Top 120 Quotes & Sayings by Noah Baumbach
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Noah Baumbach.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
How you start the movie is critical. And how often you feel that there's no reason for how it's starting.
Manhattan is so tailored. It's driven by appealing to the very wealthy and tourists.
I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.
That's the nice thing about collaborating with someone: Your work becomes a conversation.
There are the people who overthink making mix CDs and playlists, and how that works generationally is all really interesting to me.
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.
I find a lot of writing happens when you're not actually at the computer. So I carry a notebook.
I've always liked working with friends or, you know, people I have outside relationships with.
Anyone who's putting money into your movie would always rather you cast well-known people.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.'
There's something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don't know what their reaction will be.
I think anxiety is dangerous, but it makes you think it's your friend.
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.
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.
There's always some generational-guys-hanging-out movie that is made every few years, I think, and some of them are great.
'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.
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.
Other people have worked with big studios and maintained control over their movies. I see no reason why it wouldn't work for me.
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.
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.
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.
It's near impossible to make a movie in black and white in the system.
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.
Will Ferrell's made a lot of brilliant movies.
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.
I'm interested in music as an extension of character.
Truffaut loved Hitchcock.
Even fairly serious moviegoers can't shake this shadow of the corporate world.
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.
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.
Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.
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.
I wouldn't say 'Frances Ha' is autobiographical, but it's definitely very personal.
When I start a movie, there will be certain films that I watch again just because the vibe seems right.
I think I was going through a lot of change at 27, but I didn't know it was happening until it was over.
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.
I think all my movies are about transitions to some degree.
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.
You can be aware that something is idiosyncratic, and give it to a character, but keep doing it.
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.
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.
It's always really special to be at the New York Film Festival, and always a real privilege.
It's kind of major, learning to drive. I feel like it kicked up other stuff in my life.
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.
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.
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.
I don't agree with the idea that my characters are unlikeable.
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.
When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Related Authors
Ayn Rand Quotes
Russian
Writer
C. S. Lewis Quotes
British
Writer
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes
French
Writer
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
English
Writer
H. L. Mencken Quotes
American
Writer
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Japanese
Writer
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
American
Writer
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Russian
Writer
Mark Twain Quotes
American
Writer
Mason Cooley Quotes
American
Writer
Ray Bradbury Quotes
American
Writer
Samuel Johnson Quotes
English
Writer
Seth Godin Quotes
American
Writer
Sherrilyn Kenyon Quotes
American
Writer
Suzanne Collins Quotes
American
Writer