The Big Picture · Interview
October 16, 2017/ 33 min/ Sean Fennessey
Sean Fennessey talks with Noah Baumbach about The Meyerowitz Stories, his ambivalence over releasing it on Netflix, and the movies that made him.
16 films across 1 segment.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
Noah Baumbach on family, film, and Netflix
The new film. Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller as half-brothers, Dustin Hoffman as their domineering artist father. Baumbach wrote Sandler's role for Sandler and Stiller's for Stiller; readers assumed the parts were swapped. Structured as a collection of short stories, which he says unlocked the movie. Randy Newman scored it, playing live to picture.
The film that made Sandler reach out to work with Baumbach.
His first film. Fathers and sons bond over the Mets in Meyerowitz the way Elliott Gould and Josh Hamilton's characters bonded over the Knicks here. In early drafts it was the Knicks, before Baumbach moved the action to fall.
Co-written with Greta Gerwig; staffers tell him 'that is my life.' Changing the shooting model on it, he says, felt like making a first film he never made in his 40s.
A deeply felt Stiller performance, but a transformation into someone very different from him, unlike the closer-to-the-bone role in Meyerowitz.
Stiller playing a Ben Stiller-ish character inside Baumbach's world.
Also with Gerwig; Fennessey calls its look a new version of an old film.
Gerwig's directorial debut, premiering the same festival season; the two show each other drafts and cuts constantly.
The documentary Baumbach and Jake Paltrow made about Brian De Palma, who talks in it about needing to work as an interpretive director to free himself up.
The fifth consecutive guest to cite it as a must-see-in-theaters film; Baumbach argues intimate-scale movies deserve the theater too.
Saw it as a kid and thought 'I am those guys.' The movie that made him want to make movies.
Took his son to a Metrograph reissue; loved it as a kid for Robin Williams before coming to Altman. The son didn't quite love it.
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
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