Noah Baumbach

Based on Wikipedia: Noah Baumbach

In 2023, a film about a plastic doll grossed one point four billion dollars worldwide. The screenplay was co-written by Noah Baumbach, a filmmaker who had spent nearly three decades making small, talky comedies about neurotic New Yorkers—movies that, at their most successful, might earn a few million at the box office. How did the guy who made films about post-college ennui and messy divorces end up helping to write one of the biggest commercial hits in cinema history?

The answer says something interesting about where American independent film has traveled over the past thirty years, and about the strange alchemy that happens when personal filmmaking meets mainstream entertainment.

Growing Up in Brooklyn's Literary Scene

Noah Baumbach was born on September 3, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York, into what you might call a literary household—though that term feels inadequate for the specific kind of intellectual environment he inhabited.

His father, Jonathan Baumbach, wrote experimental fiction and co-founded Fiction Collective, a publishing house dedicated to avant-garde literature. He taught at Stanford University and Brooklyn College, and wrote film criticism for Partisan Review, a magazine that was essentially the house organ of mid-century American intellectualism. His mother, Georgia Brown, reviewed films for The Village Voice, the legendary alternative weekly that defined downtown New York culture for decades. She also wrote fiction.

This wasn't just a household with books on the shelves. This was a household where both parents made their living thinking seriously about storytelling—one in prose, one on screen.

The marriage didn't last. His parents divorced during his adolescence, an experience that would prove to be creative bedrock for Baumbach. He has three siblings, two from his father's previous marriage, so he grew up understanding that families can be complicated arrangements, that people leave and new configurations form.

Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Baumbach was raised, was not yet the stroller-clogged enclave of wealthy professionals it would later become. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, it was a more bohemian place, populated by writers and artists and academics who couldn't afford Manhattan. It was the kind of neighborhood where a kid could grow up immersed in film culture without anyone thinking that was unusual.

The Movies That Made Him

What did young Noah Baumbach watch? The list is revealing.

He loved The Jerk, Steve Martin's absurdist comedy about a dim-witted man who doesn't realize he's white until adulthood. He loved Animal House, the raucous fraternity comedy that essentially invented a genre. Heaven Can Wait, Warren Beatty's elegant fantasy about a football player returned to life in another man's body. The World According to Garp, adapted from John Irving's sprawling novel about a writer's chaotic life. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg's masterpiece about childhood loneliness and alien friendship—which remains Baumbach's favorite film of all time.

And Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the paranoid science fiction film about alien pods replacing humans with emotionless duplicates.

Notice what's happening here. These aren't exclusively art films. They're not the obvious choices for someone who would become associated with New York intellectual cinema. They're popular entertainments, many of them comedies, all of them fundamentally concerned with identity—who we are, who we pretend to be, how we connect with others.

Baumbach graduated from Midwood High School in Brooklyn in 1987, then attended Vassar College, where he earned a degree in English in 1991. At Vassar, he had a roommate named Jason Blum. That name might not mean much to casual moviegoers, but Blum would go on to become one of the most successful producers in Hollywood, building Blumhouse Productions into a horror empire responsible for Get Out, The Purge franchise, and dozens of other profitable thrillers. Blum produced Baumbach's first film.

After college, Baumbach briefly worked as a messenger at The New Yorker magazine. It's a small detail, but it captures something about the particular New York world he inhabited—a world where even the entry-level jobs were at legendary cultural institutions.

Finding His Voice

In 1995, Baumbach made his writing and directing debut with Kicking and Screaming. Not to be confused with the Will Ferrell soccer comedy of the same name that came out a decade later—this was something much quieter and stranger.

The film follows four young men who have just graduated from college and find themselves completely unable to move forward with their lives. They hang around campus, engage in elaborate wordplay, pursue romantic entanglements that go nowhere, and generally avoid the terrifying prospect of adulthood. The cast included Josh Hamilton, Chris Eigeman, and Carlos Jacott.

Baumbach was influenced by two films in particular. Metropolitan, Whit Stillman's 1990 debut about young upper-class New Yorkers navigating debutante season, gave him a model for how to make an ensemble film about articulate young people talking. Diner, Barry Levinson's 1982 film about a group of friends in nineteen-fifties Baltimore, showed him how male friendship could be the subject of a movie.

The film premiered at the New York Film Festival, which was a significant achievement for a first-time director. Roger Ebert praised Baumbach's ear for dialogue, noting that the screenplay wasn't simply accurate to how young people talk but was a "distillation of reality—elevating aimless brainy small-talk into a statement." Critics noticed that the plot was thin and meandering, but most recognized this as appropriate to characters who were themselves thin and meandering.

Newsweek named Baumbach one of their "Ten New Faces of 1996." He was twenty-six years old and seemed poised for a significant career.

