'White Noise' spoilers: How Noah Baumbach brought that 'bizarro' supermarket dance to life

Spoiler alert! The following post contains details about the ending of the Netflix movie "White Noise" (now streaming).

In Noah Baumbach's latest film, Adam Driver finds purgatory in the produce section.

After eye-opening encounters with atheist nuns, a crazed drug dealer and an airborne toxic event, college professor Jack Gladney (Driver) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), walk into a supermarket in the final scene of Netflix's "White Noise." Although they still fear death, the couple is newly grateful for the life and family they share, and they begin to dance blithely alongside their fellow shoppers.

What unfolds next is a jubilant, seven-minute musical sequence as the end credits roll. Here's how it all came together:

'Matilda the Musical': How Darth Vader inspired Emma Thompson's 'shocking' Trunchbull

'White Noise' ends with a dance of death by LCD Soundsystem

"White Noise" is adapted from Don DeLillo's 1985 novel of the same name. The film shifts between many genres including road-trip comedy and apocalyptic thriller, so ending with a full-blown musical number didn't seem out of left field.

One of the movie's major ideas is that to live life more fully, one must "acknowledge that it's going to end and welcome in death," Baumbach says. By dancing with abandon down the condiments aisle, Jack and Babette are savoring the simple pleasures of everyday errands, knowing that tomorrow isn't guaranteed.

Along with movie musicals, Baumbach says that he and choreographer David Neumann pulled inspiration from "dances of death and mourning in different cultures." Neumann, who previously collaborated with Baumbach on 2019's "Marriage Story," wanted the choreography to spring organically from how people shop: twirling into the checkout line to place cake mix on the conveyor belt, or lunging at a sleeve of Pringles to inspect the expiration date.

"I got cereal boxes, cans of beans and packets of meat, and just played around," Neumann says. "I also ended up doing a lot of on-the-ground research just being a weirdo in a supermarket and watching people shop."

As for the customers themselves, diversity was key: "We knew that we didn’t want 45 svelte, 20-year-old dancers," Neumann adds. "We wanted real people you would see shopping in a supermarket."

LCD Soundsystem: The band wrote the most ‘joyous song about death' for Adam Driver’s Netflix movie

To write the end-credits song, “New Body Rhumba,” Baumbach called on his longtime friend James Murphy, frontman of alt-rock band LCD Soundsystem.

"I put this idea in his head of an upbeat song about death for the ’80s," Baumbach says. “I know him very well and it just felt like something very much up his street. And James wrote a song that is about death, but it's also an incredibly muscular, powerful, danceable pop song," which has been shortlisted by the Oscars for a best original song nomination.

Noah Baumbach shot the scene in an abandoned store

Although most of “White Noise” was filmed in Cleveland, the supermarket scenes were shot in the suburb of Bedford, Ohio, where the production leased out an empty big-box store that never opened because of COVID-19. Production designer Jess Gonchor and his team were tasked with reproducing roughly 500 signs and 6,000 cans, bottles, boxes and bags – all with period-accurate labels.

The goal was to create a "heavenly place where the whole town got lost in this white noise of consumption," Gonchor says. In the book, DeLillo describes the grocery store as a spot "where things don’t die. ... The stuff (on the shelves) is always there, always available, always alive, and always vibrant."

The set was built with consideration for the final scene, giving enough space for the dancers to ride shopping carts down the aisles and walk tightrope-style along shelves.

“I wanted the cast to be able to improv and find moments and be inspired by the set," Gonchor says. "We made everything climbable; the aisles were wider; the supermarket carts were bigger. It just unfolded beautifully.”

Here are 30 movies you need to stream right now: From 'Glass Onion' to 'Top Gun: Maverick'

The camera, too, acts as a spectator: slowly weaving through aisles and observing the supermarket "wildlife" from a distance.

After the characters survive a deadly chemical explosion early in the movie, "there's no longer an illusion that we control our own destiny," Baumbach says. As a result, "the camera is loosened up and starts to take on its own life. So by the time we're shooting the dance sequence, the camera can roam on its own, see what's down different aisles, go up high, and peek around the corner."

The credits dance is much more 'tightly choreographed' than you think

At times, the supermarket dancers appear almost lackadaisical: hardly lifting their arms or eyebrows as they bag groceries and strut past cleaning supplies. But that's all rehearsed.

“The dance vocabulary you see is tightly choreographed, and then it’s directed to feel more relaxed,” Neumann says. “We wanted it to feel organic," as if ordinary people are "suddenly doing this bizarro dance."

Standouts include André L. Benjamin, who boogies alone with a box of cookies, and Jodie Turner-Smith, who fiercely leads a procession past potato chips. ("I wanted Jodie to be front and center," Neumann says. "There wasn't any other choice.") But for all its eccentricities, the dance sequence should resonate with anyone who's stared down the barrel of mortality.

"There's something great, after all the dark things that happen in the film, to have a (scene) that helps us navigate that emotional terrain," Neumann says. "To see regular people having fun – they just happen to be shopping, and then dancing – allows us to release into the moment."

How accurate is it? Fact checking 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody,' the new Whitney Houston movie

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'White Noise' on Netflix has the year's best end credits. Here's why.