Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach (born September 3, 1969) is an American film director and screenwriter.

He is known for making comedies set in New York City and his works are inspired by writer-directors such as Woody Allen and Whit Stillman.

His frequent collaborators include Wes Anderson, Adam Driver, and his wife, Greta Gerwig.

Baumbach was born on September 3, 1969, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.

His father, Jonathan Baumbach, was an author of experimental fiction and the co-founder of the publishing house Fiction Collective, taught at Stanford University and Brooklyn College, and was a film critic for Partisan Review.

His mother, Georgia Brown, was a film critic for The Village Voice who also wrote fiction.

His father was Jewish; his mother is Protestant.

He graduated from Brooklyn's Midwood High School in 1987 and received his BA in English from Vassar College in 1991.

Baumbach gained attention for his early films Kicking and Screaming (1995), and Mr. Jealousy (1997).

While at Vassar, he and fellow future filmmaker, Jason Blum, were roommates (Blum later produced Baumbach's first film, Kicking and Screaming in 1995).

Soon after, he briefly worked as a messenger at The New Yorker.

Baumbach made his writing and directing debut in 1995 with Kicking and Screaming, a comedy about four young men who graduate from college and refuse to move on with their lives.

The film starred Josh Hamilton, Chris Eigeman, and Carlos Jacott and premiered in 1995 at the New York Film Festival.

In an interview with The A.V. Club, Baumbach said of his influences on the film, "I really responded to the kind of ensemble feeling of Metropolitan, I was also thinking a lot about Diner, which was another great ensemble "friends" comedy."

Baumbach was chosen as one of Newsweek's "Ten New Faces of 1996".

Roger Ebert praised the film's "good eye and a terrific ear; the dialogue by writer-director Noah Baumbach is not simply accurate... but a distillation of reality – elevating aimless brainy small-talk into a statement."

Reviews often mentioned the thin and meandering plot, but most noted this as a facet of the characters' life stage.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times stated, "Kicking and Screaming occupies its postage-stamp size terrain with confident comic style."

In 1997, he wrote and directed Mr. Jealousy, a film about a young writer so jealous about his girlfriend that he sneaks into the group therapy sessions of her ex-boyfriend to discover what kind of relationship they had.

He then co-wrote (under the name Jesse Carter) and directed (under the name Ernie Fusco) the New York-set comedy of manners Highball.

He is also known for co-writing with Wes Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).

In 2004, Baumbach ventured his film collaboration with writer and director Wes Anderson by co-writing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) alongside Anderson.

His breakthrough film The Squid and the Whale (2005) earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

His parents divorced during his adolescence, which served as inspiration for his 2005 film The Squid and the Whale.

Baumbach has three siblings, two of whom are from a previous marriage of his father's.

Baumbach grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and was determined to become a filmmaker from a young age.

Films that influenced Baumbach include The Jerk, Animal House, Heaven Can Wait, The World According To Garp, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

Baumbach disowned the film according to a 2005 interview in The A.V. Club, the director stated,

"'The truth is, I never 'owned' Highball. It really was an experiment, and kind of a foolish experiment, because I didn't think about what the ramifications would be if it didn't work. But it was made with all the best intentions, which was to try and make a movie in six days, and use all the same people from Mr. Jealousy, with all their goodwill, and bring in some more people. And it was a funny script. But it was just too ambitious. We didn't have enough time, we didn't finish it, it didn't look good, it was just a whole… mess. [Laughs.] We couldn't get it done, and I had a falling out with the producer. He abandoned it, and I had no money to finish it, to go back and maybe get two more days or something. Then later, it was put out on DVD without my approval."

The following year, he released his fourth feature film, The Squid and the Whale (2005) which was a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about his childhood in Brooklyn and the effect of his parents' divorce on the family in the mid-1980s.

The film stars Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney in the parent roles.

In an interview with author Jonathan Lethem in BOMB Magazine, Baumbach said of the film, "Sometimes when I think about the whole experience of this, it starts to become a joke within a joke within a joke. The film is not only inspired by my childhood and my parents’ divorce, but it was also the first script I didn't show to my parents while I was working on it. It's not that I wanted to protect them from anything. I just wanted to keep it my own experience."

The Squid and the Whale was a sleeper hit and a critical success, earning Baumbach two awards at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

It also received six Independent Spirit Award nominations, three Golden Globe nominations and the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review all voted it the year's best screenplay.

His other films include Margot at the Wedding (2007), While We're Young (2014), and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017).

Baumbach wrote and directed the 2007 dramedy Margot at the Wedding, starring his then wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, and John Turturro.

In the film, Kidman plays a woman named Margot who spends several days visiting her sister Pauline (Leigh) on the eve of Pauline's wedding to Black's character.

He started his long time collaboration with Gerwig with Greenberg (2010), and continued with Frances Ha (2013), Mistress America (2015), White Noise (2022) and Barbie (2023).

His film Marriage Story (2019) earned an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination and Baumbach's second Best Original Screenplay nomination.

For the film Barbie (2023), which he co-wrote with his wife Greta Gerwig, he received his third screenplay nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 96th Academy Awards.