The Difficult Second Act

What happened next is instructive about how hard it is to maintain momentum in independent film.

In 1997, Baumbach made Mr. Jealousy, about a young writer so consumed by jealousy over his girlfriend's past that he infiltrates the group therapy sessions of her ex-boyfriend. It's a clever premise, but the film didn't make the same impact as his debut.

Then came Highball, a New York comedy of manners that Baumbach has essentially disowned. The production was an experiment gone wrong. Baumbach and his collaborators tried to make a movie in just six days, using the same cast and crew from Mr. Jealousy. The script was funny, but the ambition exceeded the resources. They didn't have enough time, didn't finish properly, and the whole thing became, in Baumbach's words, "a mess."

He had a falling out with the producer. The film was eventually released on DVD without his approval. Baumbach directed it under the pseudonym Ernie Fusco and wrote it under the name Jesse Carter—a clear signal that he wanted to distance himself from the project.

This is a common pattern in filmmaking careers. A promising debut leads to a second film that's harder to make and less successful, followed by a project that goes completely sideways. Many directors never recover from this trajectory. They disappear into television work or quit the industry entirely.

Baumbach found a different path forward.

The Wes Anderson Connection

In 2004, Baumbach collaborated with Wes Anderson on the screenplay for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson was already an established auteur—his visual style, with its symmetrical compositions and pastel color palettes, had become instantly recognizable. The film starred Bill Murray as an oceanographer making documentaries about sea life, loosely inspired by Jacques Cousteau.

This collaboration did two things for Baumbach. It kept him working during a period when his own directing career had stalled. And it connected him to a filmmaker whose sensibility was adjacent to his own but commercially more successful. Anderson's films were quirky and literary and populated by damaged people, but they also had a visual distinctiveness that made them feel like events.

Baumbach and Anderson would collaborate again in 2009 on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the stop-motion animated adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book. That film was a critical success, appearing on many year-end top ten lists, and received Academy Award, British Academy Film Award, and Golden Globe nominations for Best Animated Film. It lost to Up, Pixar's devastating story about grief and adventure, so there's no shame in that defeat. Despite the acclaim, Fantastic Mr. Fox was not a financial success—a reminder that critical praise and commercial performance often have nothing to do with each other.

The Breakthrough

The year 2005 changed everything for Baumbach.

The Squid and the Whale was a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about his childhood in Brooklyn and the effect of his parents' divorce on the family. Jeff Daniels played the father, a pompous novelist whose career has stalled. Laura Linney played the mother, a writer whose career is ascending just as her husband's declines. Their two sons are caught between them, forced to choose sides in ways that damage everyone.

The title comes from a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History depicting a giant squid locked in combat with a sperm whale—an image that terrified Baumbach as a child and that becomes, in the film, a metaphor for the primal struggle between his parents.

In an interview, Baumbach explained the strange recursive quality of making the film: "Sometimes when I think about the whole experience of this, it starts to become a joke within a joke within a joke. The film is not only inspired by my childhood and my parents' divorce, but it was also the first script I didn't show to my parents while I was working on it."

He wasn't trying to protect them from anything, he said. He just wanted to keep it his own experience.

The Squid and the Whale was a sleeper hit—the industry term for a film that performs better than expected, usually through word of mouth rather than marketing. It was also a critical triumph. Baumbach won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The film earned six Independent Spirit Award nominations and three Golden Globe nominations. The New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and National Board of Review all voted it the year's best screenplay.

After nearly a decade of struggle, Baumbach had arrived.

The Gerwig Era Begins

In 2010, Baumbach released Greenberg, starring Ben Stiller as a deeply difficult man who house-sits for his brother in Los Angeles and begins a tentative relationship with his brother's assistant. That assistant was played by Greta Gerwig.

Gerwig had emerged from the mumblecore movement—a loose collection of ultra-low-budget films made in the mid-two-thousands, characterized by naturalistic dialogue and performances, often improvised, focusing on the romantic and professional anxieties of young people. She had a quality that was hard to define: simultaneously awkward and graceful, intelligent and scattered, completely present in each moment.

The story for Greenberg was conceived by Baumbach and his then-wife, the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. The film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. But something else was happening during the production.

Baumbach and Leigh had married in September 2005, the day before his birthday, just as The Squid and the Whale was becoming a sensation. They had met in 2001 when she was starring on Broadway in Proof. They had a son, Rohmer, named after the French director Éric Rohmer, whose films about the romantic entanglements of articulate Europeans clearly influenced Baumbach's work.

In November 2010, Leigh filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. The divorce was finalized in September 2013.

Baumbach's romantic and creative partnership with Gerwig began late in 2011. They would go on to make some of the most acclaimed films of the following decade.

