2019 AWARDS SEASON ANATOMY OF A CONTENDERTHE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 72 OCTOBER 30, 2019
WILSON WEBB/NETFLIX (2)of the big-screen theatrical
experience — he’d had a good
experience on Meyerowitz Stories
and was open to reteaming.
Especially since this time Netflix
offered Marriage Story its longest-
ever theatrical window — a full
four weeks (beginning Nov. 6).
According to Heyman, Netflix’s
Scott Stuber gave them “every-
thing we wanted.”
With the $18 million budget in
place, Baumbach set out to bring
his script to life with his usual
obsessive attention to detail.
“Noah is relentless in pushing,
pushing, pushing,” says Heyman.
He tasked production designer
Jade Healy with finding the
absolutely perfect New York bar
for a scene where Charlie sings
“Being Alive” as well as the ideal
Los Angeles house where Nicole’s
mother (Julie Hagerty) lives. “You
beginning in January 2018, went
mostly without a hitch. Except
for one: The perfect location in
Los Angeles fell through. “Noah
had been in love with this house
for months and months, and then
two weeks before we shot, the city
wouldn’t permit it,” says Healy.
Baumbach was forced to shoot
the scene in which Nicole enlists
her sister (Merritt Wever) to
serve Charlie with divorce papers
in a slightly less ideal setting.
Somehow, though, he made it
work. “I felt it put me in the posi-
tion that Charlie was in, which
was being uncomfortable in a
space that I hadn’t planned to be,”
Baumbach explains.For the actors, Baumbach’s
meticulousness had its own chal-
lenges. Every camera placement,
every step in the choreography
and especially every word of dia-
logue was plotted and executed
with Swiss clock-like precision.
“He just wants every single word
that he’s written, like ‘them’ is
not ‘they’ even though in context
it would work,” says Liotta. “He
is fanatical, but the unbelievable
part of it is he’s so calm about it.
He just does not rattle.”
He does, however, ask for many,
many takes. “You never knowwhen some things that you would
think may be kind of benign, he’ll
just needle for hours over that
— and at some point you are so
broken down because you’ve tried
what you imagine as every pos-
sible way, but he won’t let go,” says
Johansson of Baumbach’s some-
times Kubrickian directing style.
“I guess it could be perceived as a
kind of neurosis, but it’s a vision,
an artistic vision.”
Driver says it was “exhausting”
as well, although it turned out
he could be just as meticulous as
his director. “For Adam to say,
‘I might try this take and cross
my legs,’ that’s a big thing,” says
Baumbach. “It changes so much.”Because he shoots so many
takes, there were truckloads
of footage to work with in the
editing room. “There’s so much
material, I feel like one could
get lost in it,” says Baumbach’s
longtime editor Jennifer Lame,
who started working on the film
before a single frame had been
shot, spending hours with the
director breaking down the script
shot by shot. “But what’s so fun
about Noah and our process is
that we talk about the movie and
the characters and the story so
much that when I go through the
50 takes, I know exactly what’s
right. I’m like, ‘Oh, there she is —
there’s Nicole.’ ”
Nevertheless, splicing together
the 136-minute film was — like
everything else in a Baumbachproduction — a painstakingly
precise process. “I’ve never seen
anything quite like it,” says
Heyman. “He begins at the begin-
ning and he’ll go forward, and
then he’ll go back to the begin-
ning — he doesn’t go to the end.
It’s one step forward, one step
back, two steps forward, two
steps back.”
There was a world where the
film could have been finished
in time for 2018’s fall festivals,
but once they pushed past that
deadline, “we really pressured
ourselves to take breaks,” says
Lame. Even after the editing was
mostly complete, they decided
to take yet another step back,spending a couple of months just
sitting with their cut. “There
is something about living with
something,” says Lame.
The film premiered at the
Venice Film Festival on Aug. 29
— well ahead of its its theatri-
cal bow and Dec. 6 Netflix debut
— garnering terrific reviews
(“Baumbach’s best yet,” raved
THR). But perhaps the greatest
compliment the film has received
so far came from someone who
normally can’t stand to watch
Baumbach’s movies — Baumbach.
“Usually, I don’t look at [my
films],” says the director. “But I
can watch this movie in ways that
I have not been able to watch pre-
vious ones. Watching the actors
feels cathartic for me. It feels
outside of me in a great way.”hear stories that he’s meticulous,”
says Healy, who was working with
Baumbach for the first time. “But
he just wants it to be exact. If
you bring him a prop, like a legal
document, you better make sure
you’ve triple-checked that it’s
exactly what it should be, because
he will check and he will know.
You can’t fake it. He doesn’t want
555 phone numbers. He does not
want any of that stuff. He really
wants it to feel real.”
Despite Baumbach’s super-
detailed prep — or maybe because
of it — the 47-day production,
Johansson and Driver
spent two days shooting
an intense, carefully
choreographed fight
scene that ran 11 pages
in the script. “I think
Noah got us each a
bottle of wine afterward,
which I probably
immediately uncorked,”
says Johansson.