Noah Baumbach On Turning Don DeLillo’s Daunting Novel ‘White Noise’ Into Disaster Movie With An Inner Life – Contenders New York

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In the depths of the Covid pandemic, stuck at home in an emptied-out New York City, filmmaker Noah Baumbach figured he and his life partner and creative collaborator Greta Gerwig had two choices for their next project.  “It was either, we were going to do something in the apartment or a Spielbergian apocalypse movie,” Baumbach said, not entirely in jest, in a White Noise panel discussion Saturday at Deadline’s Contenders Film: New York awards-season event. RELATED: Contenders New York 2022: Deadline’s Complete Coverage The movie he, Gerwig, actor Adam Driver and producer David Heyman ended up making arguably is both: a large-scale, big-budget, cast-of-hundreds environmental disaster movie with a lot of the interior life and offbeat emotional detail of his past work.

Set in the 1980s, it contains both a fully staged train crash and whimsical cross-talk among characters around the house while catastrophe looms.

White Noise is also the writer-director’s first adaptation after more than a dozen other feature-length films. His source material, Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, is a sometimes plotless, abstruse meditation on contemporary America often described as movie-proof — “unfilmable.” DeLillo’s novel examines the impact of a catastrophic “airborne toxic event” on a Midwestern college professor, Jack Gladney, suddenly faced with the end of his picturesque suburban family life.  RELATED: Contenders New York Arrivals Gallery: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Danielle Deadwyler, S.

S. Rajamouli, Zoe Kazan & More Baumbach rediscovered DeLillo’s cult classic during the height of the pandemic and was struck not just by the topicality, 35 years later, “in terms of things that are alluded to or depicted in the book,” but also the