This week’s edition of the Film Society’s weekly podcast, The Close-Up, features a two-part conversation with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Noah Baumbach. Subscribe to The Close-Up now on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Stitcher.
Baumbach returned to the Film Society of Lincoln Center in March for a mini-retrospective entitled Growing Up Baumbach, which included a triple feature of Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale, and a sneak preview of While We’re Young.
In the film, which is now in theaters, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star as a married couple in their forties who connect with a younger couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. The comedy has been hailed as the director’s most accessible film. In fact, at a recent screening the director jokingly said: “What you are about to see is the happiest I get.”
Noah Baumbach has a long history with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, starting in 1995 when his debut feature, Kicking and Screaming, was a main-slate selection in the New York Film Festival. Since then, he has attended subsequent NYFFs to present The Squid and the Whale in 2005 and Margot at the Wedding in 2007. And, more recently, his 2012 comedy Frances Ha—an effervescent portrait of a dancer in her late twenties played by Greta Gerwig—debuted at the 50th New York Film Festival, where it was an audience favorite.
That year, the director took the stage with legendary director Brian De Palma for a special Directors Dialogue moderated by Variety’s Scott Foundas (and sponsored by HBO), which is featured in part two of today’s podcast. Part one spotlights Baumbach’s most recent appearance at the Film Society’s Walter Reade Theater, with a talk moderated by New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones.
