Noah Baumbach on “Jay Kelly,” His New Movie with George Clooney

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

The filmmaker Noam Baumbach was long known for comedies and dramas that drew on his own life. Films like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story.

But things change, and so did Baumbach's source material. In 2022, he released White Noise, which is based on the novel by Donda Lillo.

And then in 2023, he worked on a smash hit in Hollywood called Barbie. He co-wrote the script with Greta Gerwig, who directed.

Baumbach's latest film is something of a return to form. It's a sharp character study of an extremely handsome, extremely famous movie star having an identity crisis.

George Clooney, of of course, plays the actor, and Adam Sandler is his beleaguered manager.

Family's losing it at home. It's like a movie where I'm playing myself or watching myself.
Sorry, you gotta go again. I didn't hear a word you said.
I said I'm suddenly remembering things.

But what is that? Memory? Well, yes.

Maybe your memory's trying to tell you something about your present. Like what? I don't know.
I'm tired. It needs to have a point.

J. Kelly opened in theaters and it will stream on Netflix starting this week.
Now, we at the New Yorker take a familial pride in Noah Baumbach.

He worked as a messenger in the office back when that was a thing, and he wrote his first humor piece for us in 1991. And he still contributes every so often.

At this year's New Yorker Festival, our own Susan Morrison sat down with Noah Baumbach to talk about the new film.

Now,

J. Kelly is a love letter to a certain classic kind of movie, and it has this lush Hollywood score by Nicholas Burtel, a big movie star, these gorgeous locations.

But I've read that you've said that working on this movie, it began as an exercise to help you, try to prod you to fall in love with movies all over again. When did you fall out of love with them?

Why did you have to do that?

It was somewhere on a

sort of deserted highway in Ohio at about 4 a.m. with a rain machine shooting white noise that I think I felt like, oh God, I don't know that I like doing this.

And that movie was just very difficult for me for several reasons. And I mean, we shot during COVID, which was

a big part of it,

just because it was so difficult and

such a fraught time.

But it was just really difficult. I'm proud of the movie, but

the making of it was so hard. And I was just thinking.
And then, but then actually,

when I was writing J. Kelly, I also

then I went and worked on Barbie with Greta and the filming of it. And that was a really great shoot.
And that sort of almost like watching her and

as she has many times for me, like she

sort of led by example, I guess. And I had a really good time on that.

felt like, well, maybe I do still like it. But it's a thing.
I guess you have to kind of, it's good in a way too to check back in with yourself.

Because I think it's something that I dreamt of doing, it's something I always wanted to do. And

I've been doing it for a long time now. And so I was sort of like, well, am I doing this only because I do it? You know, maybe I

want to go.

Yeah, yeah, and do so. Yeah.
And so it is part of the

energy of J. Kelly is my affection for the medium and both the movies themselves, but also the making of them.
Yeah, I remember now reading about pajama parties on the set of Barbie.

I mean, it must have been a very different vibe than you know,

but

the girls only, I guess. Yeah, yeah, there was a Barbie.
But it must have been a very different, I mean, I'm thinking filming that scene in the car and the river and white noise.

I mean, that must have been very different. It was hard, yeah, it was really difficult.
And it's not like my favorite kind of things to be doing in movies. It's almost an action movie, actually.

Yeah, it is. And so I, and I kind of was doing it because it was what the material required.
And

sometimes I write something, and then when I'm directing it, I kind of realize, oh, now I have to actually interpret what I

wrote.

And with that one in particular, I think I realized sort of too late how ambitious it all was. Too late for my own pleasure.

I mean, it's hard to

actually write something and say, I'm going to fall in love with movies again. I mean, it could have not paid off.

Well, the opening line of Jay Kelly, which is the opening scene is on a movie set as they're wrapping a film.

The opening line is we're coming to the end and and I kept thinking if I had seen that in the script it would just make me think it was a Beckett play you know it there is it does have a kind of a valedictory feel and so even though the whole movie is a love letter to movies there there's also a sense of you as this kind of mature artist

you know, reckoning with your work in the same way that that's what Jay Kelly is doing. So I mean were you was that a little bit of a struggle or is that just the character that you're writing?

Yeah, well I'm sure, I'm sure it must be. And the endings is this another sort of aspect of the movie, I think.
And that was kind of implicit, I guess, in my

the feelings I was having about do I love this is also I'm now I'm older, I have you know other things that I, you know, I have a family, I've think, you know, things that I could be spending my time, you know, more time doing and do I love this enough.

So So that feeling of coming toward facing the end in life as well. I mean, they're facing the end in the movie, but

Jay Kelly's facing his mortality.

I mentioned to you that last night I was talking to Ian Parker, one of our writers who wrote a great profile about 12 years ago, and he reminded me of something that Greta had said to him when he was working on this piece, which is

how very often the first lines of your movies kind of

basically tell you everything that is about to happen. In Meyer Ritz stories, Adam Sandler is trying to park Parallel Park.
I didn't get my driving license, so I was 40.

And Sandler says, am I fitting?

