“The family functions as a metaphor for society”
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Fine flower of New York independence, Noah Baumbach, 52, has built in thirteen feature films a literate and sensitive work as a Hollywood counter-model, with references rather oriented towards Europe and literature. His last movie, White Noisea Netflix production, was presented on August 31 at the opening of the Venice Film Festival.
Where did you get the idea of adapting Don DeLillo’s novel Background Noise?
I read it between the end of high school and university, some of its images and even its sentences remained engraved in me. At the beginning of 2020, I started reading it again, just like that, without a second thought. And, on that, the pandemic arrived. Gamberging like everyone else in my apartment, I was struck by the relevance of the text, given what we were going through: everything was already there.
The book indeed mixes many subjects: the ecological disaster, the hypochondria, the fear of death… Why have you located them in the 1980s rather than today?
All the topics you mention are in the book, even though it all takes place at a time when the internet and smartphones didn’t exist yet. Everything that was true back then has only grown stronger since then. And, for my part, I would much rather shoot in a supermarket than film someone doing their shopping on their computer.
How difficult was the adaptation?
It was to install a continuity, because the novel is mainly built by cycles. It was necessary to draw a line in this abundant matter. Of course, it’s a film about family, marriage, being a teacher, etc. But it was above all a question of representing the routine and the strategies that we invent to distract ourselves from our mortal condition.
The film continues to lean the intimate on the great spectacle. Where does this concern for constantly changing scale come from?
I thought a lot about the “background noise” metaphor. If you consider a family as a whole, it can look chaotic or incoherent, or produce a lulling hubbub. If you break it all down into individual parts, the voices become recognizable again, they have their own meaning. The whole film is constructed like this: in a permanent movement that goes from the whole to the particular. Like an overall shot that would end up in a close-up.
“White Noise” often overwhelms the viewer with its machine-gun dialogues delivered quickly, constantly intersecting. It feels like a real millimeter score…
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