The New Yorker:

The writer-director talks about the art of dialogue, his love of marital fight scenes, and how his new film, “Jay Kelly,” helped him rekindle his affection for the medium.

By Susan Morrison

The opening of Noah Baumbach’s new movie, “Jay Kelly,” has his leading man, George Clooney, wrapping a scene in what appears to be a crime drama. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” Clooney says, slumped and bleeding from a bullet wound. “I want to leave this party.” Despite the whiff of farewell, Baumbach, with thirteen films and two recent career-spanning tributes to his credit, says that he’s renewed his vows with the movies.

I met Baumbach more than twenty years ago, when I plucked a Shouts & Murmurs piece he’d submitted out of the slush pile. At the time, he was writing “The Squid and the Whale,” his heartbreaking divorce comedy. We sat together at The New Yorker’s Christmas party that year and talked about breakups and custody battles. When the movie came out, I interviewed him and one of its stars, Laura Linney, for the fledgling New Yorker Festival, at a theatre in his old Park Slope neighborhood. Not long afterward, I remember a lively dinner of crab cakes at the Friars Club with Baumbach, his sometime writing partner Wes Anderson, and the New Yorker legend Lillian Ross, who was then in her nineties. (When I walked into the club, Lillian yelped at me across the lobby, “Our dates are here!”) The magazine has since published a dozen more of Baumbach’s Shouts, on such subjects as Keith Richards’s Desert Island Disks and a coked-up honeybee, and in 2017, when Netflix released “The Meyerowitz Stories” —another divorce comedy, at longer range—I spoke to him for The New Yorker Radio Hour. This past October found us sharing a carpeted stage at the Festival once more, to talk about “Jay Kelly.”

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