Noah Baumbach: 'In my 20s, I felt like time was running out'

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/28/noah-baumbach-while-were-young

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Noah Baumbach is getting on a bit. He knows he is because his doctor actually listens to him now. “I used to have hypochondriacal things of like, ‘I’m worried about these headaches’, and my doctor used to always laugh it off,” says the director, as I nod in solemn recognition. “And there’s a certain point – which unfortunately you’ll get to at some point, too – where they actually start taking you seriously: ‘Why don’t we get you an MRI?’ and you’re like, ‘No, I’m joking! I thought we do this and I leave feeling better!’”

Fortunately, life’s tragicomic trajectory is always good for a bit of material, and in Baumbach’s new film, While We’re Young, the director has transposed the experience of being in his mid-40s on to Ben Stiller’s documentarian Josh, who halfway through the action (and just when he’s starting to feel young again) is diagnosed with mild arthritis. “Arthritis arthritis?” he asks, confoundedly, as if his involvement in the ageing process has to be some sort of administrative error. “I usually just say it once,” replies the doctor.

Related: While We're Young: Ben Stiller has a hipster replacement in brilliant comedy

While We’re Young, the writer and director’s eighth feature film, follows 44-year-old Josh and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) as they are befriended, beguiled and, finally, kind-of betrayed by Adam Driver’s twentysomething wannabe film-maker Jamie and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Jamie’s apparent openness, productivity and fondness for olde worlde things such as VHS, vinyl and face-to-face conversation, initially charms and invigorates Josh, who has spent the past eight years working on a monumentally unfocused and increasingly sprawling second documentary and messing about on the internet. But when Jamie starts to become more of a professional threat than a fan, Josh embarks on a quest to unpick the young pretender’s pose, and ends up unravelling his own marriage, career and ideals in the process. It’s basically All About Eve for the Apple era.

While We’re Young is also a bit of a departure for Baumbach, who has made his broadest and most accessible film to date. “I saw it in a very traditional way,” says the director, his intention being to make a film “about adults coming apart to come together. Screwball comedy in the 30s and 40s had this and movies of my adolescence, like Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, James L Brooks and Woody Allen have made.” It’s the sort of comedy that “historically has been made for a broader audience, I guess. I wanted to do my version of that kind of movie, and see what that would be. Also to allow for physical humour and to get some clear laughs.”

Until now “clear laughs” haven’t always seemed like a priority for Baumbach. His films may be funny, but their regularly offbeat and sometimes dark humour is firmly rooted in the minutely observed psychological portraits at their centre. People behave unreasonably in Baumbach’s films but not without reason, and it’s this combination of weirdness and relatability that forms the basis of his appeal.

That’s once you’re in, though: more often than not Baumbach’s films also have traits that seem to hold the audience – especially the casual onlooker – at arm’s length. Frances Ha, which starred and was co-written by Baumbach’s partner Greta Gerwig, was a meandering black-and-white bildungsroman with contemporary dance and stilted conversation as major themes. The Oscar-nominated, 80s-set The Squid And The Whale came with a muted retro aesthetic – not to mention a wilfully obscure title – while, in 2004, Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson what has to be the latter’s most esoteric film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Finally, at the centre of 2010’s Greenberg, was Ben Stiller in possibly the most alienating role of his career, playing a self-absorbed misanthrope teetering on the edge of the psychological abyss, who treated his sweet and straightforward love interest (Gerwig, again) with an almost unbearable contempt. According to the New Yorker, one cinema displayed a sign refusing to refund tickets until an hour after admittance.

I saw this film in a very traditional way, about adults coming apart to come together

In While We’re Young, though, we have Ben Stiller wearing a stupid hat, Naomi Watts embarrassing herself in a hip-hop dance class and some gross-out-grade farce (“We’ve got some vomiting in this,” proffers Baumbach dutifully by way of evidence, referring to a scene in which the two couples attend an ayahuasca ceremony). It all adds up to a comedy that is far more immediate – and therefore a lot more inclusive – than Baumbach’s previous films.

That’s not to say the director has forgone his cerebral streak entirely. The film does begin with an exchange from Ibsen’s The Master Builder, after all, something you probably wouldn’t get with Judd Apatow. “Every time we were working on the beginning of the movie I would look at that quote and would just think: ‘You’re just gonna lose them immediately, you’re just gonna hear collective groans in the audience,’” says Baumbach. “Like, really, you’re gonna make us read this Ibsen quote?” Proof, perhaps, that the director isn’t quite ready to welcome his audience in with open arms just yet. At least until they’ve made it through 15 seconds of Norwegian realism.

