George Clooney, Adam Sandler and Noah Baumbach on the set of Jay Kelly (Photo by Peter Mountain, courtesy of Netflix)

30 years after his debut feature Kicking and Screaming (1995), writer-director Noah Baumbach, having crafted a notable career both in Hollywood and outside of it, has made his softest film yet, and that’s not meant as a pejorative. George Clooney stars as a fading movie star who embarks on a European trip to attend a film festival that’s planning to gift him a career tribute, using the honor as an excuse to spend time with his unsuspecting, backpacking daughter. Jay Kelly is a movie made by a parent in a time of reflection. That it was co-written by actress Emily Mortimer, whose children Baumbach previously cast as the kids in his Don DeLillo adaptation White Noise [2022], emphasizes the more obvious warmth at play here. In addition to the title character, Jay Kelly’s manager (Adam Sandler) is also torn between being a workaholic and being a good father, and much of the film’s charm comes from the ways in which Sandler’s character begrudgingly but loyally babysits his client, often to the detriment of his own marriage. (In a further bit of meta-casting, Sander’s wife is played by Baumbach’s, filmmaker Greta Gerwig).
A few weeks after his film concluded its festival run (which began at this year’s Venice Film Festival), Baumbach spoke with me about the blocking of extended takes, writing for specific actors, and more. Jay Kelly is now streaming on Netflix.
Filmmaker: I’m sure it changes depending on the film at hand, but do you write for specific actors? After experiencing a certain level of success, I’m sure you’ve earned that right.
Baumbach: It does depend on the movie. There were some films where I knew, “I’d like to write a part specifically for this one person,” and in the case of Jay Kelly, it was actually Adam [Sandler] who I initially thought I’d love to write something for. I had been thinking about it for a while, ever since we first worked together on The Meyerowitz Stories [2017]. I wanted Adam to play something close to himself in a way, now that I knew him better. I find him to be a beautiful, gentle, loyal, generous person, and I thought, “It’d be interesting to have him play someone who is somewhat of a caretaker.” So, Emily and I started working on the character of Ron and thought, “That should be Adam.” But even when I am writing for a specific actor, the process can be a little bit split. I can be writing a character that I know a certain actor will play (and sometimes their face will come into [my mind] as I write it), but when I’m in the writing stage, I try to keep it so that it’s still an “invented person” with no [preexisting attributes or characteristics]. When I’m writing for somebody, it’s not necessarily so literal as to be like, “It’s exactly them in my mind, every day, with their voice saying the lines.” Intuitively, I need to allow myself a kind of freedom. Of course, I knew the character of Jay would have to be played by somebody famous. It needed to be a movie star who would play our movie star. It was clear early on that that was the way it was going to work. As George has previously joked, when I gave him the script, I was lucky he said yes, because there are only about three people in the world who could play the part. He was right.
Filmmaker: When I think about films that depict artists who are in a period of self-reflection, there’s Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz [1979] and even something like Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries [1957], where it’s an older man looking back on his life. Your film is indirectly in conversation with some of those films, at least in the way it takes on a whole life and looks back on it through one person’s perspective. Were those films you grew to love throughout your own life? If so, how did you see them informing the structure of Jay Kelly?
Baumbach: Absolutely. I love those movies. I don’t know what you would call them—they’re not really a genre exactly, but there is a kind of movie, I suppose, that a lot of filmmakers, at different points in their careers, have approached, that takes [the form of] a movement going forward and backward at the same time, a sort of expression of an artist in some way. In Wild Strawberries, the character is not an artist, but I agree with you, I’d place that film in the same category. In a way, even Bergman’s Persona [1966] could be categorized as such, although it’s not so much a journey into the past. It’s a journey everywhere, to every dimension. Of course, I was aware of those movies, but when we were writing Jay Kelly, we didn’t think about them so much. We let the story go where it wanted to, but I definitely wanted to write something where the past and present lived simultaneously alongside each other. In a funny way, even a movie like Annie Hall [1977] does this, even though it’s not a portrait of an artist but is the type of movie where there’s a seamlessness between past and present. It was something we were aware of as Emily and I were writing the script, and it grew to become the language of the movie. Once we had these memories [planned out], we could design a way for Jay to enter them. The memories would be something that would just be there, in the scene, or that Jay could walk right into. They could be right behind him or just over to the side. Conceiving of Jay’s memories [in that way] helped to define and expand what was possible for the language of the movie.
Filmmaker: Several scenes in the film are presented as Jay’s memories, but rather than provide us with a standard flashback, you make these transitions in-camera so that a part of the viewer is, alongside Jay, both in the present and the past. When you were writing those out, were you already thinking about how you were going to pull those off practically via clever production design?

