This evening’s Venice Film Festival opening film White Noise “is a story of American culture”, according to writer-director Noah Baumbach.
“I was a child in the 80s; it was a very formative time for me,” said Baumbach, speaking at Venice press conference for the Netflix title. “The movies that I saw then informed me and led me to want to do what I do. So I also saw it as a story of American cinema. Because of the genre elements and tonal shifts that were available to me, I could use this language.”
Adapted from Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel of the same name, White Noise follows college professor Jack Gladney – played by Adam Driver - who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitler studies. In one scene, Gladney interrupts a lecture by fellow professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) on Elvis Presley, to draw comparisons between the two men.
“DeLillo’s novel is a satire, of academia as well as pop culture, and how academia has imbibed pop culture,” said Baumbach of the Hitler/Elvis comparison. “You can have the study of something like Hitler alongside the study of something like Elvis. We can see it in search engines, how this stuff all levels out – it all starts to take on almost equal measure. Which of course it doesn’t have. To have Don and Adam go at it like that was an amazing opportunity.”
On his transformation to play a character at least a decade older than his age, Driver joked, “I’m very satisfied with where things are going. It looks great.”
“We talked about the look,” he continued. “I don’t have a receding hairline so we thought we’d add that. We had a backup stomach, then we didn’t need the backup stomach and it was just my weight, and that was uncomfortable.”
Child stars
The film also stars Gerwig as Gladney’s wife Babbette; Jodie Turner-Smith; Screen Star of Tomorrow Raffey Cassidy as the Gladney’s eldest child; plus real-life siblings Sam and May Nivola, as two further Gladney children.
Sam and May’s parents are actors Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola, who are thanked in the closing credits. “If you’ve ever had kids who are in a movie, their parents deserve thanks,” said Baumbach. “I’ve known Emily and Alessandro for years, and admire them both tremendously. I was auditioning kids with [casting director] Doug Aibel, and did many auditions and callbacks. We were in the pandemic and a lot of it was on Zoom.
“These two Nivola kids kept coming up to the surface and were just so wonderful. So they earned the part. And of course I had to break it to their parents – are you OK basically spending six months in Ohio? They [Emily and Alessandro] were amazing and so patient.”
Speaking of several scenes with the family together in a car, Baumbach said, “Between cut and action, the kids would just keep talking, and would go from the dialogue of the script to their own dialogue, which would be equally hard to follow.
“I’d be at the monitor with headphones on, and I’d see Adam and Greta looking over their shoulders like ‘What are they talking about?’. Then we’d start the scenes again and they’d just go into the dialogue from the movie.”
Gerwig said it was “a long stretch of rehearsal” that meant the characters “stopped being ideas” from the book.
“That’s when I guess they felt more like characters in a Baumbach movie,” she said, while adding that the book and film characters “feel very intertwined – they don’t feel like separate things.”
It is the latest collaboration between Baumbach, Gerwig and Driver, who have previously worked together on films including Frances Ha. Gerwig laughed at, but did not respond to the suggestion that she could have auditioned Driver for the role of Ken in her upcoming film Barbie (the role went to Ryan Gosling, with production now complete ahead of a July 2023 release).
White Noise opens Venice Film Festival this evening in Competition with the festival running until September 10.
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