And in the beginning of Greenberg, Greta is trying to merge into traffic on the freeway, and she says, are you going to let me in?

And then I also realized that Squid in the Whale opens with

you know, the son, one of the sons saying,

on the tennis court, mom mom and me versus you and dad. So, I mean, it's almost like it's a conscious decision to kind of give the viewer the cliffs notes to the movie before it even.

Putting it out there is so obvious.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm not even that aware of that.

I mean, it was brought up at a certain point, but I mean, I think it's really sort of like you always kind of want to tell the story of the movie in the beginning of a movie.

I mean, it's the opening shot of Jay Kelly is, in a way, a kind of representation of what the rest of the movie, Jay's journey, is going to be. And so whether it's the line or it's something else, but

a lot of those ones just were just word the lines. I mean, when you were just now talking about Meyerwoods, I was sort of wondering what the first line was.
And I guess that works.

The Are You Gonna Let Me In one, I was doing, for Greenberg, I was doing an interview after the movie came out, and the interviewer pointed out that this was what the story of the movie was.

It was sort of like, are you gonna let her to Greenberg? Are you gonna let me in?

And I all of a sudden felt myself about to cry because I didn't, I'd never thought of it or realized it. Well, I think metaphors are unconscious.

I just now remembered that when we first talked about Squid and the Whale 20 years ago, I said, you know, there's a lot of ping-pong and tennis in this movie.

Is that because the movie's about these children going back and forth between their parents as a part of their custody arrangement? And you shocked me by saying

that it never occurred to you. No, and now, again, I'm shocked again when you say that.

Well, you know, your movies often, we're talking about Squid, have a really strong autobiographical component. And, you know, this one is about a giant movie star.

You're not a giant movie star, but you're a big deal Hollywood director. And

it's tempting to kind of see Jay Kelly in some ways as a stand-in for you.

You know, especially, it makes me wonder, you know, after the giant success of Barbie, one of the highest-grossing movies of all time,

do you feel like have you kind of vaulted into a slightly different relationship to Hollywood? Or is it more just about age, as we were talking about, you know, looking back at your whole life?

And I also think the notion of an actor, you know, was something that was interesting.

It was a good metaphor for something, you know, about sort of playing yourself, which is something a lot of my movies are kind of about, I guess. It's sort of how we play ourselves.
I also, what I

you know, you think about these things in retrospect.

I've written, a lot of my characters in the past have been people who define themselves by

a certain

lack of success or lack of the success they hoped for, the way they sort of hoped their life would be, their sort of projection of theirself not reaching that.

And calling that failure, I think, or thinking of it as failure. Like Dustin Hoffman, the Meyerwood stories or Jeff Daniels.
Yeah, or Greenberg himself.

And

what I realized in doing this was that in some ways defining yourself by your own success is sort of the same challenge because it's just another way of not knowing who you are, not looking at where you really are and where you, you know.

And I think Jay Kelly is, there's something in him in the beginning of the movie that's sort of motivating him

to go out in the world to find himself in some way.

What's the packing? Come from the game? How'd you and Vivian do? Well, we were up five, four four and six. I do too many movies.
But it's fine. What's the packing? You think I do too many movies?

I think you do just the right amount of movies. I think I do too many movies.
You do work a lot. See? Barbara tells me the truth.
What happened last night? You can't have too much underwear.

How'd you get the black guy? I'll tell you on the plane. What plane? The plane that I booked.
We're leaving a one. Where are we going? Meg, where are we going? France.
France. France?

I mean, there are events that sort of set him going, but I like that about the character, that it was somebody who was,

there's something kind of,

there's certainly something infantilized about his life, but that there is something

in there, you know, in ways that we often do, like in some ways talking about coming after white noise, of like reinventing himself.

Like something in him knows he needs to almost perpetuate his own crisis to move forward in life. And I think I'm interested in that too, of the sort of unconscious things we do throughout our lives.

Like you look back and you're like, oh, yeah, I needed a change then, but I didn't, I couldn't have told you that,

but I did this, which made the change happen. And certainly people have gone through, I mean, divorce is that.
I've dealt with that a lot. And it's like what Mike Nichols said about the graduate.

It was like the story of a man who saves himself through madness. Yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah, all the movies, and if you think about it, a lot of art is really about the gap between who we are and who we think we are.

And when you and I were talking about this the other day,

at first when I saw you were making a movie about a massively successful person, I thought, what a change. But you were saying that

this feeling of failure and unfulfilled ambition and huge success are both ways of kind of having a barrier. to who you really are.

And it made me wonder, is there some kind of median level of success that is notionally more healthy?

Or is this just the human beings? No, because you probably probably just want more.

I think no matter what, there's a gap. You know, no one's ever going to close that gap.
And I think we look and find different ways in our life, you know, throughout.

I mean, it can be more conscious, like through therapy or through whatever, but to sort of

reintroduce ourselves to ourselves as we go.

Noah Baumbach speaking with Susan Morrison of The New Yorker. More in a moment.

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You know, you were just quoting Mike Nicholson. I was just remembering something that I read in their two interesting biographies of him recently.