Frances Ha and a New Direction

In 2012, Baumbach directed Frances Ha, which he co-wrote with Gerwig, who also starred. The film follows Frances, a twenty-seven-year-old dancer in New York who is not quite making it—her dance company doesn't give her enough work, her best friend is drifting away into a more adult life, and she can't seem to find her footing in the world.

Baumbach made a crucial aesthetic choice: he shot the film digitally but in black and white. This was a deliberate homage to the collaborations between Woody Allen and the cinematographer Gordon Willis, particularly Manhattan, Allen's 1979 love letter to New York City. The visual choice announces that Frances Ha is part of a tradition of New York films about creative people navigating love and ambition.

Critics compared it to the work of Allen, Jim Jarmusch, and François Truffaut—the French New Wave director whose films about young people in Paris clearly influenced Baumbach's vision of young people in Brooklyn. Gerwig received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.

Frances Ha represented something new in Baumbach's filmography. His earlier work had often focused on difficult men—the pompous intellectual father in The Squid and the Whale, the self-absorbed neurotic in Greenberg. Frances Ha was warmer, more hopeful, centered on a woman whose struggles were economic and creative rather than psychological. It suggested that Gerwig's influence was pushing Baumbach in new directions.

The Netflix Period

In 2017, Baumbach released The Meyerowitz Stories on Netflix, rather than through traditional theatrical distribution. This was still a somewhat unusual choice for a prestigious filmmaker—Netflix was aggressively courting directors but hadn't yet become the default destination for mid-budget adult dramas that it would later become.

The film focuses on a fractured and dysfunctional family. Dustin Hoffman plays the patriarch, a sculptor whose career never quite achieved the heights he expected. Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler play his sons from different marriages, each damaged in their own ways by their father's narcissism and neglect. Emma Thompson plays the father's current wife.

The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious award in international cinema. It received strong reviews—ninety-two percent approval on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Critics praised the way Baumbach navigated family dysfunction with what one called a "bittersweet lens."

But the Netflix release meant fewer people saw it in theaters, and it didn't enter the cultural conversation the way The Squid and the Whale had.

Then came Marriage Story.

The Divorce Film

Released in 2019, Marriage Story follows Charlie and Nicole, a theater director and an actress, as their marriage dissolves. Adam Driver plays Charlie, Scarlett Johansson plays Nicole, and the film meticulously documents how two people who still care about each other can be pulled apart by the divorce process itself.

The film features an extraordinary scene where Charlie and Nicole finally say all the terrible things they've been holding back—a screaming fight that escalates until Charlie says something so cruel he immediately collapses in shame and apology. It's one of the most emotionally raw sequences in recent American cinema.

Laura Dern plays Nicole's divorce lawyer, a character who is simultaneously supportive and predatory, genuinely helpful to her client while also escalating the conflict. Ray Liotta plays Charlie's lawyer, equally combative. Alan Alda appears as Charlie's first lawyer, a kindly older man who promises a gentler approach but proves ineffective.

Mark Kermode, the film critic at The Guardian, called it "simply Baumbach's best film to date—insightful, sympathetic and rather beautifully bewildered." He compared it to Annie Hall, Kramer vs. Kramer, and La Grande Illusion, invoking both American relationship dramas and the French humanist tradition of Jean Renoir.

Marriage Story received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Both Driver and Johansson were nominated in leading roles. Laura Dern won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

With Marriage Story, Baumbach became one of the few screenwriters to sweep what the industry calls "The Big Four" critics awards: the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle, and National Society of Film Critics. It was the culmination of everything he had been working toward since Kicking and Screaming—a film about articulate people navigating emotional devastation, made with technical precision and genuine feeling.

The Billion-Dollar Pivot

And then he co-wrote Barbie.

Greta Gerwig directed the film, which she and Baumbach wrote together. It starred Margot Robbie as the iconic doll and Ryan Gosling as her companion Ken. America Ferrera delivered a monologue about the impossible expectations placed on women that became one of the most discussed moments of the year.

The film was released on July 21, 2023, the same day as Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, creating a cultural event that the internet dubbed "Barbenheimer." Audiences went to see both films back to back—a three-hour meditation on the atomic bomb followed by a pink-saturated comedy about a plastic doll, or vice versa.

Barbie grossed one point four billion dollars worldwide. To put that in context, The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach's breakthrough film, earned about seven million dollars domestically. Barbie made two hundred times that amount.

The screenplay received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay (the British academy categorized it differently), and the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. This was Baumbach's third Academy Award screenplay nomination, and his most commercially successful work by an almost incomprehensible margin.

