Film	Noah Baumbach: My Brother Didn't Do Those Things by M. Faust

The so-called independent film boom of the early 1990s, when every young director wanted to be the next Quentin Tarantino or Whit Stillman and every financier wanted to start the next Miramax, left a lot of casualties. Many a young filmmaker got the chance to make a movie, only to have it indifferently released to home video or cable.

One survivor is Noah Baumbach, whose The Squid and the Whale is one of the hits of the arthouse season. Baumbach’s 1995 debut Kicking & Screaming, about the experiences of a group of recent college graduates unsure where to proceed when faced with Real Life, drew some attention if not much business. His 1998 follow-up Mr. Jealousy was barely released, and after an uncompleted, partly improvised movie utilizing that same film’s cast (which Baumbach disowns, though it was released to video) it started to look as though he might be another young auteur whose career began and ended in the 1990s.

But Baumbach hadn’t gotten out of the business. He contributed the occasional humor piece to The New Yorker, and co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with his friend Wes Anderson. And he spent time coming up with the direction and script for The Squid and the Whale, which was inspired by his memories of the painful divorce of his parents when he was a teenager. Filmed for a minimal budget of $1.5 million, the alternately wrenching and hilarious film effectively recreates the milieu of Brooklyn intelligentsia in the late 1980s, using a handheld Super 16mm camera to evoke the immediacy and rawness of the emotions. And it features terrific performances by Laura Linney and especially Jeff Daniels, who is bitterly funny as a novelist who can no more interest publishers in his latest work than he can hold his family together. (Baumbach’s father is novelist Jonathan Baumbach; his mother is former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown.)

I spoke with Noah Baumbach by phone a few weeks ago from his home in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, actress Jennifer Jason Leigh:

Let’s start with the really obvious question: just how autobiographical is this?

No matter how many times I’m asked that question, I’m never sure exactly how to answer it. I think of it as a work of fiction. While I use people and places, a time, environment that I know very well, it’s fictionalized within all of that. The movie’s designed to be a kind of hopefully emotional experience for the viewer. But I think the reason it works that way is because it is fiction and not literally true.

Were you worried that, given that viewers would know it was in some degree inspired by your own life, that they would assume everything in the film really happened to you?

The only thing I worried about—not worried, but the only thing I want to make sure people know is that I invented the stuff the younger brother in the movie does, the drinking and the masturbation. My brother didn’t do those things. Even if he had, I don’t know that I would have had access to that information, and if I had I wouldn’t betray a trust like that. That’s the only thing I feel it’s important for me to delineate.

In writing the script, I never thought too much about what people would think is true or not. In some ways I was naïve about that—I really didn’t know how much people would be interested in the autobiography. In retrospect I understand why people are—I get it now, I guess, but going into it I never thought about it.

Was the impetus behind this doing a certain kind of emotional story that your own life informed, or working through your own life as a fictional piece?

Well, I’ve always used my life in my writing. This one has more obvious direct parallels, and it’s gotten the most attention, so people are more interested in it. But I’ve always tried to connect to real things in my life—not necessarily real stories or experiences, but emotionally real things. I wasn’t writing this to work out anything—if anything I had to work out stuff before I wrote it.

You recently got married yourself. Did the process of writing and making this film affect your feelings about marriage?

It really didn’t have any bearing on it. I understand that from an outside perspective the timing of it might seem ironic, but for me they’re completely separate. I never thought of this movie as about marriage or divorce or family—I really wanted to write about people and going through this experience. Divorce is always going to be part of it. But I was thinking of it as very particular to these people. In writing I never even really grappled with my own feelings about marriage and divorce and those things. I had to keep smaller, stay within the world of these characters. I’ve been with my wife for four years and then we got married.; I never thought, oh, I’ve gotten to this place through this movie. It’s very separate.

The actual shooting of the film only took a few weeks. Was that a result of the small budget you had to work with?

It was—we had a lot to do and very little time and money to do it, so it was crammed in there. Fortunately I prepared very well, and the actors rehearsed a lot, and I knew the material so well that afterward when we were cutting the material together, I didn’t feel I was missing stuff. At the same time it was a serious challenge.

