Noah Baumbach quotes:

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  • I was late to the Knicks. My dad was a big fan. But I first started watching baseball; I became a Red Sox fan. My dad was a Mets fan. I wanted to have my own team and league.

  • The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.

  • It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum.

  • It's nice being friends over a period of time with people whose music you like so much, or other filmmakers, seeing people change, go through trials.

  • Friends of friends had bands in college or in their early 20s and had a moment where they had some kind of interest from a record label or manager. It's always interesting how people handle those decisions and those moments.

  • Many of the crew members I work with and continue to work with were friends or have become close friends, and so we keep working together. And I like casting friends of mine or people I know in parts I know would be perfect for them. I like to bring things and people that mean something to me in to my work.

  • I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford's 'Good Solider' or something I wasn't equipped to understand.

  • When you're around your family, and you have that history and that shared language, you say things you'd be embarrassed to hear quoted back to you later.

  • I think sometimes bad behaviour can be liberating for certain people. They need to behave badly to find themselves - to go off path to find their path. You see it with kids all the time: They're testing boundaries, and I think that's healthy.

  • I can feel pretty critical of people, and I understand that sort of feeling of when you're going through something that's painful, taking it out on the world and projecting onto other people, finding faults with other people because it's harder to find faults in yourself.

  • When you find yourself on the Internet when you're supposed to be writing, you've already lost. It's even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet.

  • A film set becomes its own family anyway, and all family dynamics come out during a shoot. The trick is hiring people who know how to handle that.

  • I've had great experiences or joyful experiences making a movie that people found very disturbing.

  • Dance is a profession with an expiration date for many people.

  • As a kid, I thought of myself as a funny person who secretly wanted to be serious, but now I think maybe I'm a serious person who secretly wants to be funny.

  • I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with these huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.

  • I'm interested in the way major events don't necessarily announce themselves as major events. They're often little things - the drip, drip of life that changes people or affects people.

  • Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.

  • That's the nice thing about collaborating with someone: Your work becomes a conversation.

  • When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.

  • I think I was going through a lot of change at 27, but I didn't know it was happening until it was over.

  • I find a lot of writing happens when you're not actually at the computer. So I carry a notebook.

  • I love black-and-white movies that are about contemporary subjects.

  • It's kind of major, learning to drive. I feel like it kicked up other stuff in my life.

  • I get a lot of responses to my movies. Some people say, 'Oh, I thought it was really funny - I hope that's okay!' And my answer always is 'Yes. It's totally okay.'

  • I've always liked working with friends or, you know, people I have outside relationships with.

  • There are the people who overthink making mix CDs and playlists, and how that works generationally is all really interesting to me.

  • Adaptations are fun for me because they connect to the idea of filmmaking I had when I was a kid. I would see a movie and think: 'I'm gonna make that movie.'

  • Being funny, in some ways, is about being connected to psychology.

  • Frances Ha' is the closest final product to what I had in my head of any movie I've made. I'm not entirely even sure why that is.

  • Other people have worked with big studios and maintained control over their movies. I see no reason why it wouldn't work for me.

  • It's near impossible to make a movie in black and white in the system.

  • Wes Anderson's films, 6-year-olds are crazy about them.

  • The Squid and the Whale' I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.

  • I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.

  • Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.

  • How you start the movie is critical. And how often you feel that there's no reason for how it's starting.

  • I really like my first movie a lot, 'Kicking and Screaming.' I think it's a - I'm very pleased and proud of that movie, but it wasn't the - it wasn't 'Citizen Kane' right out of the box, you know? It wasn't 'Sex, Lies and Videotape.'

  • I thought at the time of my parents' divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager.

  • I'm sure I've said some pretty bad pick-up lines.

  • I think all my movies are about transitions to some degree.

  • I'm always looking for overlooked post-Dylan singer-songwriter records from the '70s.

  • I'm a huge proponent of therapy and analysis, but it's something that, in a nonprofessional way, can be abused.

  • I try to procrastinate, if I can, productively, like I'll work on something else as procrastination. Or I take a walk. Because often I find, if you get out, more things come to you.

  • My dad was a great movie companion. He wouldn't diminish 'The Jerk.' If I liked it, he liked it. He could see it through my eyes.

  • I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

  • I used a video camera, and shot on film cameras at school and stuff, but I had a lot more training as a writer. I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.

  • I watch movies all the time, so it's hard to pick certain specific directors that have inspired me in the aggregate.

  • I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.

