Noah Baumbach

 ( 1969 Births ) 

Baumbach grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and from a young age he was determined to become a professional filmmaker. Films that influenced Baumbach include The Jerk, Animal House, Heaven Can Wait, The World According to Garp, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

He graduated from Brooklyn's Midwood High School in 1987 and received his A.B. in English from Vassar College in 1991. While at Vassar, he and fellow future filmmaker, Jason Blum, were roommates (Blum later produced Baumbach's first film, Kicking and Screaming in 1995). Soon after, he briefly worked as a messenger at The New Yorker.

In 1997, he wrote and directed Mr. Jealousy, a film about a young writer so jealous about his girlfriend that he sneaks into the group therapy sessions of her ex-boyfriend to discover what kind of relationship they had. He then co-wrote (under the name Jesse Carter) and directed (under the name Ernie Fusco) the New York-set comedy of manners Highball. Baumbach disowned the film according to a 2005 interview in The A.V. Club, the director stated,

Baumbach wrote and directed the 2007 dramedy Margot at the Wedding, starring his then wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, and John Turturro. In the film, Kidman plays a woman named Margot who spends several days visiting her sister Pauline (Leigh) on the eve of Pauline's wedding to Black's character. It was shot in April and May 2006 in Hampton Bays and City Island, Bronx. The film was released in the United States by Paramount Vantage on November 16, 2007. Baumbach helped to write and direct the short films Clearing the Air and New York Underground which aired on Saturday Night Live. The films were co-written and co-produced by cast-members Fred Armisen and Bill Hader. New York Underground featured Hader as a British rock journalist doing a piece on quirky underground musician Joshua Rainhorne (Armisen has performed as Joshua at numerous live events). Clearing the Air featured Hader, Armisen, and Paul Rudd (who was the guest host for that week) trying to clear the air over a girl they all slept with. Both pieces aired on SNL in the fall of 2008.

Baumbach co-wrote the screenplay for the 2009 film version of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox with Wes Anderson, who directed it using stop-motion technology. The film was a critical success appearing on many critics top 10 lists of the year. The film also received the Academy Award, British Academy Film Award, and Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Animated Film, losing to Pixar's Up. Despite the critical praise the film was not a financial success.

Baumbach has "shown an affinity for writing about the East Coast elite." Baumbach has written an adaptation of Curtis Sittenfeld's novel Prep. He also co-wrote a screenplay for the animated film . He worked on HBO's adaptation of the Jonathan Franzen novel The Corrections, but the pilot was never completed and HBO passed on the project. Baumbach wrote and directed the 2014 comedy-drama While We're Young, starring Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. A24 Films released the film on March 27, 2015, and the film went on to gross more than all of Baumbach's previous films in the United States box office. He also directed and cowrote the 2015 comedy Mistress America, starring Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was released to general audiences on August 14. That same year he presented De Palma, a documentary about filmmaker Brian De Palma that he co-directed with Jake Paltrow. It premiered at the 2015 Venice Film Festival.

In 2017, The Meyerowitz Stories was released on October 13 on Netflix. Before its streaming debut, the film was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The film focuses on a fractured and dysfunctional family, and starred Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler and Emma Thompson. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 92% based on 181 reviews, and an average rating of 7.66/10. The website's critical consensus reads, " The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) observes the family dynamic through writer-director Noah Baumbach's bittersweet lens and the impressive efforts of a remarkable cast." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 79 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

In 2019, Baumbach wrote, produced and directed Marriage Story. The film follows a showbusiness couple and their marriage breaking up followed by an emotional divorce preceding. The film starred Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as the family couple. Alan Alda, Ray Liotta and Laura Dern also portray the lawyers involved about the divorce. The film also featured performances by Merritt Wever, Julie Hagerty and Wallace Shawn. It premiered to great acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, before it was released on Netflix on November 6, 2019, with many ranking it among Baumbach's best work. Mark Kermode, film critic at The Guardian, wrote, "this often hilarious heartbreaker is simply Baumbach’s best film to date – insightful, sympathetic and rather beautifully bewildered." Kermode also compared the film to Annie Hall (1977), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and La Grande Illusion (1937). The film went on to receive six Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay. Driver and Johansson also received nominations in leading roles. Laura Dern won the Academy Award for a supporting role. With the release of Marriage Story, it also made Baumbach one of the few screenwriters to ever sweep "The Big Four" critics awards: Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle, and National Society of Film Critics.

His most recent film Jay Kelly, which is his fourth from Netflix, is described as a "coming-of-age story about adults". Baumbach cast George Clooney and Adam Sandler. He co-wrote the film with actress Emily Mortimer and the film will be produced by David Heyman and Amy Pascal. Netflix boss Scott Stuber said: "Noah Baumbach's got an excellent kind of Jerry Maguire-esque, for lack of a better analogy, but a really great life-affirming movie with two big movie stars that's starting to come together, so that'll be exciting."

He has also cited Ernst Lubitsch, Max Ophüls, Jean Renoir, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Spike Lee, Whit Stillman, Steven Spielberg, as well as the Screwball comedy, and the films of the French New Wave as influences. His favorite film of all time is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Baumbach is a fan of the "beautiful" music of Electronic music acts New Order and OMD, and sought to "do something that evoked" those bands on the soundtrack of Mistress America (2015). He has also cited David Bowie and Paul McCartney, and the of Tangerine Dream and Georges Delerue, as important to him.

Baumbach's romantic and creative collaboration with actress, writer and director Greta Gerwig began late in 2011, after they met during the production of Greenberg. They have two sons, born March 2019 and February 2023. Twelve years into their relationship, Baumbach and Gerwig married at New York City Hall in December 2023.

Baumbach's brother Nico is a film theorist and associate professor at Columbia University's Center for Comparative Media.

Acting roles

He has also received nominations from the Golden Globe Awards, British Academy Film Awards, Critics Choice Movie Awards, Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival and Writers Guild of America Awards. He has been nominated for five Independent Spirit Film Awards and received two wins.

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