I'm John Wallam. I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine. This week's

Sunday read is my story about the filmmaker Noah Boundack who started adapting the

Don De Lillo novel White Noise into a film during the pandemic. I went to London in the

spring when Boundack was editing the film and then met up again with him this summer as

he was scoring the movie with the composer Danny Elfman in New York.

The filmmaker Noah Boundack started hurtling through Hollywood's award season in late 2019

and tandem with his partner, Greta Gerwig. Boundack's tenth feature film, Marriage Story,

and Gerwig II, an adaptation of Little Women, were both radiating with a claim and the

couple spent that December, January, and February attending event after event. Everywhere

they went, they shook hands and hugged and scrunched close together for group photos. They

leaned in, nearer to people's faces to hear better in noisy rooms. They breathed in,

breathed out, they dined indoors. Along the way they were informed that the Chinese theatrical

releases of their films were being pushed back and cancelled altogether.

After the Academy Awards, where Marriage Story and Little Women were each nominated six

times, the actress Laura Dern, a close friend of Boundacks and Gerwig's, who appeared in

both films and won an Oscar for Boundacks, wanted them to join her on a vacation in Santa

Barbara, California, to decompress. Boundack, who by nature seems quite compressed, just

wanted to fly back home to New York, and sit around watching movies. But Gerwig persuaded

him to go. One morning, Dern found Boundack sitting by the pool with the New York Times

open on his phone, and a copy of Don de la Loes white noise in his lap. Boundack hadn't

read the books since he was a teenager, shortly after it came out in 1985, but picked it

up again on a whim several weeks earlier. He'd been carrying the novel with him as he flew

...