Noah Baum­bach: ​‘Peo­ple some­times tell me, ​“Why don’t you just make some­thing funny?”’

At the 2017 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Sto­ries was one of two fea­tures in the main com­pe­ti­tion pro­duced by the online stream­ing plat­form Net­flix (the oth­er being Bong Joon-ho’s Okja). We sat down with the writer/​director to find out whether recent changes in movie dis­tri­b­u­tion have had any effect on him, and how this new work links back to past greats such as The Squid and the Whale, Green­berg and While We’re Young.

LWLies: Where did you get the idea of putting Adam San­dler and Ben Stiller in the same movie? The films they star in usu­al­ly allow for just one com­e­dy actor.

Baum­bach: This is the third movie where I’ve worked with Ben. Adam had come to me a few years ago ask­ing to let him know if any­thing comes up. Then it turned out that Ben and Adam were think­ing of work­ing togeth­er at the same time as I was think­ing that it’d be inter­est­ing to have them play broth­ers or some­thing. Then we all had lunch togeth­er, and all that real­ly came out of that lunch was that they would be broth­ers, and that there should prob­a­bly be a phys­i­cal fight between them at some point in the movie. I built the rest of the movie around that.

In While We’re Young and Mis­tress Amer­i­ca, there are lines that are fun­ny just by them­selves. In The Meyerowitz Sto­ries, Dustin Hoffman’s char­ac­ter, Harold, has this line ​“you should see the oth­er dog” which is only fun­ny because he repeats it so many times.

What I’ve want­ed to do in a movie for a long time is, have some­body tell the same sto­ry or make the same joke more than once. The struc­ture of the film, with the first part cen­tring on one broth­er and the sec­ond part on the oth­er, allowed to have Harold tell the same sto­ries sev­er­al times. And of course, he tells it dif­fer­ent­ly to each broth­er, and he’s look­ing for dif­fer­ent reac­tions from each, and each has a dif­fer­ent reac­tion to what he expects. I final­ly found a way to do that with Meyerowitz Sto­ries. Because I’ve writ­ten things like that in oth­er movies then cut them out because they just seemed repet­i­tive. But some­how, in this con­text, it felt like human behaviour.

How did you cre­ate the humour in this film? Was it all writ­ten or was there some improvisation?

The actors spoke the script exact­ly. I always work that way. I’ll rehearse and talk to the actors, and things will come from that – I don’t ignore them. But once we’re shoot­ing the movie, I see our job as inter­pret­ing the script. The way it’s word­ed and writ­ten, the scenes real­ly only work if you do the dia­logue right. Even if you infer words or change things, it doesn’t sound right, it’s like music in that way. It sounds wrong to me. Sim­i­lar­ly, there’s a lot of block­ing, because there’s a lot of cam­era move­ments and a lot of move­ments in the scene gen­er­al­ly, so it can take a long time to get it right. I some­times do a lot of takes.

In some moments there are quick cam­era move­ments and a cer­tain inten­si­ty that recalls The Squid and the Whale over, say, Mis­tress Amer­i­ca. Why did you decide to return to that?

I don’t know specif­i­cal­ly. I usu­al­ly find that I have some­thing – it can be a scene or a sit­u­a­tion, any­thing real­ly – that I just real­ly want to put in a movie. For instance, I want­ed to show what it’s like to be in a hos­pi­tal. I felt like I hadn’t quite seen it in a movie before, that dynam­ic where somebody’s life and your own emo­tion­al life are all hang­ing in the bal­ance, while at the same time nurs­es are order­ing lunch right out­side and talk­ing about what they’re doing later.

It’s a com­pli­cat­ed thing where I think there is humour – maybe a dark humour – but also some­thing very poignant. That’s some­thing that had been in my head before, but I hadn’t had a place to put it. It found its way with the broth­ers, so that’s how I found myself back in a sort of fam­i­ly world. But I think all of my movies are about fam­i­ly, even if they’re about friend­ships. There’s this kind of ​“the fam­i­ly we choose, the fam­i­ly we don’t choose” dynam­ic going on. And The Meyerowitz Sto­ries is, of course, about the fam­i­ly we don’t choose.

