Background and career
Noah Baumbach (born September 3, 1969) is an American filmmaker. He is known for making films set in New York City and his works are inspired by filmmakers such as Woody Allen and Whit Stillman. His frequent collaborators include Wes Anderson, Adam Driver, and his wife, Greta Gerwig. He has received various accolades including a Critics' Choice Awards, two Independent Spirit Awards and three Gotham Awards as well as award nominations for four Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. Baumbach first gained attention for his early films Kicking and Screaming (1995), and Mr. Jealousy (1997). His breakthrough film The Squid and the Whale (2005) earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He first collaborated with Gerwig on Greenberg (2010) and their collaborations continued with Frances Ha (2013), Mistress America (2015), White Noise (2022), and Barbie (2023). His other films include Margot at the Wedding (2007), While We're Young (2014), The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), and Jay Kelly (2025). Marriage Story (2019) earned an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination and Baumbach's second Best Original Screenplay nomination. For Barbie, which he co-wrote with Gerwig, he received his third screenplay nomination for Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is also known for co-writing with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). In 2025, he was awarded the Telluride Film Festival Silver Medallion.
Baumbach was born on September 3, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York City, into a family with Jewish roots. His father, Jonathan Baumbach, was an author of experimental fiction and the co-founder of the publishing house Fiction Collective, taught at Stanford University and Brooklyn College, and was a film critic for Partisan Review. His mother, Georgia Brown, was a film critic for The Village Voice who also wrote fiction. His parents divorced during his adolescence, which served as inspiration for his 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach has three siblings, two of whom are from his father's previous marriage. Baumbach grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and from a young age he was determined to become a professional filmmaker. Films that influenced Baumbach include The Jerk, Animal House, Heaven Can Wait, The World According to Garp, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He graduated from Brooklyn's Midwood High School in 1987 and received his A.B. in English from Vassar College in 1991. While at Vassar, he and fellow future filmmaker, Jason Blum, were roommates (Blum later produced Baumbach's first film, Kicking and Screaming in 1995). Soon after, he briefly worked as a messenger at The New Yorker.
Baumbach made his writing and directing debut in 1995 with Kicking and Screaming, a comedy about four young men who graduate from college and refuse to move on with their lives. The film starred Josh Hamilton, Chris Eigeman, and Carlos Jacott and premiered in 1995 at the New York Film Festival. In an interview with The A.V. Club, Baumbach said of his influences on the film, "I really responded to the kind of ensemble feeling of Metropolitan, I was also thinking a lot about Diner, which was another great ensemble "friends" comedy." Baumbach was chosen as one of Newsweek's "Ten New Faces of 1996". Roger Ebert praised the film's "good eye and a terrific ear; the dialogue by writer-director Noah Baumbach is not simply accurate... but a distillation of reality – elevating aimless brainy small-talk into a statement." Reviews often mentioned the thin and meandering plot, but most noted this as a facet of the characters' life stage. Janet Maslin of The New York Times stated, "Kicking and Screaming occupies its postage-stamp size terrain with confident comic style." In 1997, he wrote and directed Mr. Jealousy, a film about a young writer so jealous about his girlfriend that he sneaks into the group therapy sessions of her ex-boyfriend to discover what kind of relationship they had. He then co-wrote (under the name Jesse Carter) and directed (under the name Ernie Fusco) the New York-set comedy of manners Highball. Baumbach disowned the film according to a 2005 interview in The A.V. Club, the director stated,
The truth is, I never "owned" Highball. It really was an experiment, and kind of a foolish experiment, because I didn't think about what the ramifications would be if it didn't work. But it was made with all the best intentions, which was to try and make a movie in six days, and use all the same people from Mr. Jealousy, with all their goodwill, and bring in some more people. And it was a funny script. But it was just too ambitious. We didn't have enough time, we didn't finish it, it didn't look good, it was just a whole... mess. [Laughs.] We couldn't get it done, and I had a falling out with the producer. He abandoned it, and I had no money to finish it, to go back and maybe get two more days or something. Then later, it was put out on DVD without my approval.