Once they do, they’ll find that While We’re Young is a film bursting at the seams with ideas. Orbiting what Baumbach says he primarily thinks of as a “comedy about marriage” are conversations about authenticity, identity, technology, children, ego, ageing, of course, and the generational divide. By the end, so much has been talked about by the characters, and so much left unresolved, the film might as well come with a sheet of discussion topics for you to go away and think about at home.

One of the film’s themes that might generate the most dialogue is technology. Josh and Jamie’s respective attitudes towards mod cons is the thing that seems to cleave the two generations most cleanly. “Before this movie I avoided it, because there’s nothing more boring than filming a computer screen or a phone,” says Baumbach. “I felt like, how many movies have we seen where people are like [puts on a nerdy voice]: ‘I’m trying to break down the firewall!’” By making a film that at least nods in the direction of generational divide, though, he didn’t really have a choice. Josh and his contemporaries are frozen in internet-based procrastination – “I found ways to procrastinate in the olden days, too, but at least it wasn’t right on your screen,” says Baumbach. “It’s like if you worked on your television set, or in a crack pipe.”

But their problem is a straightforward one compared to Jamie and Darby, who seem to have a more duplicitous relationship with technology. One second they’re making a song and dance of eschewing it – preferring the limitations of videos over streaming sites, physical board games over their App Store versions – the next they’re using it to record, edit and broadcast everything about themselves. That, along with a moment in the film when the pair beg Josh and Cornelia not to Google the word for “marzipan” when they can’t remember it, I took as a comment on a nostalgia-fuelled, internet-borne psychic dissonance. And it made me feel a bit sad. But I’m not sure Baumbach quite knows what I’m on about.

“I guess I thought it was a funny idea,” he says when I ask why he had the younger couple indulge in dark age innocence. “Adam’s character and Amanda’s character are somehow relishing not knowing…” he trails off. “I don’t know, it just seemed funny to me.”

In the end, though, While We’re Young isn’t so much about the specifics of the generational divide, as much as it is about ageing in the abstract. “For the first time in my life,” says Stiller’s character at one point, “I’ve stopped thinking of myself as a child imitating an adult.” Growing up is something that has cropped up time and again in Baumbach’s work, from 16 year-old Walt’s accelerated coming of age – thanks to his parents’ acrimonious divorce – in The Squid And The Whale, to 27-year-old Frances in Frances Ha, who is unceremoniously reminded of her relative underachievement on a daily basis by blundering members of her social circle. It means Baumbach’s films resonate no matter whose psyche is at their centre: I tell him that, even at 24, I probably still identify most with Stiller’s character, and his fear of an encroaching horde of untowardly high-achieving young people.

“I felt that in my 20s. I don’t know how you feel, but I always felt like time was running out, which is crazy, I can tell you right now,” he says with kindly authority. This is despite the fact that the feeling was probably unwarranted in his case, considering he had made his first film – 1995’s Kicking And Screaming (about a group of college graduates refusing to embrace their newly adult status) – by the time he was my age. Accordingly, Baumbach admits it’s Adam Driver’s Jamie with whom he says he finds most kinship. “People tend to come into conversation assuming I’m either on the side of Ben’s character or I have some kind of closer relationship to Ben’s character,” he says, “but, in many ways, certainly professionally, I have more in common with Jamie’s ambition and productivity.”

Recent years have seen Baumbach at his most prolific; his next film, Mistress America, (whose follow-up the director says he’s already started writing) will likely be released in the US in September. Another collaboration with Gerwig, it has been described as a comedy as light in tone as While We’re Young. It might be a clue that Baumbach is to leave behind the peculiar style of his previous work permanently, moving towards a middle ground somewhere between particularity and populism. It seems safe to assume, though, that the forlorn emotional landscapes that have always underpinned his work will remain. At the heart of While We’re Young, says Baumbach, is a sense of bittersweet resignation. “Ben says at the end: ‘What’s the opposite of the world’s your oyster?’ It’s coming to terms with the fact there aren’t boundless possibilities at a certain point. This is your one and only life. And this is how it’s going to be. It doesn’t mean you can’t change and that you can’t achieve later in life, but there are things that you can’t do any more. You have to accept that, and in some ways I think there’s beauty in that compromise, too.”