By Billie MelissaShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberWhen I meet with Noah Baumbach, life mirrors art.
Surrounded by an entourage, Baumbach walks the long hallway of the Corinthia Hotel, a tangible atmosphere of hustle and bustle swirling, with him at the centre – calm, quiet, composed.
As Noah is led into the room, I shake hands with a publicist at Netflix, whose arms are full of folders and a laptop, and am fussed over by a woman I presume to be a hair stylist, while another leans elegantly against the wall of the room Noah and I will meet in.
The scene could be captured and sliced into his new film, Jay Kelly. It's the most Hollywood of moments, but it's happening in a corridor north of the River Thames, where across the water the BFI London Film Festival is in full swing. Jay Kelly is part of its star-studded line-up, with George Clooney leading as the titular movie star who is amidst somewhat of a midlife crisis, reckoning with the death of his mentor and friend, and the realization that the life of his two daughters has flashed before his eyes.
Noah and I meet the day before its UK premiere at the festival — a homecoming in part for the film, partially shot in the city — with the stars, Adam Sandler, George Clooney, and Baumbach's partner in life and art, Greta Gerwig, in attendance.
While the controlled chaos of my introduction to Noah mimics that which surrounds Jay, he and his imagined movie star could not be further apart.
Sat in a chair, legs crossed, a glass of water in front of him, Noah is quiet when he speaks, but an irresistible passion flows through his conversation, making it impossible not to lean in and linger on every word.
All this is no longer new for him. His first film was released 30 years ago, and in 2023, he co-wrote the billion-dollar hit Barbie, which skyrocketed his and Gerwig's reputations. Already a power duo from their indie darlings Frances Ha and Mistress America, he is now a star of the mainstream, and for his latest work, he gives us a peek behind the curtain at what that looks like.
..."Movies aren't what they were," Baumbach tells me. "They are to me, but they're not – in the culture – what they were. Film stock is not what it was. Movie stars are not what they were. All these things that I grew up loving and being part of in this art form – they're still there, a lot of people are still doing it – but it just doesn't seem to have the same..." he trails off, "something's changing."
How do you remedy that feeling? With an elaborate twelve-page opening scene of a movie set, bustling and vibrant with every department flooding the stage – oh, and make it a oner.
We are immediately basking in movie magic as the camera trawls over the intricacies of life in motion on set, and there in the cinematographer's seat to capture it all is the Academy Award-winner behind La La Land, Linus Sandgren.
As he did in 2016 for Damien Chazelle, Sandgren gifts us with a stunner of an opening. It makes your heart flutter and evokes nostalgia for anyone who grew up in a household of movie lovers who adore the works of Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor, whose work influenced Jay Kelly.
When I ask Baumbach which of Sandgren's works he remembers seeing first, he cites the cinematographer's collaborations with David O. Russell, American Hustle and Joy.
"When we met, we just had such a," Baumbach thinks, "that thing that you have when you meet certain people where you feel like, 'Oh, this is who I like being.' We feel the same way about everything."
What made him the correct partner for Jay Kelly was that "He's both incredibly technically minded and inventive," Baumbach says. "He's always thinking of new ways of doing something that are surprising."
It's the perfect quality for a film as alive as Jay Kelly. Sandgren and the film's production designer, Mark Tildesley, were tasked with using old showbiz tricks for multiple scenes where Clooney literally walks between past and present, moving through the space to enter a memory from his youth.
Baumbach says these moments were "built into the material of the movie" by himself and co-writer Emily Mortimer. He tells me that the act of making Jay Kelly was also a celebration and an embrace of that process.
..."Because George was going to be participating – he watches his younger self in some of them – it was done because it felt like the right thing for the movie," Baumbach says. "But giving ourselves the restrictions – if we're not going to do any of this in post – what we see here has got to be what it is. That was a great restriction to have, because it made us all really refine, and refine, and refine."
Throughout his career, Baumbach has made gold out of whatever resources he has available to him. His fourth feature, The Squid and the Whale, starring Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, and Jesse Eisenberg, had a reported budget of $1.2 million and went on to earn Baumbach his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
In a recent interview with GQ, Baumbach speaks of his time prior to making The Squid and the Whale as very formative. He likens it to a moment in Frances Ha when Frances is asked at a dinner party the age-old question: 'What do you do?'
