Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach (born September 3, 1969, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) established himself as a distinctive new voice in filmmaking with his self-aware, dialogue-heavy dramas about artists and intellectuals living in his home city of New York. Starting in 1995 with his debut film Kicking and Screaming, he has written and directed such well-received movies as The Squid and the Whale (2005), Frances Ha (2012), Marriage Story (2019), and White Noise (2022). Baumbach is also known for his collaborations with director and actress Greta Gerwig (his partner, with whom he wrote the 2023 box-office smash Barbie) and director and screenwriter Wes Anderson.

Childhood

Baumbach grew up in Brooklyn, the eldest of two sons born to Jonathan Baumbach and Georgia Brown. Baumbach’s parents published fiction and wrote film criticism—his father in Partisan Review and his mother in the Village Voice. His father also taught fiction at Brooklyn College. Baumbach was exposed to art films from early childhood; in a profile on Baumbach published in The New Yorker in 2013, Baumbach’s father claimed that he took his elder son to see French New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1970; The Wild Child) when the boy was two years old. According to Baumbach’s recollections, however, his favorite movies growing up were the swashbucklers of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, followed by the films of Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma when he was older.

When Baumbach was a teenager, his parents divorced and began a joint custody agreement in which Baumbach and his brother stayed with their father on intermittent days of the week, rather than for several days at a time. The unusual arrangement later inspired a plot detail in The Squid and the Whale.

Film career

After graduating from high school, Baumbach studied literature at Vassar College and worked briefly as a messenger at The New Yorker. He made his first film at age 24, the indie feature Kicking and Screaming, about a band of recent college graduates who carry on with their lives aimlessly in the months after their graduation. Some critics found it reminiscent of director Whit Stillman’s comedies of manners, especially Metropolitan (1990). In 1997 Baumbach followed up with Mr. Jealousy, a romantic comedy about a writer who becomes obsessed with his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, a famous novelist.

Baumbach’s other early films were Highball (1997)—which was released only on DVD (against his wishes) and which he later disowned, considering it unfinished—and the short film Conrad & Butler Take a Vacation (2000). In 2004 Baumbach collaborated with Wes Anderson on the screenplay for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which Anderson directed. The quirky comedy starred Bill Murray as an oceanographer who seeks revenge on the shark that killed his diving partner.

For his next film, Baumbach explored a more personal theme. His script for The Squid and the Whale began as a memoir about living through his parents’ divorce. On subsequent drafts, it was transformed into fiction, but heavy elements of autobiography remained, such as his parents’ awkward custody arrangement. Baumbach even used his parents’ book collections as props in the film and had Jeff Daniels, who played the character based on Baumbach’s father, dress in Jonathan Baumbach’s old clothes. The film won awards for directing and screenwriting at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. In a 2019 Vulture article assessing Baumbach’s career, critic Scott Tobias wrote that it was with this film that Baumbach finally “found his true voice.”

In 2007 Baumbach wrote and directed Margot at the Wedding, a comedy drama starring Jennifer Jason Leigh (whom he had married in 2005), Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, and John Turturro. He collaborated with Anderson again in 2009, cowriting the screenplay for Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson’s stop-motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book of the same name. In 2010 Baumbach wrote (with Leigh) and directed Greenberg, which starred Leigh, Ben Stiller, and Greta Gerwig. Two years later came his romantic comedy drama Frances Ha. Between the making of the latter two films, Baumbach separated from Leigh and he and Gerwig became a couple. (Baumbach and Leigh divorced in 2013, and he and Gerwig married in 2023.) Baumbach and Gerwig wrote the script for Frances Ha, which follows a dancer (played by Gerwig) in her late twenties living in New York City and trying to settle into adulthood. Shot in black and white, it was consciously indebted to the iconic films of the French New Wave.

After Frances Ha, Baumbach turned his lens on stories about generation gaps. While We’re Young (2014) featured Stiller and Naomi Watts as a Gen X couple who are thrown into a midlife crisis when they realize their young millennial friends (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) have overtaken them in cultural relevance even as their parents and mentors of the elder generations (Charles Grodin and Peter Yarrow) still wield influence. In Baumbach’s 2017 film The Meyerowitz Stories, produced by Netflix, three adult siblings (including one with a grown child) try to understand their domineering, artistic father (Dustin Hoffman). Critics especially praised Adam Sandler and Emma Thompson out of the film’s ensemble cast, and Sight & Sound magazine called the film a “mature sequel” to The Squid and the Whale. In between these two films, Baumbach and Gerwig teamed up again to write Mistress America (2015), with Baumbach as director and Gerwig in a strong supporting role.

In 2019 Baumbach’s Marriage Story returned to the theme of relationships and divorce and was a major critical breakthrough The story of a stage director (Driver) and an actress (Scarlett Johansson) who divorce and try to work out custody of their young son while living on separate coasts, the film received six Oscar nominations (including for best picture and best original screenplay) and was regarded by many critics as one of the best films of 2019. The storyline bore many resemblances to Baumbach’s divorce from Leigh, though he stressed to The New York Times, “This movie is not autobiographical; it’s personal, and there’s a true distinction in that.” That same year, in his profile of Baumbach’s films, Vulture’s Tobias observed:

As a New Yorker who chronicles the lives of the tormented intellectuals, Baumbach has inevitably been compared to vintage Woody Allen, but his voice is distinctive in its relentless self-interrogation and lacerating humor.

In 2022 Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 postmodern novel White Noise was released in theaters and on Netflix. Film critics noted resemblances between its cinematic style and that of Steven Spielberg’s action-fantasy movies from the 1980s, the same period in which DeLillo’s novel was written and is set. The following year saw Baumbach embark on another collaboration with Gerwig, one that resulted in a stunning box-office success. Baumbach and Gerwig wrote the screenplay for Barbie, which Gerwig directed. The comedy-fantasy film was praised for its self-aware script and became the year’s top blockbuster.