Noah Baumbach Isn’t Getting Any Younger

To paraphrase Girlscreator, Lena Dunham, Noah Baumbach may not be the voice of his generation, but he’s a voice of a generation. Over the last two decades, the 45-year old director has made films about his peers struggling with relationships, careers, and neuroses. His latest film, While We’re Young, explores an unusual friendship between a forty-something couple, played by Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts, and a pair of millennials played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. Stiller and Watts’s characters develop a “couples crush” on the younger pair and try to keep up with them. But they find out being young takes more than wearing a fedora, listening to cool music, and staying out late.

Ben Stiller and Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young

(Jon Pack, Courtesy of A24)

Baumbach says the inspiration for the movie came from his own experience of growing older. “Once the doctor started taking all my worries seriously, I felt like I’ve passed some threshold,” he tells Kurt Andersen. While We We’re Young feels like an optimistic comedy with mainstream appeal. That’s unusual for Baumbach, whose previous movies, like Margot at the Weddingand Greenberg, have been generally more downbeat comedies. But Baumbach says the happier tone of While We’re Young doesn’t mark a permanent change. “Some are more hopeful than others, some are sadder than others. I don’t feel like the tone of one is any less or more true than another.”

Baumbach’s career took off in 2005, with his semi-autobiographical film,The Squid and The Whale, about his parents’ divorce. That film was told from the perspective of a teenage boy in the 1980s. Now that Baumbach himself is divorced, “it’s a subject matter that I’ll probably have to revisit at some point,” he says. But he doesn’t think his earlier take on divorce was necessarily wrong. “I don’t know that The Squid and the Whale says anything but that divorce is hard, and I can say that’s still true.”

Bonus Track: Kurt’s extended conversation with Noah Baumbach

A still from Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, starring Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller as a middle-aged couple in crisis.

(Jon Pack, Courtesy of A24)