Noah Baumbach’s fifth feature-length picture, “Greenberg” hits theaters later this month. The picture stars Ben Stiller as an aimless 40-something New Yorker who moves to Los Angeles in order to figure out his life while house sitting for his brother. Awkward, and recovering from a breakdown, while he’s there he begins an unlikely relationship with his brother’s assistant (Greta Gerwig).
Known for his adored and wry coming of age college film, “Kicking And Screaming” and his more caustic, but perceptively funny dramedies, “Squid & The Whale” and “Margot At The Wedding,” the writer/director is also celebrated for his writing collaboration with Wes Anderson on “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” and the Academy Award-nominated animated picture, “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
And those hoping for more from that already fruitful partnership may still yet see another film.
“Wes and I do have another… I dunno if you’d call it a partly written script — but it’s a partly written story, ideas and scenes that we have been talking about for a long time,” Baumbach told The Playlist in an interview conducted yesterday (and it’s something that Anderson hinted at a few years ago).
And the filmmaker noted that it’s a project the duo started working on before their ‘Life Aquatic’ effort. “It’s becoming kind of an ongoing document of our friendship, it’s something we keep adding to every time we see each other. At least once or twice [when we meet up] they’ll be something that cracks us up that we’ll go, ‘Oh, that should go into the script,’ but I ‘m not necessarily sure if we’ll end up finishing it. In some ways it’s more fun to just add to it.”
Baumbach wouldn’t divulge a title and was coy with details, but said the idea is pretty fleshed out. “It has a basic premise, it has a lot of characters, it has a lot of story actually, but these things transform all the time. You think the [story] is one thing and then it turns out to be another.”
As for two other projects Baumbach was once attached to, an adaptation of “The Emperor’s Children” written for Ron Howard and another called “Prep” written by Curtis Sittenfeld, announced in the trades in 2006, they’re still in the works. Some may have presumed these projects had died or gone dormant, but the director said both scripts have been completed and that they are still active projects — both of which he himself wants to direct.
It’s interesting to note because when Baumbach first signed on to adapt Claire Messud’s ‘Emperor’s Children’ it was a project the trades had pegged Howard to direct for Universal.
The ‘Emperor’s Children’ novel is about Ivy League grads living on New York’s Upper West Side and approaching their 30s with unease and apprehension. The director obviously has his ear attuned to the voice of erudite East Coast upper crust-types, so in several ways this could be a continuation of the ground work he laid with the characters in “Kicking And Screaming” (and hello, comedy-of-manners guy Whit Stillman, why aren’t you working with these guys??).
There’s also the coming-of-age tale, “Prep” which has been completed for some time, but still lingers with the director. “It’s a great book. This woman Curtis Sittenfeld wrote it and both those novels — ‘Emperor’s Children’ and ‘Prep’ — are really great and were really fun to adapt, because the voices were so particular and strong and it’s really enjoyable to work off something that’s already so solid. And I really liked the script. I do think [‘Prep’] will get made at some point, it’s all about finding when and how to do it. It’s all set in high school, but it’s a script I wrote a few years ago now and it doesn’t go away in my head, it’s another project where I feel like I can really see the movie in my head.”
According to Amazon the boarding school-set novel is the story of a “South Bend, Indiana, teenager who wins a scholarship to the prestigious Ault school, an East Coast institution where ‘money was everywhere on campus, but it was usually invisible.'” Class and teen social structures will obviously be a focus.
As for his recently announced script work on Brett Ratner’s “Tower Heist,” which will likely start Ben Stiller, the director downplayed his involvement. “There’s already a great script for that movie, I’m just helping out at this stage. That falls into the category of things you used to work on and no one would know about in the pre-Internet age. It’s really fun, it’ll be a fun movie.”
Baumbach cautions however, that he does not know what project is coming next or when, citing the luck and star alignment it sometimes takes to make a movie come together. “The problem of the modern age of IMDB and Internet sites and its great and all, but you say something too loudly and suddenly its on your resume and you’re answering to it.”
“The presumption, in just talking about [these projects] is that you have complete control about the order of things in your life. I used to feel much more of a sense of the oeuvre, like ‘What’s next, OK I’ve just made this one, what’s going to be the next one.’ The preciousness has dissipated as I’ve gotten older, and I think that’s good. There’s so many moving pieces in putting a movie together and I don’t really care anymore as long as it’s a project that I feel good about, I would make them pretty much in any order.”
We’ll have another story on Baumbach’s “Greenberg” next week. That picture comes out March 19 in limited release in New York and L.A. and will roll out over the next couple of weeks, starting with 200 screens on March 26th.