Noah Baumbach and Company Open Up About ‘Marriage Story’

Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” is one of the most emotionally wrenching movies of the year—or, frankly, any recent year. So it comes as something of a shock to hear that when Baumbach conceptualized what our own Rodrigo Perez dubbed a “full-bodied and red-blooded story of marital collapse,” he was thinking of his story in far rosier terms. “I was thinking about writing and making a love story,” he explained at Friday’s press conference following the film’s press and industry screening for the New York Film Festival, where it is the Centerpiece selection. “And I was trying to figure out what that would be, like how to tell a love story in a different way.”

That wasn’t all that was different for Baumbach this time around. Though he’s worked with other screenwriters before—including multiple collaborations with Wes Anderson and Greta Gerwig—this time, he involved his cast in the writing process. “I went to Adam [Driver] and Scarlett [Johansson], Laura [Dern] too, before I wrote it,” Baumbach said. “So it was our conversations, all of us, that found their way into the movie – and also just knowing it was them, thinking of them, saying and doing things. I would have written this script differently if I didn’t have that guide.”

Some directors might worry about trying to get commitments from actors without a fully formed screenplay—and some actors might hesitate to make that commitment. But Johansson felt no such concern. “The first thing I got was—maybe it was just a draft that you were working on—but it was Nicole’s story that she tells to Laura’s character,” she said, referring to a long, searching monologue in which her character gives her divorce lawyer the full, warts-and-all story of the courtship, the marriage, and its disintegration. “It was her story, the way she… it was her story. And I don’t know any actor that would get those sides and—there was no question after that, after I read those sides. It was like, ‘Well, y’know, I’ll see you on set, I guess.'”

Perhaps as a result of that intimacy, and that active involvement by actors hoping for—and, from the result, achieving—a Cassavetes-style rawness onscreen, much of the work they’re asked to do in “Marriage Story” is downright gutting. The film’s centerpiece sequence is a gloves-are-off duet between Johansson and Driver, in which their characters attempt to work through the details of their out-of-control divorce battle and end up reopening old wounds and hurtfully addressing old resentments. To hear the director describe it, it was even more upsetting to make than watch. “It was an eleven-page scene that often they were doing all the way through, over and over again,” Baumbach said. “It was exhausting, and much more so for them. And it was also the most gratifying thing I’ve ever been involved in, because of what they gave.”

This is not to say that every other day was a walk in the park, Driver insisted. “I think sometimes in movies, there’s a scene or two that you know is coming up on the schedule,” he explained, “that just seems unlike the others, whether it be more emotionally complex or physically complex or something that’s exhausting. But for this movie, I felt every day was one of those scenes – which was a testament to good writing, that the stakes were high in everything.” But still, he continued, “every day felt like a major event. They all felt, like, too soon in the schedule.”

If that argument is the height of their collaborative grief and pain, very different emotions are at play late in the film, in a pair of scenes in which their characters—independently of each other—find themselves performing a song from Steven Sondheim’s “Company” in a public setting. It sounds contrived, but it’s not; both characters are veterans of the New York theater, where that text is sacrosanct.

“I kind of half-joked that I reverse-engineered the whole movie just to get the two of them to sing those songs,” Baumbach laughed. “But I did have that idea early on, and ‘Company’ is something that Adam and I have talked about a lot, as something that we love. And I thought, how great if we could use these songs both as ways for us to tell stories and also to show character—which is story. So I kind of had them as markers in my mind, that I would hopefully feel like when I got to those points in the movie, I could justify it, and wouldn’t be just like jamming it in, y’know? I’ve done that before in scripts, ‘I’m gonna do a dance number,’ and then I get there, and it’s like, this will never work in this reality. But this story, it gave back a lot as I worked on it, and I felt that we could do it.”

So why, then, is a film that’s so laser-focused on divorce—a long, painful, protracted, difficult, compromising divorce—titled “Marriage Story”? Because, frankly, that’s how Baumbach started thinking about it and still does. In his mind, movies where the subject is divorce, like this or his earlier “The Squid and the Whale,” aren’t really about divorce at all.

“‘Squid’ was about divorce on one hand, but it was also a coming of age story,” he said. “It was about children, parents, and moving away from parents. I really thought of it as a movie about family—which I think about this one as well—and it’s told in the cloak of divorce, and of course, it is about divorce in many ways. But I was really focused on the love story of it, and exploring how in some ways when something isn’t working, you kind of see it in a different way, a more clear-eyed way. And that way, in looking at divorce, I could explore marriage.”