He's quoted at one point of saying, you know, people who figured out how to like themselves, they're really boring. You don't want anything to do with them.

Yeah. Which is kind of interesting.

So

I feel like this movie is in the tradition of, you know,

I'm thinking of Seth Rogan's

show, The Studio, Robert Altman's,

you know, The Player.

It's a great comedy of manners about Hollywood. And, you know, there's some really funny, there's great running gag about a piece of cheesecake in his rider that is so funny.

And so anyway, watching the movie, I kept imagining you, you know, through your various movies,

you know, making notes of all these little idiocies that you have encountered along the way. I mean, is Jay Kelly a repository, the film, a repository for little things you've noticed?

Or I also assume that Clooney and Adam Sandler themselves have probably lived a J. Kelly kind of life and have...
Absolutely. I mean, was it like a kind of grab bag of people's

Yeah, I think so. I mean also like this idea for a character, which is true for

people of the you know movie stars of of a certain level where they have like they do wherever they go there's always the same things laid out for them, you know.

Does this happen for you? Do you have a rider? No, I don't have one.

I mean, there's definitely that thing of like, I mean, because also the rider for him, you know, it's this sort of notion of like in the beginning of the movie, you haven't seen the movie, it's like there's a cheesecake as part of like the assortment of things that is in every room he goes into.

And he says, I don't like cheesecake. Why is this always here?

And Adams, this place's manager, says, you know, well, you once said you liked it, so it made it into the rider.

But I also felt like it was actually a good, you know, an amusing way to sort of also, again, tell this sort of story of identity and of like, who are we? Are we the person who said it then?

Are we, you know, and these things like this rider idea too, they get repeated. So it is sort of like, well, I wanted this one time

years ago and I'm still getting it, you know, and it kind of can keep you from advancing or changing in your life because it's the same stuff that you had asked for back then.

And I think sort of, and that's what happens to those, I think to people sometimes who get too,

you know, they're too sort of bubbled in that way. So I thought that was, again,

they're amusing details and I'm, you know, the milieu is

fascinating to me. It's a world I know well.
But I also, there are so many elements in it that I felt like I could kind of tell these, this sort of tale of... identity crisis.

Yeah, well the cheesecake as kind of part of his composite identity that he's performing. As you just said,

this whole movie is kind of about, at one point, he says, I don't know who I am, am I just playing a part?

It's about how we all just kind of perform ourselves, you know, and collect little bits of cheesecake and idioms and whatever. And it also reminds me of another thing that you do in your films.

And I'm especially thinking of Myrowitz stories where, you know, Joan Didian always said that we tell ourselves stories in order to survive, you know, to console ourselves.

And you often create characters who, within a movie, they'll tell the same story. You'll hear them tell the same story.

The way people tell the same family stories or the same jokes or even in Jake Kelly, Adam Sandler as the manager is always calling his clients puppy.

And one client probably doesn't know that the other client's being called puppy.

But this way of repeating phrases and stories makes the characters feel so lived in and so real. But that's another version of just how you're kind of performing your character.

Well, yeah, and how language, the way we talk or the way the characters talk

becomes self-defining too, and sort of can they break those patterns? I mean, it is, I write a lot of dialogue, and it comes naturally to me. I think I have

an ear for it, but I'm always interested in

the movies of sort of like how the

rhythms of how people talk, both

as helping me find the characters often as I'll write myself and kind of discover the characters while I'm writing the dialogue, but also how

what people say is not what they're saying. And I often write a lot of extraneous stuff that isn't even really meant to be focused on.
It's like musical,

just sounds and things, but I think, or how people talk so as not to have to say anything.

But also how people's patterns can change over the course of a movie and how that is also a way of discovering character or revealing character in a movie.

Well, so if we all tell ourselves a story about our lives in order to make us feel better, what story is Jay Kelly telling himself?

Well, I mean, I guess at which point in the movie we don't know.

I think the story that initially that he's telling himself is that these sort of choices that he's made and the bargains he's made with himself throughout his life are

were worth it. You know, I think

when we all are younger,

we make decisions that seem much easier because we think, well, well, I have plenty of time to get to the other thing. Like, you know, I'm going to read War and Peace at some point.

And, you know, then you get to a certain point.

And I think the point that Jay Kelly's in in the movie, where essentially it's a kind of shocking realization, even though it's the most obvious thing in the world, which is that

this is the only one he's going to get.

This is the only version

of his life.

And these decisions are real decisions, and they've had real consequences, and they're real. And it's a shocking realization.
I mean, like that the human experience is your experience.

And I think that's the story he's telling himself. And I think that story starts to show its cracks as the movie goes, which is, I think, true in probably a lot of my movies, is the characters have

these stories that are ways to sort of justify the life they've lived.

Jay Kelly is wonderful and I hope you all see it. Thank you so much, Lily.
Thank you, Susan.

Thank you.

That's writer and director Noah Baumbach talking with the New Yorkers Susan Morrison. I'm David Remnick.
That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I hope you had a great holiday.

And a special welcome to our new listeners on WBAA in Indiana. Hope you enjoyed the show.

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