Filmmaking Amidst Chaos

Jon Mooallem met with the director Noah Baumbach to discuss his latest film, an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise.”

The pair explore the recent chain of personal and public events in Baumbach’s life, including the toll of the coronavirus pandemic and the death of his father, and how this “routine trauma” has affected his work, and why it prompted him to create a discombobulated, “elevated reality” for his film in the vein of David Lynch, the Coen brothers and Spike Lee.

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