The Noah Baumbach Retrospective
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
Higher Ground
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2025
⏱️ 79 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Filmmaker Noah Baumbach has spent the past three decades transmuting his experiences into cinema, culminating in his latest film, Jay Kelly, his love letter to movies (and the memories they evoke).
We begin with the “quiet crisis” Baumbach found himself in on the heels of releasing White Noise (5:30), finding his way back to the page, with co-writer Emily Mortimer, to create Jay Kelly for George Clooney (10:20), the films that defined his early years (15:00), and the week that Mike Nichols’ production of Heartburn took over his Park Slope childhood home (22:45). Then, we walk through his early, funny work in Kicking and Screaming (29:00) and Mr. Jealousy (30:45), how art imitated life in The Squid and the Whale (32:00), and the start of his lasting collaboration with Greta Gerwig in Greenberg (43:00).
On the back-half, Baumbach talks about his love of working with actors (45:30), setting the stage for the infamous Marriage Story fight scene (47:00), his process of writing personal stories (51:30), and how his subconscious seems to always be one step ahead of him (52:00). To close, the influence of Noah’s Hollywood mentor, the late Peter Bogdanovich (58:45) and a prescient essay from Baumbach’s mother, former film critic of The Village Voice, Georgia Brown (1:05:00).
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Transcript
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| 0:22.1 | Lemonada. This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Forgo, so welcome to the show. Today, writer-director Noah Bombach. |
| 1:01.2 | Earlier this year, |
| 1:02.1 | Bombach was at the Telluride Film Festival, |
| 1:04.4 | where he was being honored for, quote, |
| 1:06.4 | 30 years' worth of distinctive vision |
| 1:08.2 | and indelible movie moments |
| 1:09.7 | from Francis Ha to marriage story. |
| 1:12.9 | After the tribute, which actually neatly ties into his new film, Jay Kelly, we'll get to that |
| 1:17.7 | in a second. Bombach went on stage for a Q&A surveying his career. And he shared this story, |
| 1:24.4 | and it's one he's told before, but he talked about the first time he met Mike Nichols, |
| 1:28.8 | like Mike Nichols of Nichols in May, or, you know, Mike Nichols, the famous movie director. |
| 1:34.5 | It was right after he had seen The Squid and the Whale, and Nichols, who seemed to always have |
| 1:39.9 | the perfect line for everything, said, Noah, I see you got into the movie business for the |
| 1:45.5 | exact same reason I did. He then holds for a comedic amount of awkward silence, revenge. |
| 1:53.2 | And if it's not revenge that defines Bombach's films, it's something like revisionist history. |
| 1:59.4 | Since kicking and screaming in 1995, Bombach's mind his lived experiences, from being a child of |
| 2:06.1 | divorce to getting divorced himself, and turned it into art. |
| 2:10.4 | Quote, it's not exactly revenge on a person. |
... |
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