How do you square these two things—the intimate divorce drama and the toy commercial turned feminist statement? The answer might be that Baumbach has always been interested in how people construct identities and the gap between who we present ourselves as and who we actually are. Barbie, a doll that represents an impossible ideal of femininity, is a surprisingly natural subject for a filmmaker who has spent his career examining the masks people wear.

The Influences

Baumbach has been explicit about his influences, and they reveal a lot about what he's trying to do.

Woody Allen is "an obvious influence," Baumbach has said. "He was the single biggest pop culture influence on me." Specifically, he cites Manhattan, Zelig, and Broadway Danny Rose—films that combine visual sophistication with neurotic comedy, that take place in a very specific New York milieu, that feature characters who talk constantly and often brilliantly.

Beyond Allen, Baumbach has cited Ernst Lubitsch, the German-American director whose sophisticated comedies of the nineteen-thirties set the template for witty romantic filmmaking. Max Ophüls, the French director known for elaborate tracking shots and stories about the cruelty of love. Jean Renoir, the great French humanist whose films treat all their characters with compassion even when exposing their flaws.

He's influenced by Robert Altman, whose ensemble films created the sense of overlapping lives in specific communities. Peter Bogdanovich, who brought the sensibility of classic Hollywood into the New Hollywood era. Spike Lee, whose Do the Right Thing demonstrated that you could make vital cinema about specific New York neighborhoods. Whit Stillman, whose films about upper-class young people talking provided a direct model for Kicking and Screaming.

The screwball comedies of the nineteen-thirties and forties—films like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, where sophisticated people talk at impossible speeds while falling in love—clearly inform Baumbach's dialogue style. And the French New Wave, that explosion of young filmmakers in late-fifties and early-sixties Paris who reinvented cinema by breaking its rules, gave Baumbach permission to make personal films about his own experience.

His musical influences are equally specific. He loves New Order and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, known as OMD—British electronic bands from the nineteen-eighties whose synthesizer-driven songs combined melancholy and danceability. For Mistress America, he wanted to evoke those bands in the soundtrack. He's also drawn to David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and the film scores of Tangerine Dream and Georges Delerue.

What Comes Next

Baumbach's upcoming film is called Jay Kelly. It's his fourth project for Netflix and is described as a "coming-of-age story about adults"—which sounds very much like a description of everything Baumbach has ever made.

The film stars George Clooney and Adam Sandler. Baumbach co-wrote it with the actress Emily Mortimer, and it will be produced by David Heyman, who produced all the Harry Potter films, and Amy Pascal, the former Sony executive who has shepherded numerous prestige projects.

Netflix's Scott Stuber has described it as having a "Jerry Maguire-esque" quality—"a really great life-affirming movie with two big movie stars." This suggests something more conventionally uplifting than Baumbach's usual mode, which tends toward the bittersweet at best.

In 2025, Baumbach was awarded the Telluride Film Festival Silver Medallion, a career honor that recognizes significant contributions to cinema. His unpublished memoir was acquired by Knopf, the prestigious literary publisher, in 2023.

Baumbach and Gerwig married at New York City Hall in December 2023, twelve years into their relationship. They have two sons, born in March 2019 and February 2023. His brother Nico is a film theorist and associate professor at Columbia University's Center for Comparative Media, continuing the family tradition of thinking seriously about storytelling.

The Arc of a Career

What does Noah Baumbach's career tell us about filmmaking in America?

It tells us that persistence matters. Between Kicking and Screaming in 1995 and The Squid and the Whale in 2005, Baumbach spent a decade struggling—making films that didn't connect, working as a co-writer on other directors' projects, watching his promising debut fade into the past. Many filmmakers don't survive that kind of wilderness period.

It tells us that personal material can be powerful. Baumbach's best films—The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, Marriage Story—draw directly from his own experience. He doesn't hide behind genre or spectacle. He puts his anxieties and failures on screen and trusts that audiences will recognize something universal in his specific circumstances.

It tells us that collaboration changes artists. The Baumbach who made Kicking and Screaming was interested in male friendship and post-collegiate drift. The Baumbach who makes films with Greta Gerwig is interested in women's experiences, in hope as well as disappointment, in growth as well as stagnation. Artists influence each other, and romantic partnerships can be creative partnerships.

And it tells us that the boundaries between independent film and mainstream entertainment are more porous than we sometimes assume. The filmmaker who made a seven-million-dollar divorce drama can also co-write a billion-dollar blockbuster about a plastic doll. The skills transfer. The sensibility adapts. What looked like a small career turns out to have been preparation for something larger.

Noah Baumbach is fifty-five years old. He's made more than a dozen films, received four Academy Award nominations, and helped write one of the most successful movies ever made. He's still working, still collaborating, still finding new things to say about how people talk to each other and fail to understand each other and somehow keep trying anyway.

That's a career. That's a life in film.