Noah Baumbach Quotes

I'm sure I've said some pretty bad pick-up lines.

Adaptations are fun for me because they connect to the idea of filmmaking I had when I was a kid. I would see a movie and think: 'I'm gonna make that movie.'

I'm interested in the way major events don't necessarily announce themselves as major events. They're often little things - the drip, drip of life that changes people or affects people.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

I always viewed life as material for a movie.

I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.

I call my wife and tell her I'm going to sleep at the lab. She reminds me that she left me a week ago. Louis tries to crack me up by pantomiming humping a chimp through the cage.

Other people have worked with big studios and maintained control over their movies. I see no reason why it wouldn't work for me.

Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.

It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum.

Will Ferrell's made a lot of brilliant movies.

I can feel pretty critical of people, and I understand that sort of feeling of when you're going through something that's painful, taking it out on the world and projecting onto other people, finding faults with other people because it's harder to find faults in yourself.

I graduated in '91, so the '90s for me were very much the first years out of school, so I can't really look at that decade as independent of my own experience of my 20s, really.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

I wouldn't say 'Frances Ha' is autobiographical, but it's definitely very personal.

With 'Greenberg,' I wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles ... my great love for it and also the way that I felt not at home and alienated there.

I like to have memories of a place. It brings something extra. I'm not even sure what it is. I mean, it's the same part of it as I like using friends in small parts or people I know or my doorman.

I've run into more people walking in L.A. than if I drove. Because you stand out so much if you walk. People from my past have stopped their cars and said, 'Hey!' But if I was in a car, they never would've seen me.

Anyone who's putting money into your movie would always rather you cast well-known people.

I don't agree with the idea that my characters are unlikeable.

I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford's 'Good Solider' or something I wasn't equipped to understand.

I watch movies all the time, so it's hard to pick certain specific directors that have inspired me in the aggregate.

As a kid, I thought of myself as a funny person who secretly wanted to be serious, but now I think maybe I'm a serious person who secretly wants to be funny.

A film set becomes its own family anyway, and all family dynamics come out during a shoot. The trick is hiring people who know how to handle that.

Nothing that I've turned down do I feel like I should have done. Because I've generated everything I've done, I've never really considered doing something that I haven't originated myself. There are definitely things that I've been brought that someone else made good movies out of. But it's not a path I've followed, so I don't have regret.

Friends of friends had bands in college or in their early 20s and had a moment where they had some kind of interest from a record label or manager. It's always interesting how people handle those decisions and those moments.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

Woody Allen's movies are so much a part of me. I grew up watching them over and over and would read all his comic pieces for the New Yorker. In some ways, his influence is so much there that I can't even locate it any more.

I think anxiety is dangerous, but it makes you think it's your friend.

I live in Manhattan now, because, in a way, it was my fantasy.

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

I've definitely been in situations where I could tell someone was interested in me, but I could tell they were insulting me in some passive/aggressive way, so I felt bad about myself at the same time.

I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.

I've always liked working with friends or, you know, people I have outside relationships with.

'Frances Ha' is the closest final product to what I had in my head of any movie I've made. I'm not entirely even sure why that is.

I think if we taped a lot of families that claim to be relatively normal, you'd be surprised when you hear some of the things said.

Being funny, in some ways, is about being connected to psychology.

It's kind of major, learning to drive. I feel like it kicked up other stuff in my life.

I know people who are incredibly successful who still dress the way they did when they were 18, just because they still think that's how they look good.

I'm curious how people build up the codes that they live their life by, and how they come to think that that's the best way for them to function.

I try to write 'and it's all very funny' after each scene description so that the reader can imagine the movie in their head.

Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.

It's near impossible to make a movie in black and white in the system.

There was a telemarketing job one summer in high school that I was rejected for. I still walk by the building that I actually had the interview in. It's still in New York, and I always think about that job and why I didn't get it.

I don't like when you necessarily know that this is the end of the movie. I like when a movie ends abruptly. You go through this, and some of the scenes are uncomfortable, and some are funny - and then suddenly it's over.

I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people either adjust to those things and let go of adolescent notions. Or they dig in deeper.

I like having associations with locations beyond their meaning for the specific movie.

I get a lot of responses to my movies. Some people say, 'Oh, I thought it was really funny - I hope that's okay!' And my answer always is 'Yes. It's totally okay.'

I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.

I'm interested in music as an extension of character.

I thought at the time of my parents' divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager.

Many of the crew members I work with and continue to work with were friends or have become close friends, and so we keep working together. And I like casting friends of mine or people I know in parts I know would be perfect for them. I like to bring things and people that mean something to me in to my work.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

You can be aware that something is idiosyncratic, and give it to a character, but keep doing it.

Music is like color or acting or whatever. It's really something I think about from the beginning. Not that I always know exactly what I'm going to use, but I don't see it as something like, "Let's find some songs now!" after we have a finished film.

I didn't train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.

It's going to start really interfering with your quality of life, your health, if you don't adjust to life as it's happening to you.

I think I was going through a lot of change at 27, but I didn't know it was happening until it was over.

I really like my first movie a lot, 'Kicking and Screaming.' I think it's a - I'm very pleased and proud of that movie, but it wasn't the - it wasn't 'Citizen Kane' right out of the box, you know? It wasn't 'Sex, Lies and Videotape.'

I've had great experiences or joyful experiences making a movie that people found very disturbing.

I try to procrastinate, if I can, productively, like I'll work on something else as procrastination. Or I take a walk. Because often I find, if you get out, more things come to you.

When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.

Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.

We expect forty-year-olds to have grown up at some point, and to be engaged and adult and take responsibility, and doing nothing would seem to go against that.

[Shwing] the really naked stuff I've dealt with in my own life, my own therapy and relationships - for me it just feels like a film I'm really proud of.

That's the nice thing about collaborating with someone: Your work becomes a conversation.

Wes Anderson's films, 6-year-olds are crazy about them.

When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

There's always some generational-guys-hanging-out movie that is made every few years, I think, and some of them are great.

There's something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don't know what their reaction will be.

The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.

I like shooting in New York because I have such a connection to the city. I have so many memories there.

I was late to the Knicks. My dad was a big fan. But I first started watching baseball; I became a Red Sox fan. My dad was a Mets fan. I wanted to have my own team and league.

When I start a movie, there will be certain films that I watch again just because the vibe seems right.