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Noah Baumbach is an American filmmaker known for his comedies set in New York City. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and has collaborated with Wes Anderson, Adam Driver, and Greta Gerwig.
Noah Baumbach is a Brooklyn-born writer, director and producer of acclaimed films such as The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story and White Noise. IMDb provides his personal details, credits, videos, photos, trivia and more.
- January 1, 1
- 1.75 m
- Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
Learn about the life and career of Noah Baumbach, a film director, writer and actor who often explores dysfunctional families and personal trauma in his films. Find out his family background, marital status, awards, trivia and quotes.
- September 3, 1969
Dec 20, 2023 · 'Barbie' co-writers Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are married, wrapping a huge year for the record-breaking director who had a second child in March.
- nardine.saad@latimes.com
- Staff Writer
- Overview
- Childhood
- Film career
Noah Baumbach (born September 3, 1969, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) established himself as a distinctive new voice in filmmaking with his self-aware, dialogue-heavy dramas about artists and intellectuals living in his home city of New York. Starting in 1995 with his debut film Kicking and Screaming, he has written and directed such well-received movie...
Baumbach grew up in Brooklyn, the eldest of two sons born to Jonathan Baumbach and Georgia Brown. Baumbach’s parents published fiction and wrote film criticism—his father in Partisan Review and his mother in the Village Voice. His father also taught fiction at Brooklyn College. Baumbach was exposed to art films from early childhood; in a profile on Baumbach published in The New Yorker in 2013, Baumbach’s father claimed that he took his elder son to see French New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1970; The Wild Child) when the boy was two years old. According to Baumbach’s recollections, however, his favorite movies growing up were the swashbucklers of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, followed by the films of Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma when he was older.
When Baumbach was a teenager, his parents divorced and began a joint custody agreement in which Baumbach and his brother stayed with their father on intermittent days of the week, rather than for several days at a time. The unusual arrangement later inspired a plot detail in The Squid and the Whale.
After graduating from high school, Baumbach studied literature at Vassar College and worked briefly as a messenger at The New Yorker. He made his first film at age 24, the indie feature Kicking and Screaming, about a band of recent college graduates who carry on with their lives aimlessly in the months after their graduation. Some critics found it reminiscent of director Whit Stillman’s comedies of manners, especially Metropolitan (1990). In 1997 Baumbach followed up with Mr. Jealousy, a romantic comedy about a writer who becomes obsessed with his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, a famous novelist.
Baumbach’s other early films were Highball (1997)—which was released only on DVD (against his wishes) and which he later disowned, considering it unfinished—and the short film Conrad & Butler Take a Vacation (2000). In 2004 Baumbach collaborated with Wes Anderson on the screenplay for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which Anderson directed. The quirky comedy starred Bill Murray as an oceanographer who seeks revenge on the shark that killed his diving partner.
For his next film, Baumbach explored a more personal theme. His script for The Squid and the Whale began as a memoir about living through his parents’ divorce. On subsequent drafts, it was transformed into fiction, but heavy elements of autobiography remained, such as his parents’ awkward custody arrangement. Baumbach even used his parents’ book collections as props in the film and had Jeff Daniels, who played the character based on Baumbach’s father, dress in Jonathan Baumbach’s old clothes. The film won awards for directing and screenwriting at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. In a 2019 Vulture article assessing Baumbach’s career, critic Scott Tobias wrote that it was with this film that Baumbach finally “found his true voice.”
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In 2007 Baumbach wrote and directed Margot at the Wedding, a comedy drama starring Jennifer Jason Leigh (whom he had married in 2005), Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, and John Turturro. He collaborated with Anderson again in 2009, cowriting the screenplay for Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson’s stop-motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book of the same name. In 2010 Baumbach wrote (with Leigh) and directed Greenberg, which starred Leigh, Ben Stiller, and Greta Gerwig. Two years later came his romantic comedy drama Frances Ha. Between the making of the latter two films, Baumbach separated from Leigh and he and Gerwig became a couple. (Baumbach and Leigh divorced in 2013, and he and Gerwig married in 2023.) Baumbach and Gerwig wrote the script for Frances Ha, which follows a dancer (played by Gerwig) in her late twenties living in New York City and trying to settle into adulthood. Shot in black and white, it was consciously indebted to the iconic films of the French New Wave.
Nov 23, 2022 · The filmmaker Noah Baumbach started hurtling through Hollywood’s award season in late 2019 in tandem with his partner, Greta Gerwig.
Birthday: Sep 3, 1969. Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York, USA. Often described as witty, insightful and unapologetically New York, it was no surprise that writer-director Noah Baumbach drew...
