Noah Baumbach

The 79th Venice Film Festival opened with a screening of Noah Baumbach’s newest film, White Noise, on August 31. It’s the first time the American writer-director has written an adapted screenplay, the source material being a novel of the same name by American author Don DeLillo.

Dusk was imminent on the Lido but the lights were bright outside the Mostra Internazionale D’Arte Cinemagrafica. It was opening night for the 79th annual Venice Film Festival and the world’s media had come to capture the celebration for the premiere feature, White Noise.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) made quite some noise when it premiered in Cannes last May, much of it related to the fact that it was the first ever streaming service-produced film to run in the prestigious Palme d’Or competition (to the marked displeasure of French exhibitors). Beyond the novelty and the controversy lies Noah Baumbach’s funny and poignant story about parents, adult children and the ties that bind all of us in one or the other capacity – or both.

The introspective comedies of Noah Baumbach have established him as one of the most distinctive voices working in American cinema today. Recently his films have been populated by millennials and gen-xers feeling their way though life’s existential and emotional choices as if they’d misplaced the instruction manual.

Greta Gerwig, star and writer of Frances Ha, and director and writer Noah Baumbach talk about bringing the fictional life (more…).