Noah Baumbach wanted to see Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler fight. That was one of the initial ideas he had for his new film The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). The two comedians play half-brothers—each wrestling with his place in their dysfunctional family—and, yes, they end up exchanging blows.
Their father, Harold (the inimitable Dustin Hoffman), is an oft-divorced sculptor and professor, who maintains, even in old age, unreasonable expectations with regards to his children and his career. His daughter, Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), fades into the background by choice; Danny (Sandler) is a doting father who never acted on his musical talent; and Matthew (Stiller) eschewed the arts to go into accounting. Baumbach’s film—which shares some DNA with his autobiographical indie classic The Squid And the Whale—unfolds episodically and is enormously funny as it digs into the peculiarities and problems of these frustrated oddballs.
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The day after Meyerowitz made its New York Film Festival debut earlier this month, Baumbach hopped on the phone with me to discuss how he came to build this story and why he’s crying more these days.
VICE: There’s a lot of this movie that seems like it’s in conversation with The Squid and the Whale. Is it a maturation or response to that film at all?
Noah Baumbach: I didn’t think of it much in that way. When I was writing what ended up being The Squid and the Whale—but at the time I didn’t know what it was—I started writing a movie about adult siblings dealing with divorce. I couldn’t crack it in any way, so I thought, Do I do some flashbacks? Then I started writing from the kids’ perspective, and that obviously took over and became that movie. So it’s been there with me. I started this one almost from the outside in, in that I’d said to Ben and Adam, “Is there a movie where they play brothers?” That connected me back with that initial idea, probably.
Had those conversations with Ben and Adam been happening for a while?
Adam reached out to me separately a few years ago, saying, “I’d love to come do something with you if you ever have a role for me.” Ben and I had been working together, and Ben and Adam had simultaneously reconnected and were saying, “Hey, we’ve never really been in a movie together—what’s something we could do?” So when I brought it up to Ben, he said, “Adam and I were just talking about this.” I wrote the script thinking of the the two of them, but besides them having a physical fight, we didn’t have anything specific that we felt needed to be in there.
So the physical fight needed to be in there?
Well, no—it just seemed [like] something that would be funny, and I felt like if I could justify a physical fight between them, then that’s a movie I’d like to see.
“(New and selected)” always makes me think of poetry. Were you intending to find something poetic in the structure?
They use it in poetry and also in collecting short stories. One of the things that really helped me crack the structure of the story—because I wrote around and through it many times before I came to this—was this idea of a collection of short stories that had been written over a period of time. An author who returns to the same family every so often, [like] John Updike, Salinger, or Roth.
I read a collection of John Updike stories about this family the Maples. The parents finally divorce, and it’s very sad—but it was also sad to me that Updike didn’t know that when he wrote the first story. It’s different than a novel, where you’re experiencing it as this narrative but the author knows what’s going to happen before you do. This is more like, “Maybe the author didn’t know where this was going?”
It puts the author in the same position as the characters, not being omnipotent in that moment. Did you think about omniscience when writing and structuring the film?
Well, you’re always in that role—there are things you don’t know, and then places you think you’re going to get to, but you don’t know how to get there. Every one of them is different, in that way. Greenberg, by design, was seemingly formless—a character roaming, in a way. With Frances [Ha], I felt needed a structure and I didn’t know what it was; [Co-writer and partner] Greta [Gerwig] and I talked about it a lot and we came up with this idea of the different homes, like chapters. You could almost look at Frances as a series of short stories about somebody.
Around that time, I got more comfortable with the idea of finding structure that helps me find the characters. I used to come at it the other way around, where I’d try to write the characters and let them inform where the story was going.
There are very abrupt and funny cuts throughout the movie. Were they in your head and in the structure when you were writing, or did those come in the editing process?
They were in the script. It’s something I’ve actually done before in other movies, but not in a way that becomes structural or as a motif you recognize. In Squid and Margot [At the Wedding], I’d cut people off in the middle of what they were saying. It felt, to me, like the right thing for the movie—like the abruptness was like the movie sharing the emotion with you in some way. It calls attention to itself, obviously. It’s funny, but it’s a laugh that is coming from me and not from the true behavior of the people.
You have title cards for Danny and Matthew, and a parenthetical for Jean’s story. Why?
Jean’s been left out. You see it in her introduction—she’s been in the room, and you don’t even realize it. They’ve already been talking about stuff, and still she’s there, and she’s OK with it.
I wanted Jean to have her moment, but I thought in a way Jean’s modesty was such that she’d put her story in parentheses—like, “Don’t take this too seriously. I’m just going to say this.” What prompts Jean to tell the story is out of her control. She wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise, so that’s why I put it in parentheses.
I was reading an interview around Squid and the Whale where you talked about not having sentimentality in that film. What was your approach in Meyerowitz?
I would make a distinction between sentimentality and things that feel emotionally true—you might even call it “earned sentimentality.” This movie and Squid are open-hearted, too. I love all these people—even the ones that people might take issue with and are behaving badly. My job is to be true to them and the characters, and sometimes that might provoke sentiment or bigger emotion—which this movie does. But if it feels earned and right, it’s a beautiful thing and what you want in a movie—to laugh and cry. I’m at a point in my life where I just started crying a whole lot more. I find everything so sad. I’m an easier cry now than I used to be, and maybe there’s something you’re picking up in that too.
What brought you to Harold and the ideas you explore when it comes to legacy?
This is a family where art took the place of religion because it was Harold’s thing. You could almost tell this story with the father as a priest or a pastor—former priest, I suppose. Also, the notion of family mythologies, which every family has—even the good stories are told in the narrative that defines the family. As we get older, we internalize these things in ways that we don’t even realize.
This patriarch who defines success in such a tortured and clear way has to do with artistic integrity. He clearly wants success, but he can’t admit that because it’s embarrassing. That becomes quite confusing for children, and we certainly see how that bears out. Dustin and I spent a lot of time going through the rhythms of his speech. It was challenging even just to memorize, because a lot of what he says isn’t apropos of anything anyone just said or anything that happened. I had a specific guy in my head, and I needed him to both interpret that and reinvent it.
Sigourney Weaver very briefly plays herself during a scene at a MoMA opening. Was she written in the script?
It was indicative of the good luck I had in terms of getting all the actors I wanted. I wrote it as Sigourney, who I didn’t know. It just felt right—this person in New York who Harold would be impressed by, and the audience would also know. I was lucky she agreed to do it, because I didn’t have a backup idea. I can’t wait to work with her again and have her play a fictional character.
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