Baumbach: I am aware of it in the script stage, but at the same time, it really wasn’t until I started talking to Mark Tildesley, the production designer, and Linus Sangren, the DP, [that I started thinking] about how we were going to do it. In a way, the “how” is quite simple: we built the sets together, directly next to each other, so, for example, Jay could walk through the airplane and directly into the acting class from his past [in the film’s first “memory scene”] because both sets were built side-by-side. But it was quite a long process to ultimately arrive at a simple answer. The way and specificity with which it was designed, the way it’s lit, how the actors play it—all of that is crucial for this to work, because there’s a version of doing it exactly the same way that doesn’t work, that feels sort of thin. What we really wanted to do was evoke memory, this notion that these elements are there with us all the time. It’s not like we’re cutting to a flashback where you’re digressing or pulling the viewer somewhere back in time. No, this is something that’s happening all around us all the time, and you just happen to be available to it, at this particular moment. The physical design had to really capture that for it to work.
Filmmaker: You mentioned Linus earlier. How did you two work together to block the elaborate oner on a soundstage that opens the film? 
Baumbach: That was another thing that took a lot of prep. Early in our prep, when we were at Shepperton [Studios] in London, which is where we filmed a lot of the interiors, we would go over there with PAs and whoever else was available and just start blocking out the scene. I would read through it and we’d try to figure out how we were going to [film it]. That developed over time. Then, as I cast the other parts of the crew and the people who have a lot of the lines in the scene, if they were available, we would bring them in so that at least we could have the real person start to get used to walking through it for real. Then when Adam and George came in for two weeks of rehearsal, they joined in too. 
It was on the first day of shooting that we really went for it. The first take we did [with everyone] was actually not bad. The Sylvia Plath quote that opens the movie is actually part of the shot, done [in-camera] with the text written, in black, on [a plate of] glass. This is something that Linus is so smart about. It was his suggestion that “we could shoot the text in black on glass and then have some white smoke enter [the shot] that slowly begins to reveal the text.” That’s practical smoke that’s revealing the Plath quote. Then we throw focus onto the man sitting in the back who says “we’re coming to the end, the end of the movie, the end of the shoot,” then move off him and onto Emily [Mortimer]’s character, but you don’t even feel the glass as we pass it and move on with the rest of the shot. In addition to it being an exciting thrill [to shoot], the sequence provided some bonding for the crew, to begin [production] in that particular way. You get it down pretty well and realize, “OK, now we can do it even better and faster,” so it was a good tone to start on. It starts the movie and also started our shoot.
Filmmaker: On the opposite end of the spectrum, blocking-wise, I wanted to ask about the extended scene that takes place between George Clooney and Billy Crudup at a local bar. When you’re shooting a scene that’s composed of two actors sitting across from each other at a table, does a scene like that come more to life in the edit? Or in working with the two great actors that you have, do you just know while you’re on set who and when to cut to and what to really emphasize?
Baumbach: What I like to do with long scenes, with movement scenes as well, is often block them out as if they’re one shot, all the while knowing that there are points where I can cut.(I’ll know where I want to cut, so I can shoot the pieces on the other sides of those things. But that scene in particular involves two people sitting at a table, so it’s all about the actors’ faces and their performances. That said, we began [shooting] at the bar, where both actors are at the jukebox and have their conversation, and just shot the entirety of the scene the whole way through. The way those scenes are written is a kind of swim, and when you have great actors like that, they can really play off each other, so the moves in the scene or dialogue always influence other successive moves. Each take therefore has its own character and variation. Often when I’m cutting them—even though I’m cutting between takes and can combine several takes, which I do—I find that it’s usually one take, on either side, that I’m primarily using, because even if there’s a thing I like that they did in another take, it’s often not in the same language as the take that’s working overall. In a lot of cases, the [end result] is not like a greatest hits compilation. 
When Billy’s having his moment with the reading of the menu, that was thrilling, because he was so… I mean, he tried to talk me out of doing it and told me he wasn’t a Method actor, and I pretended to listen to him [laughs]. He was like, “I really thought the script might change on the day [of shooting], and it really didn’t.” I was like, “no, we were just going to do it that way,” [laughs] because I knew he could do it. Part of what makes him such a good actor is that he’s aware of the larger story at hand and how his character is supposed to fit into the whole thing. Billy would ask me, “How, in what I’m doing in this scene, can I help tell Jay’s story?,” while, of course, giving something that’s in and of itself an amazing performance.

Regarding the other side of the take, George is such a smart actor and knew that his reactions to Billy were going to be so important. His character has to fall for Billy’s character again after he hasn’t seen him in all these years, like he’s almost falling back in love with him, only to get gut-punched in the second half of the scene. The only thing in that scene that we did beyond essentially showing these faces was have Jay get up at a certain point and walk over to the bar, and when he comes back, we’re on the other side of the line. I think that is a sort of unconscious (or maybe a conscious) move on my part to produce an unconscious feeling in the audience, that maybe something is starting to change within their conversation.
Filmmaker: In thinking of the character of Peter (played by Jim Broadbent) and his being a mentor to Jay, I was curious if, throughout your career, you’ve had one or several similar figures in your own life. I know, in particular, Mike Nichols became a fan after seeing The Squid and the Whale, but throughout your career, have you had similar mentors check in with you?
Baumbach: Absolutely, I mean….making a movie like this, particularly after Mike [Nichols] passed away and then Peter Bogdanovich, who I was very close with, passed away. I was really lucky in that I got to meet a lot of my heroes: Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet and Brian De Palma, who I’m still quite close with, [Baumbach and Jake Paltrow co-directed a documentary on the Dressed to Kill director in 2016] They all became mentors. Peter, I would definitely call a mentor, Mike, I would definitely call a mentor. They were people I had many meals with, whom I’d then get to ask questions about themselves and everything in their movies, but their influence, I think, went beyond movies. They were like movie fathers in a way.