Guess quote

Noah Baumbach [1969-0] American

Rank: 101
Writer, Filmmaker

Noah Baumbach is an American independent filmmaker. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Squid and the Whale and is known for making dramatic comedies.

Funny, Best, History

Quote	Tags	Rank
I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people either adjust to those things and let go of adolescent notions. Or they dig in deeper.		101
I'm curious how people build up the codes that they live their life by, and how they come to think that that's the best way for them to function.	Best	102
Friends of friends had bands in college or in their early 20s and had a moment where they had some kind of interest from a record label or manager. It's always interesting how people handle those decisions and those moments.		103
I thought at the time of my parents' divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager.		104
It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum.	Funny, History	105
As a kid, I thought of myself as a funny person who secretly wanted to be serious, but now I think maybe I'm a serious person who secretly wants to be funny.	Funny	106
It's nice being friends over a period of time with people whose music you like so much, or other filmmakers, seeing people change, go through trials.		107
It's always really special to be at the New York Film Festival, and always a real privilege.		108
I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.		109
When you find yourself on the Internet when you're supposed to be writing, you've already lost. It's even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet.		110
Even fairly serious moviegoers can't shake this shadow of the corporate world.		111
Many of the crew members I work with and continue to work with were friends or have become close friends, and so we keep working together. And I like casting friends of mine or people I know in parts I know would be perfect for them. I like to bring things and people that mean something to me in to my work.		112
That's the nice thing about collaborating with someone: Your work becomes a conversation.		113
I try to procrastinate, if I can, productively, like I'll work on something else as procrastination. Or I take a walk. Because often I find, if you get out, more things come to you.		114
I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.		115
With 'Greenberg,' I wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles... my great love for it and also the way that I felt not at home and alienated there.		116
I can feel pretty critical of people, and I understand that sort of feeling of when you're going through something that's painful, taking it out on the world and projecting onto other people, finding faults with other people because it's harder to find faults in yourself.		117
A lot of black-and-white films generally have a color version that will be used for TV.		118
Manhattan is so tailored. It's driven by appealing to the very wealthy and tourists.		119
My dad was a great movie companion. He wouldn't diminish 'The Jerk.' If I liked it, he liked it. He could see it through my eyes.		120
'The Squid and the Whale' I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.		121
I think sometimes bad behaviour can be liberating for certain people. They need to behave badly to find themselves - to go off path to find their path. You see it with kids all the time: They're testing boundaries, and I think that's healthy.		122
I think anxiety is dangerous, but it makes you think it's your friend.		123
When you're around your family, and you have that history and that shared language, you say things you'd be embarrassed to hear quoted back to you later.		124
Adaptations are fun for me because they connect to the idea of filmmaking I had when I was a kid. I would see a movie and think: 'I'm gonna make that movie.'		125
I get a lot of responses to my movies. Some people say, 'Oh, I thought it was really funny - I hope that's okay!' And my answer always is 'Yes. It's totally okay.'		126
I really like my first movie a lot, 'Kicking and Screaming.' I think it's a - I'm very pleased and proud of that movie, but it wasn't the - it wasn't 'Citizen Kane' right out of the box, you know? It wasn't 'Sex, Lies and Videotape.'		201
Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.		202
I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.		203
I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.		204
We all have these notions of cool that come about at different points in our lives, and it's interesting in how it evolves or doesn't evolve in different people.		205
Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.		206
The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.		207
I'm a huge proponent of therapy and analysis, but it's something that, in a nonprofessional way, can be abused.		208
Being funny, in some ways, is about being connected to psychology.		209
A film set becomes its own family anyway, and all family dynamics come out during a shoot. The trick is hiring people who know how to handle that.		210
I'm interested in the way major events don't necessarily announce themselves as major events. They're often little things - the drip, drip of life that changes people or affects people.		211
I love black-and-white movies that are about contemporary subjects.		212
When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.		213
I've had great experiences or joyful experiences making a movie that people found very disturbing.		214
I'm sure I've said some pretty bad pick-up lines.		215
Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.		216
I've always liked working with friends or, you know, people I have outside relationships with.		217
I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.		218
I graduated in '91, so the '90s for me were very much the first years out of school, so I can't really look at that decade as independent of my own experience of my 20s, really.		219
There's always some generational-guys-hanging-out movie that is made every few years, I think, and some of them are great.		220
