Scanner
Your daily cup of WTF?
ScreenGrab
The Nerve Film Blog
Slice
Each month a new artist; each image a new angle. This month: Giovanni Cervantes.
ScreenGrab
The Nerve Film Blog
Autumn
A fashionable L.A. photo editor exploring all manner of hyper-sexual girls down south.
The Modern Materialist
Almost everything you want.
Paper Airplane Crush
A San Francisco photographer on the eternal search for the girls of summer.
Rose & Olive
Houston neighbors pull back the curtains and expose each other's lives.
chase
The creator of Supercult.com poses his pretty posse.
The Remote Island
Nerve's TV blog.
61 Frames Per Second
Smarter gaming.

The Screengrab

Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Posted by Peter Smith
After years spent working his way back after the box office failure of his second feature, the underappreciated 1997 comedy Mr. Jealousy, the writer-director Noah Baumbach struck gold with 2005's The Squid and the Whale, about the emotional fallout from the divorce of a culturally ambitious Park Slope family. Because Baumbach's own parents divorced when he was a teenager, and because his father, Jonathan Baumbach, is, like the hero's father in his movie, a novelist — his mother is Georgia Brown, who used to be a film critic for the Village Voice — part of the buzz around the movie was always based on assumptions that it was autobiographical. Baumbach tells Dennis Lim that while he was doing promotion for the film, "Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true. I’d get tripped up answering a question about my real father based on something in the movie that wasn’t real." Baumbach's new follow-up, Margot at the Wedding, is another emotionally charged comedy about marriage and family, and it too draws on Baumbach's life, which now includes the experience of having people ask you presumptuous questions about your life based on what they assume they know about you and your family from your work. The new picture's title character is a writer (Nicole Kidman) who has to contend with readers hell-bent on seeing her fiction as a blueprint of her life and the lives of her family, including her sister, whose busted first marriage served as the basis for one of Margot's stories. (The movie is a family project in another way: Margot's sister is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to Baumbach.) So, now that the director can get his projects funded again, does he have any other pipe dreams about the future? "My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical." — Phil Nugent
+ DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
Posted Nov 15 2007, 03:00 PM
Filed under: , , , , , , , ,

Comments

No Comments

in
Send rants/raves toscreengrab@nerve.com

Archives

  • May 2009 (183)
  • April 2009 (205)
  • March 2009 (190)
  • February 2009 (166)
  • January 2009 (172)
  • December 2008 (179)
  • November 2008 (128)
  • October 2008 (188)
  • September 2008 (150)
  • August 2008 (168)
  • July 2008 (133)
  • June 2008 (146)
  • May 2008 (241)
  • April 2008 (243)
  • March 2008 (200)
  • February 2008 (210)
  • January 2008 (237)
  • December 2007 (132)
  • November 2007 (122)
  • October 2007 (106)

    • Bloggers

    • Paul Clark
    • John Constantine
    • Vadim Rizov
    • Phil Nugent
    • Leonard Pierce
    • Scott Von Doviak
    • Andrew Osborne
    • Hayden Childs
    • Sarah Sundberg
    • Nick Schager
    • Lauren Wissot

    Contributors

    • Kent M. Beeson
    • Pazit Cahlon
    • Bilge Ebiri
    • D.K. Holm
    • Faisal A. Qureshi
    • Vern
    • Bryan Whitefield
    • Scott Renshaw
    • Gwynne Watkins

    Tags

    Browse All Tags

    Places to Go

    People To Read

    Film Festivals

    Directors

    Partners

    College Humor
    The Onion
    Cracked.com
    Fark.com
    Ask Men
    Heavy.com