The shooting style seems perfectly appropriate to the story and the kinds of emotions it evokes. Was there anything you would have done different with a larger budget, aside from maybe relaxing a little?

No, and I’m happy to say that and mean it. Relaxing a little would have been nice…at one point we thought we might have had more money, $6 or 7 million, but I was still planning to shoot on Super 16 with a handheld camera. If it were a different kind of movie, or if I’d had a different vision for it, it would have been probably foolish to try to make it for so little. But I always knew that the rawness, the jaggedness of how I wanted to shoot could be done for $1.5 million or it could be done for more. Though relaxing shouldn’t be undervalued.

Jeff Daniels wouldn’t have been my first choice for this part, but he turned out to be amazing in it. How did you come to cast him?

I heard from the casting director that he was interested, and that he wanted to fly himself in to meet with me—he was shooting in New Orleans at the time. He hadn’t been the first person I thought of either, but I’d always been a fan of his. With casting, when someone says, how about so and so, I’ll wear the suggestion around for a few days, absorb it, see how it feels, and the more I lived with Jeff in that part it felt good to me. When I met him, he first thing he said to me was how funny he thought the script was. And I’d always wanted someone who I thought was innately funny to play Bernard. Because even though it’s not a comic performance, there are definite comic elements to it that I thought needed to be underlined. I knew Jeff could be funny, which I liked, and I knew how good an actor he was. The more I thought about it, it just felt good to me. That said, it wasn’t until we started rehearsing that I got to see how incredible he was.

Do you think of the film as a comedy or a drama? Are there parts that people laugh at where you weren’t expecting them to, or vice versa?

I think it’s just my natural way of looking at things as it weaves in and out of both. I never thought of it as either a comedy or a drama. At the same time, when I did watch it for the first time with people, little screenings for friends, I started to realize that the movie has an immediacy that caught people up. In some cases people might find things funny but were maybe so taken with the authenticity of it that they wouldn’t laugh. I had to get used to the fact that things I thought were funny other people weren’t going to laugh at. That being said, it didn’t really concern me—I kind of like that.

A lot of the humor is so acid—watching it I was taken a little a back, wondering, is this supposed to be funny, or am I just a bastard for laughing other people’s pain?

Initially, when I watched it with smaller groups, people wouldn’t laugh as much because they were having that exact experience. Then in big crowds laughter becomes contagious—someone is always laughing, so that gives other people the OK to laugh.

Your parents both wrote about film —your mother was a reviewer for the Village Voice, your father early in his career for the Partisan Review. How did their feelings about film lead to your own?

They were a huge influence. I grew up in a household where a wide range of films were available to me and talked about; even before home video, we would go to revivals. Just hearing about a lot of them intrigued me... I was open to the idea of film as art, and it shaped my way of looking not only at movies but about the world. I decided at an early age that I wanted to make films because something seemed so appealing about them to me. But at the same time being introduced to such a wide range of films is almost overwhelming. It took me until my 20s to discover what I wanted, what films I liked. In a lot of cases that overlapped with films they liked, but I also found things that were not considered part of the canon, the filmmakers that they knew about.

You co-wrote Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and his next film, The Fantastic Mr Fox. What’s it like to go back and forth between making your own films and collaborating with someone who seems so idiosyncratic?

Our collaboration really came from our friendship. We wrote those scripts very specifically as projects to be directed by Wes. I really enjoyed it, it was a way to participate in another world that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own. We really get along, so our collaboration feels kind of effortless, it’s just fun. It’s more like a conversation: when I write by myself it’s a more interior, solitary thing.

Has your family seen the film, and if so are they still speaking to you?

My family and I are really close. They really like the movie—they’re writers too. Again, I feel that what I accomplished with this movie is a kind of emotional reality, and if it works for you it provokes a very emotional experience in watching it. I’m flattered that people see the movie and assume it’s just a carbon copy of my life, but it really isn’t.

Why would you find that flattering? It would seem to say that people felt you couldn’t invent characters and just took them from your life instead.

I take it as a compliment because it means the movie has an impact. The natural reaction is to assume it must be real because it felt so real. That reaction is not what I have with the movie—for me it’s a piece of work that I worked really hard on, putting it together so it would have this impact.