NYFF Report: Noah Baumbach's 'While We're Young' Is the Official Surprise Screening
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in ‘While We’re Young’
The New York Film Festival “Surprise Screening” is a proud three-year-old old tradition that dates back to 2011, when Martin Scorsese showed up with a work-in-progress version of his 3D family film Hugo. The following year, Steven Spielberg gave festivalgoers a sneak peek at Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning turn as the nation’s 16th president in Lincoln.
This year, the festival announced that they’d surprise audiences with a 2015 release from a “New York Film Festival favorite.” While Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper and J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year (both of which are opening in limited release in late 2014, but will play wide next year) were some of the rumored titles, the director who eventually strode onstage to introduce his latest film was…Noah Baumbach.
The native New Yorker is a three-time veteran of the NYFF (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding and Frances Ha all played in previous years) and while his newest effort, While We’re Young, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival first, he wanted hometown audiences to have an advanced look too. He brought along multiple members of the movie’s A-list cast, including stars Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts and Adam Driver.
In the film, Stiller and Watts play middle-aged married Brooklynites who experience some serious age regression when they befriend a much-younger couple, portrayed by Driver and Amanda Seyfried. But it turns out that their new pals aren’t as cool as they initially appear, with Driver’s character — an aspiring documentary filmmaker, a career path shared by Stiller — using his easy charisma to mask a streak of ugly ambition. Baumbach and the cast stuck around after the screening for a Q&A with the audience. Here are some of their most surprising answers about the NYFF’s latest “Surprise Screening.”
Ben Stiller, Noah Baumbach, Naomi Watts and Adam Driver at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 28.
Baumbach doesn’t want to talk about the movie too much
Baumbach hesitated to make any grand thematic proclamations about what’s clearly a very personal story. “I had a lot of complicated thoughts and I wanted to make a movie about them,” he said. “I started writing While We’re Young three or four years ago, but all those thoughts are still in my mind. There are also a lot of questions I don’t have answers for. I just put them in there and tried to work them out in the movie in a way that I’m not well-equipped to work out onstage with you right now.”
Stiller completely identified with his character…
Being on the cusp of 50 himself, the actor/director admitted that it maybe wasn’t much of a stretch getting into his character’s headspace. “Noah hit on something in the movie, which is the idea that this younger generation has a [certain] confidence. As you get older, I’ve found that you take less in life for granted and there’s something great about being young and not knowing that, because it gives you the confidence to try things,” Stiller said. “I also think the access people have to media at a younger age [is different], because they’re putting themselves out there and have to declare who they are. Back in my day, I had no idea what I was doing when I was 24. If I had had Facebook or Twitter, I would have been a mess.”
…but Driver didn’t — like at all
The Girls star didn’t have any special insight into his millennial striver. “When Noah sent the script to me, I was like ‘Oh yeah, I’ll do it,’ before I even read it. And then I actually read it and didn’t feel connected to the character. The things that he does are not things I would do — they are things I would shy away from.” He and Baumbach did find common ground on how the character should behave, though. “We had this image of water for the character. He moves around like water, just kind of floating through [the frame].”
Don’t ask Baumbach for advice on becoming a filmmaker
The only words of wisdom that Baumbach could offer a young kid in the audience who asked him for advice was to point to While We’re Young as an example of what not to do. “Don’t do what [Adam] did,” he told the director-to-be. “Don’t befriend an older filmmaker by telling him you’ve seen his least successful movie. For me, you’d say ‘I loved Margot at the Wedding!’ And for Ben, you’d say, ‘I loved The Cable Guy.’”
Photo credit: Getty Images
