Hello Noah
Interviews are pretty slick. And to be honest I often wonder if the answers are contrived. Did the interview actually occur face to face or did the interviewee just get a list of questions via email and have to respond? Probably face to face is what I usually reason. And then I become even more impressed by the meandering thoughts of strangers - thoughts that I often interpret as utter brilliance (well, at least the ones I share with you).
That’s where Noah Baumbach comes in. I read an interview with him today in the New York Times magazine that struck a cord with ol’ r roth. So I thought I’d share a bit of what he had to say. And if you are so inclined, I encourage you to click on the link and read some more.
Who: Noah Baumbach, the director of the new Indie film “The Squid and the Whale“.
Article: The Intelligentsia Indie
Source: New York Times Magazine
You’re the son of Jonathan Baumbach, an accomplished literary novelist, and Georgia Brown, a former film critic for The Village Voice. How much of the film is autobiographical?
“I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford’s “Good Solider” or something I wasn’t equipped to understand.”
So do you see your film, which opened in New York this week, as a rebellion against the excesses of the intellectual life?
“I grew up in the heat of 70’s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art. My film is emotional rather than meta, and that’s my rebellion.”
…
These days you’re what Roth (Phillip) might call a goodnik. You and the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh were married just last month, both for the first time.
“We’ve been together for four years. We didn’t send out invitations for our wedding. We just called family and said come to our house in a week. We took our own pictures. Most of them were Polaroids, and a good percentage of those were out of focus.”
Now that’s a rad wedding, and yahoo for emotion vs. theory/meta meaning. But what does ‘goodnik’ mean? And why can’t I find the definition anywhere…?
Filed by ryanroth at October 11th, 2005 under Dijyano