Noah Baumbach finds a cinematic playground in 'White Noise'

It was early in the pandemic when filmmaker Noah Baumbach, for the first time in his career, found himself wondering what he was going to do next.

2019 had been a big year, both professionally and in his personal life. He lost his father. He had a child, with partner Greta Gerwig. And both had big movies (his was Marriage Story, hers was Little Women) that had put them on the months-long awards circuit with an infant up until the Oscars.

Weeks later, when the world shut down, Baumbach picked up Don DeLillo’s 1985 classic White Noise, about a professor of Hitler studies at a generic Midwestern college, his blended family and the airborne toxic event that has everyone in a panic. In it he found a voice that was both inspiring and familiar and the themes a little uncanny in the context of the pandemic. He decided to try his hand at an adaptation.

Baumbach spoke about making the film, available to stream on Netflix, and stars Gerwig, Adam Driver and Don Cheadle, getting to dabble in different genres and how "Greta is always right.” Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.

People throw around the word “unfilmable” a lot when it comes to White Noise and a lot of post-modern books. Did that mean anything to you?

No, I guess if I had known maybe I would have been more daunted. I also don’t generally look to adapt things. My movies have all been from my own ideas and scripts. But in re-reading it, the voice got in my head. I was never thinking of it in terms of it being filmable or unfilmable. It always seemed filmable to me.

It does seem like a strange lack of imagination.

I guess what people mean is that it’s very literary and extremely literary books seem like so much a book and something you can only do in literature. But this one had so many overtly cinematic elements, the notions of sound and vision, the mass culture that surrounds these people, the cloud. All of these things seemed to have real cinematic analogs to me.

When it comes to the cinematic language you use, Spielberg’s name has come up often and so has Godard’s. Could you walk us through an example where you were referencing something specific?

DeLillo, on one hand, is telling the story of a family in a contemporary, elevated version of society in the ’80s, but a big part of that is illustrating the influence that culture and pop culture, advertising culture, movie culture, TV culture, news culture has on our lives. I felt like that’s all inherent in how I shot it. So, take the evacuation and the disaster element of the movie from part two. That has a real movie counterpart and a language that was available to me.

Then Jack (Driver) going to the motel later to kill a man is a very noir sequence. The kids talking in the car while the dad is trying to drive through the woods feels like a family comedy, with the put-upon father and everyone making demands that he can’t live up to. I thought it would be fun to embrace those movie elements. It was exciting to me because I haven’t had material that’s asked that of me, or I haven’t written it for myself. So following that line seemed intuitive and also gave myself opportunities as a director to do other things.

We were trying to think of whether you’ve even had a gun in any of your movies.

No, no one even says the word gun.

Greta makes Babette, who is a tricky character, relatable and empathetic and profound. How did you figure out who she was going to be outside of DeLillo’s gaze?

I have the privilege of having Greta often sitting across the table from me while I’m writing. In this case we were quarantined and in lockdown, but I could look up at any moment and say, what about this? And early in that time I mused aloud, “Who do you think would be good as Babette?” And she immediately said “Me, I should play her.” And Greta is always right so I signed her up then and there.

I think it gave me confidence in that Greta saw herself in the character. It allowed me to see that character in a clearer way. I follow the structure of the book and she appears to be one thing in the first part and then reveals herself to be somebody more complex. But in the book, you’re in Jack’s head so she’s more of a projection. I also changed aspects of it to bring Babette into more of the ending, because I saw it as a kind of comedy of remarriage.

People were excited about the movie and being in the movie and I used a lot of real families. I liked that there was a kind of enthusiasm that in my years of shooting in New York City I’ve watched dwindle. It used to be if I came back to Brooklyn to shoot, people would get excited. Now nobody’s excited.