In 2004, Baumbach collaborated with screenwriter and director Wes Anderson, co-writing with Anderson, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). The following year, he released his fourth feature film, The Squid and the Whale (2005) which was a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about his childhood in Brooklyn and the effect of his parents' divorce on the family in the mid-1980s. The film stars Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney in the parent roles. In an interview with author Jonathan Lethem in BOMB Magazine, Baumbach said of the film, "Sometimes when I think about the whole experience of this, it starts to become a joke within a joke within a joke. The film is not only inspired by my childhood and my parents’ divorce, but it was also the first script I didn't show to my parents while I was working on it. It's not that I wanted to protect them from anything. I just wanted to keep it my own experience." The Squid and the Whale was a sleeper hit and a critical success, earning Baumbach two awards at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. It also received six Independent Spirit Award nominations, three Golden Globe nominations and the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review all voted it the year's best screenplay. Baumbach wrote and directed the 2007 dramedy Margot at the Wedding, starring his then wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, and John Turturro. In the film, Kidman plays a woman named Margot who spends several days visiting her sister Pauline (Leigh) on the eve of Pauline's wedding to Black's character. It was shot in April and May 2006 in Hampton Bays and City Island, Bronx. The film was released in the United States by Paramount Vantage on November 16, 2007. Baumbach helped to write and direct the short films Clearing the Air and New York Underground which aired on Saturday Night Live. The films were co-written and co-produced by cast-members Fred Armisen and Bill Hader. New York Underground featured Hader as a British rock journalist doing a piece on quirky underground musician Joshua Rainhorne (Armisen has performed as Joshua at numerous live events). Clearing the Air featured Hader, Armisen, and Paul Rudd (who was the guest host for that week) trying to clear the air over a girl they all slept with. Both pieces aired on SNL in the fall of 2008. Baumbach co-wrote the screenplay for the 2009 film version of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox with Wes Anderson, who directed it using stop-motion technology. The film was a critical success appearing on many critics top 10 lists of the year. The film also received the Academy Award, British Academy Film Award, and Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Animated Film, losing to Pixar's Up. Despite the critical praise the film was not a financial success.
His film Greenberg was released March 2010. It starred Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig and Rhys Ifans. The story was conceived by Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The film nominated for the Golden Bear at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival. In 2012, Baumbach directed the comedic drama Frances Ha, which he cowrote with Greta Gerwig, who also starred. The film played at the Toronto International Film Festival. Baumbach filmed Frances Ha with his cinematographer Sam Levy digitally and in black-and-white, the latter to emulate in part collaborations by Woody Allen and his cinematographer Gordon Willis, in films like Manhattan (1979). CBS News compared Frances Ha's style to the works of Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and François Truffaut. Gerwig received a Golden Globe Award nomination for her performance. Baumbach has "shown an affinity for writing about the East Coast elite." Baumbach has written an adaptation of Curtis Sittenfeld's novel Prep. He also co-wrote a screenplay for the animated film Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. He worked on HBO's adaptation of the Jonathan Franzen novel The Corrections, but the pilot was never completed and HBO passed on the project. Baumbach wrote and directed the 2014 comedy-drama While We're Young, starring Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. A24 Films released the film on March 27, 2015, and the film went on to gross more than all of Baumbach's previous films in the United States box office. He also directed and cowrote the 2015 comedy Mistress America, starring Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was released to general audiences on August 14. That same year he presented De Palma, a documentary about filmmaker Brian De Palma that he co-directed with Jake Paltrow. It premiered at the 2015 Venice Film Festival. In 2017, The Meyerowitz Stories was released on October 13 on Netflix. Before its streaming debut, the film was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The film focuses on a fractured and dysfunctional family, and starred Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler and Emma Thompson. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 92% based on 181 reviews, and an average rating of 7.66/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) observes the family dynamic through writer-director Noah Baumbach's bittersweet lens and the impressive efforts of a remarkable cast." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 79 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
