Noah Baumbach Quotes
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I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.
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My dad was a great movie companion. He wouldn't diminish 'The Jerk.' If I liked it, he liked it. He could see it through my eyes.
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There's something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don't know what their reaction will be.
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I try to procrastinate, if I can, productively, like I'll work on something else as procrastination. Or I take a walk. Because often I find, if you get out, more things come to you.
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I really like my first movie a lot, "Kicking and Screaming." I think it's a - I'm very pleased and proud of that movie, but it wasn't the - it wasn't "Citizen Kane" right out of the box, you know? It wasn't "Sex, Lies and Videotape."
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I've always liked working with friends or, you know, people I have outside relationships with.
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I don't agree with the idea that my characters are unlikeable.
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Will Ferrell's made a lot of brilliant movies.
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Manhattan is so tailored. It's driven by appealing to the very wealthy and tourists.
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It's kind of major, learning to drive. I feel like it kicked up other stuff in my life.
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That's the nice thing about collaborating with someone: Your work becomes a conversation.
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I think anxiety is dangerous, but it makes you think it's your friend.
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You can be aware that something is idiosyncratic, and give it to a character, but keep doing it.
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I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.
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I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so - which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.
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When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.
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Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.
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I'm interested in the way major events don't necessarily announce themselves as major events. They're often little things - the drip, drip of life that changes people or affects people.
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I've had great experiences or joyful experiences making a movie that people found very disturbing.
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If you don't feel good about something, you don't shake it off easily.
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When you find yourself on the Internet when you're supposed to be writing, you've already lost. It's even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet.
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I like to have memories of a place. It brings something extra. I'm not even sure what it is. I mean, it's the same part of it as I like using friends in small parts or people I know or my doorman.
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I always viewed life as material for a movie.
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It's near impossible to make a movie in black and white in the system.
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I get a lot of responses to my movies. Some people say, 'Oh, I thought it was really funny - I hope that's okay!' And my answer always is 'Yes. It's totally okay.'
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When you're around your family, and you have that history and that shared language, you say things you'd be embarrassed to hear quoted back to you later.
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I wouldn't say 'Frances Ha' is autobiographical, but it's definitely very personal.
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I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.
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I thought at the time of my parents' divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager.
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The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.
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