but as shot by frequent Gus Van Sant collaborator Harris Savides, it’s not a conventionally ‘pretty’ film. ‘Harris and I wanted to use as much natural light as possible. We used these old lenses from the ’70s that created a more diffuse look – not as tack-sharp as modern lenses. The movie is about peeking into people’s lives and psychologies, literally: Margot listens through doors. The look of the film puts the audience in that position, too – you have to lean into it, peer into it.’

Baumbach is currently peering into Claire Messud’s acclaimed novel ‘The Emperor’s Children’, which he’s adapting for a Ron Howard film; he has also re-teamed with Wes Anderson (with whom Baumbach wrote ‘The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou’) on the script for ‘The Fantastic Mr Fox’, an animated version of the Roald Dahl story. ‘Adaptations are fun for me because they connect to the idea of filmmaking I had when I was a kid,’ Baumbach says. ‘I would see a movie and think: I’m gonna make that movie.’

The feel of ‘Margot’, in a word, is bracing: it’s a nakedly intimate cinematic experience, both exhilarating and knowingly claustrophobic. There’s a vertiginous thrill to be found in its frank and fearless attitude toward human foibles, its corrosive anything-goes dialogue, its surgical precision in unpacking gnarled psyches.

‘Even though the movie is an invention, with its own reality, it does play it close to the bone; it’s played pretty straight,’ Baumbach says. ‘If you look at movies out right now with difficult, unsympathetic, horrible protagonists’ – such as ‘No Country for Old Men’ or ‘There Will Be Blood’ – ‘the audience is protected from them, because the characters are archetypes or metaphors. And those movies are great. But in this one, there’s nothing protecting you from these people – you’re thrown right into that world. I see how people might resist that. ’

‘The movie creates anxiety; it’s designed that way,’ Baumbach adds. ‘And anxiety produces strange effects in people.’

‘Margot at the Wedding’ opens on February 29.

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