She dances around the answer, saying, "It's hard to explain," and when asked if that's because what she does is complicated, she simply says, "No...because I don't really do it."
Baumbach had made a few films, but didn't yet feel like a quote/unquote filmmaker. He tells GQ, "I started going to therapy, and I lived some life, and I had some disappointment," which then set him on the path to become the kind of filmmaker he is now.
...While the resources available to Baumbach to make Jay Kelly surpass those of what he had when making Frances Ha, the two share an energy and playfulness.
Not just in the practical effects, but also in the vibrancy and tactility of each frame; a staple through Sandgren's filmography, also.
"That's something that Linus is very good about, too, getting the color while we're shooting. Sometimes you end up with dailies that you just can't wait to get to the color correct, so you can just improve it all," Baumbach laughs before praising Sandgren's particular attention to detail, which meant "I was then editing with, essentially, a movie that looked like the movie pretty much that we ended up with."
During a talk at this year's New York Film Festival with Sentimental Value director, Joachim Trier, Baumbach said part of his process when making films is "accommodating the reality that's around your fiction and letting your fiction interact with that real world and vice versa."
It's a skill Baumbach has refined over time, telling me in our conversation, "I shot my first movie 30 years ago in LA, but it wasn't meant to be LA. When I watch it, I just see LA, because the color of it is just so Los Angeles."
Los Angeles stars once again in Jay Kelly, and Baumbach tells me that beyond the sun and practicality of it all, the landscape actually informs Clooney's character, because "[Jay's] narcissism doesn't work in Italy the same way it worked in LA."
..."As the movie shifts and Jay becomes smaller in the landscape, there are moments where he's obscured more," Baumbach says. "The table with his father when they're all there in Italy, the flowers are in his face."
Identities, both public and secret, are, perhaps, the most prominent theme of Jay Kelly.
"Mortality is, of course, the sort of unspoken thing that's triggering these things," says Baumbach. "Yes, it is the death of his friend and mentor at the beginning of the movie that's part of what sets everything in motion, but it's that sort of shocking realization that the human experience is also your experience. Which, when you're younger, I think there's some way you can convince yourself that you're going to do it differently somehow."
At the start of Jay Kelly, Jay wraps production on one project, and has a small window of time before he starts another.
We briefly see what life looks like for Jay outside of Hollywood glitz, and it looks familiar. He has a home, two daughters, but it doesn't look like life the way we know it. It's always got a certain dazzle to it. A huge swimming pool overlooking Los Angeles, a kitchen the size of a home itself, and a repeated joke that Jay is never truly alone, which lands every time a manager, publicist, stylist, or security guard enters the frame after he denies this statement.
On one of these occasions, he learns from his manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), that his mentor and friend, Peter Schneider, has died.
...Played by Jim Broadbent, Schneider is the first director to take a chance on Jay, and it is through this relationship that we get a fleeting glimpse at how transactional most of Jay's relationships are. Schneider wants him to do him a favour by putting his name on a film he is excited to make, but cannot get funding for. Jay's immediate dismissal of the request from his ageing mentor shows us just how little the passage of time worries him.
We learn that moment to be the last interaction he and Peter have. The rest of the film is somewhat akin to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, as Jay chases his daughter across Europe in hopes of stealing back some of the time he missed with her in childhood, with the ghost of the relationship with his other daughter, who tried – and failed – in healing the wounds between her and her father, haunting him all the while.
"I've made movies about people who defined themselves almost in failure, in who they weren't and who they wanted to be, the fact that they'd fallen short, or even just that life had not lived up to whatever kind of fantasy of youth," Baumbach reflects. "I think it's the story of a lot of my movies in a way. What I also realized while working on this was that defining yourself by success is the same thing. It's just another way of doing it. It just is another barrier between you and who you might be."
Jay Kelly Release Date
Jay Kelly will have a limited theatrical run from November 14 before becoming available to stream on Netflix from December 5, 2025.
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