Will Ferrell's made a lot of brilliant movies.		221
There's something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don't know what their reaction will be.		222
I'm interested in music as an extension of character.		223
There are the people who overthink making mix CDs and playlists, and how that works generationally is all really interesting to me.		224
Truffaut loved Hitchcock.		225
There was a telemarketing job one summer in high school that I was rejected for. I still walk by the building that I actually had the interview in. It's still in New York, and I always think about that job and why I didn't get it.		226
When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.		301
You can be aware that something is idiosyncratic, and give it to a character, but keep doing it.		302
I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.		303
I find a lot of writing happens when you're not actually at the computer. So I carry a notebook.		304
It's near impossible to make a movie in black and white in the system.		305
How you start the movie is critical. And how often you feel that there's no reason for how it's starting.		306
There is an isolated experience to being a director. It's very communal because there's a crew, but it's only you. You're the one on the hook.		307
I wouldn't say 'Frances Ha' is autobiographical, but it's definitely very personal.		308
I think I was going through a lot of change at 27, but I didn't know it was happening until it was over.		309
I don't agree with the idea that my characters are unlikeable.		310
Woody Allen's movies are so much a part of me. I grew up watching them over and over and would read all his comic pieces for the New Yorker. In some ways, his influence is so much there that I can't even locate it any more.		311
To this day, I have people I might meet who will make assumptions about my life based on fictional elements of 'The Squid And The Whale.' But I think that's par for the course if you make something that feels kind of real.		312
It's kind of major, learning to drive. I feel like it kicked up other stuff in my life.		313
Anyone who's putting money into your movie would always rather you cast well-known people.		314
I suppose some studio executive would say it's death for a comedy if people aren't all laughing in the same places, but I find with my movies that people laugh in very different places. I can't control it.		315
When I start a movie, there will be certain films that I watch again just because the vibe seems right.		316
Other people have worked with big studios and maintained control over their movies. I see no reason why it wouldn't work for me.		317
I think if we taped a lot of families that claim to be relatively normal, you'd be surprised when you hear some of the things said.		318
I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so - which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.		319
I've run into more people walking in L.A. than if I drove. Because you stand out so much if you walk. People from my past have stopped their cars and said, 'Hey!' But if I was in a car, they never would've seen me.		320
We expect forty-year-olds to have grown up at some point, and to be engaged and adult and take responsibility, and doing nothing would seem to go against that.		321
I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with these huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.		322
I think all my movies are about transitions to some degree.		323
I don't like when you necessarily know that this is the end of the movie. I like when a movie ends abruptly. You go through this, and some of the scenes are uncomfortable, and some are funny - and then suddenly it's over.		324
I do like having books on my shelves. I do value that life.		325
I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford's 'Good Solider' or something I wasn't equipped to understand.		326
I always viewed life as material for a movie.		401
I know people who are incredibly successful who still dress the way they did when they were 18, just because they still think that's how they look good.		402
I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.		403
I like the way corduroys feel. I like the sort of jean aspect of corduroys, but also the texture of them. They probably remind me of my childhood, too, I think. I wore cords, and my dad had a corduroy jacket.		404
I think I've always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.		405
I like shooting in New York because I have such a connection to the city. I have so many memories there.		406
I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.		407
Peter Bogdanovich is a good friend.		408
I watch movies all the time, so it's hard to pick certain specific directors that have inspired me in the aggregate.		409
I didn't train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.		410
I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.		411
I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.		412
'Frances Ha' is the closest final product to what I had in my head of any movie I've made. I'm not entirely even sure why that is.		413
I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we're shooting, and that's always a challenge because, unfortunately, people on the street don't know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.		414
It's going to start really interfering with your quality of life, your health, if you don't adjust to life as it's happening to you.		415
Dance is a profession with an expiration date for many people.		416
I've definitely been in situations where I could tell someone was interested in me, but I could tell they were insulting me in some passive/aggressive way, so I felt bad about myself at the same time.		417
Wes Anderson's films, 6-year-olds are crazy about them.		418
I was late to the Knicks. My dad was a big fan. But I first started watching baseball; I became a Red Sox fan. My dad was a Mets fan. I wanted to have my own team and league.		419
I'm always looking for overlooked post-Dylan singer-songwriter records from the '70s.		420

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