The are also some trag­ic moments, like a scene when Ben Stiller gives a speech at a muse­um. Did you ever con­sid­er mak­ing a straight drama?

It’s inter­est­ing you say that because peo­ple some­times tell me, ​‘Why don’t you just make some­thing fun­ny?’ I don’t dis­tin­guish between com­e­dy and dra­ma. Both in dai­ly life and when I’m work­ing, I see them work­ing side by side. Every­thing is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly one thing and the oth­er. Or some­thing could be fun­ny to some­body, and not fun­ny to some­one else.

The scene you cit­ed is a good exam­ple because when it starts, you hear peo­ple laugh­ing and Ben starts to cry, but by the end of it, peo­ple start cry­ing. That’s the thing as well: I wrote that scene, and it says in the script, ​‘He’s cry­ing uncon­trol­lably, slop­pi­ly.’ I want­ed to see that in a movie, because gen­er­al­ly, cry­ing in movies is con­trolled in some way. I want­ed to see some­body with snot com­ing out of their nose and every­thing. And Ben did it. And it was one of these things where he knew he had to do it and go all the way. He was under a lot of pres­sure but he had to go all the way, because oth­er­wise, it just wouldn’t work. But on the oth­er hand, I don’t know what’s gonna hap­pen. It’s a bit like work­ing with an ani­mal, you don’t know what they’re gonna do. But it was real­ly beau­ti­ful what he did.

To come back to Ben Stiller and Adam San­dler, how did you deal with the dynam­ic between them?

I had to warn Ben, ​‘You’re gonna get a script, you don’t show up until page 45, so just hang in there!’ Actu­al­ly, a key thing for me in fig­ur­ing out the script was dis­cov­er­ing that it would be bro­ken into sec­tions. As the title sug­gests, I thought of it as a sort of col­lec­tion of short sto­ries that maybe have appeared in The New York­er over the years, but now you’re buy­ing the book, and there is a kind of nar­ra­tive through-line, but maybe you read them all as sto­ries indi­vid­u­al­ly before that.

And that dis­cov­ery some­how cracked some­thing for me because this struc­ture, where each one of them deals with the father sep­a­rate­ly, it already says a lot about the fam­i­ly – the kids aren’t very close because they didn’t exact­ly grow up togeth­er. They’re not even in the same movie. You hear about one broth­er who’s sort of a shad­ow over the first sec­tion, and then he shows up. And that why I want­ed to give Ben also a big intro­duc­tion too, there’s a wall that lit­er­al­ly breaks down in front of him.

Did you feel they had dif­fer­ent act­ing styles?

Some­thing you deal with as a direc­tor, with all actors, is that nobody is the same and every­one needs dif­fer­ent things. You see some actors – Dustin is this way – chat­ting with the guy with the slate, mak­ing jokes and every­thing, right up to the moment you say, ​‘go’. Then he’s the char­ac­ter. He needs that to relax. Oth­er actors like to be qui­et, in their own zone. I like to have a relaxed set any­way – it’s a small set, there are no phones, there’s no director’s chair, there are no peo­ple who aren’t actu­al­ly work­ing on anything.

I don’t say ​‘action’ because to me, that just reminds you it’s a movie. I like to just let the scene sort of hap­pen as much as I can, giv­en that there are all these peo­ple and the lights, and that it’s a total­ly fab­ri­cat­ed sit­u­a­tion. But Ben and Adam have known each oth­er a long time, they’re friends and I think that helped too. They had this sort of imme­di­ate cama­raderie. And because they’re in a lot of the movie not togeth­er, and we shot those sec­tions first – we pret­ty much shot the film in order – they actu­al­ly were kept apart for a while. But they’re so admir­ing and respect­ful of each oth­er, there’s nev­er any dan­ger that one is going to bump up against the other’s methodology.

Watch­ing the film on the big screen was a great expe­ri­ence. How do you feel about it being released via Netflix?

I agree with you. Well, you know, I made the movie inde­pen­dent­ly, to be shown on the big screen, like all my movies. But Net­flix acquired it and they’ve been real­ly great and sup­port­ive. But I hope as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble see it the way you saw it.