  • I don't like when you necessarily know that this is the end of the movie. I like when a movie ends abruptly. You go through this, and some of the scenes are uncomfortable, and some are funny - and then suddenly it's over.

  • I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people either adjust to those things and let go of adolescent notions. Or they dig in deeper.

  • With 'Greenberg,' I wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles... my great love for it and also the way that I felt not at home and alienated there.

  • When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

  • I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.

  • I'm curious how people build up the codes that they live their life by, and how they come to think that that's the best way for them to function.

  • It's going to start really interfering with your quality of life, your health, if you don't adjust to life as it's happening to you.

  • Woody Allen's movies are so much a part of me. I grew up watching them over and over and would read all his comic pieces for the New Yorker. In some ways, his influence is so much there that I can't even locate it any more.

  • I like the way corduroys feel. I like the sort of jean aspect of corduroys, but also the texture of them. They probably remind me of my childhood, too, I think. I wore cords, and my dad had a corduroy jacket.

  • Even fairly serious moviegoers can't shake this shadow of the corporate world.

  • I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

  • It's always really special to be at the New York Film Festival, and always a real privilege.

  • I've definitely been in situations where I could tell someone was interested in me, but I could tell they were insulting me in some passive/aggressive way, so I felt bad about myself at the same time.

  • I like shooting in New York because I have such a connection to the city. I have so many memories there.

  • There's something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don't know what their reaction will be.

  • Manhattan is so tailored. It's driven by appealing to the very wealthy and tourists.

  • I always viewed life as material for a movie.

  • I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

  • [Shwing] the really naked stuff I've dealt with in my own life, my own therapy and relationships - for me it just feels like a film I'm really proud of.

  • A lot of black-and-white films generally have a color version that will be used for TV.

  • Anyone who's putting money into your movie would always rather you cast well-known people.

  • I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.

  • I didn't train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.

  • I do like having books on my shelves. I do value that life.

  • I don't agree with the idea that my characters are unlikeable.

  • I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.

  • I guess I probably took New York for granted. Growing up, playing in the street, going down to the Avenue to the record store and to the grocery store and stuff like that.

  • I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.

  • I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.

  • I like having associations with locations beyond their meaning for the specific movie.

  • I like to have memories of a place. It brings something extra. I'm not even sure what it is. I mean, it's the same part of it as I like using friends in small parts or people I know or my doorman.

  • I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we're shooting, and that's always a challenge because unfortunately people on the street don't know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.

  • I live in Manhattan now, because, in a way, it was my fantasy.

  • I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so - which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.

  • I think anxiety is dangerous, but it makes you think it's your friend.

  • I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

  • I think I've always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.

  • I try to write 'and it's all very funny' after each scene description so that the reader can imagine the movie in their head.

  • I wouldn't say 'Frances Ha' is autobiographical, but it's definitely very personal.

  • I'm interested in music as an extension of character.

  • It's nice being friends over a period of time with people whose music you like so much, or other filmmakers, seeing people change, go through trials

  • Music is like color or acting or whatever. It's really something I think about from the beginning. Not that I always know exactly what I'm going to use, but I don't see it as something like, "Let's find some songs now!" after we have a finished film.

  • Nothing that I've turned down do I feel like I should have done. Because I've generated everything I've done, I've never really considered doing something that I haven't originated myself. There are definitely things that I've been brought that someone else made good movies out of. But it's not a path I've followed, so I don't have regret.

  • Peter Bogdanovich is a good friend.

  • There was a telemarketing job one summer in high school that I was rejected for. I still walk by the building that I actually had the interview in. It's still in New York, and I always think about that job and why I didn't get it.

  • There's always some generational-guys-hanging-out movie that is made every few years, I think, and some of them are great.

  • We all have these notions of cool that come about at different points in our lives, and it's interesting in how it evolves or doesn't evolve in different people.

  • We expect forty-year-olds to have grown up at some point, and to be engaged and adult and take responsibility, and doing nothing would seem to go against that.

  • Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.

  • When I meet certain filmmakers, sometimes you sit down and you do have some kind of shorthand. It can be fun to see them as someone who has been through similar experiences, but also as someone who just loves film. You can talk with them about films in a way that feels really free.

  • When I start a movie, there will be certain films that I watch again just because the vibe seems right.

  • When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

  • Will Ferrell's made a lot of brilliant movies.

  • You can be aware that something is idiosyncratic, and give it to a character, but keep doing it.

  • I suppose some studio executive would say it's death for a comedy if people aren't all laughing in the same places, but I find with my movies that people laugh in very different places. I can't control it.

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