Noah Baumbach Admits ‘White Noise’ Broke Him and Almost Made Him Quit Filmmaking

I figured I should write a separate article about this, which does tell a whole other story about Noah Baumbach’s journey to hell.

Baumbach co-wrote “Barbie” with Greta Gerwig. It became a cultural juggernaut and earned him his fourth Oscar nomination. However, if it weren’t for that film, who knows what he would be doing right now.

In a Vanity Fair piece, tackling his upcoming “Jay Kelly,” Baunbach gets real about his last directorial effort, 2022’s “White Noise,” which he describes as one of the more bruising creative experiences of his career.

The 2022 Netflix adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel polarized critics and failed to connect with audiences. The film, a longtime passion project, was always considered a fool’s errand by many in the literary and film communities. DeLillo’s book, frequently dubbed “unfilmable,” proved just that, even for a filmmaker of Baumbach’s talent.

That was a really hard time for me [..] I’m very proud of that movie, but I had a really hard time making it. I had this feeling of, like, ‘Am I doing this just because I always wanted to do it — do I even like doing it anymore?’

Baumbach admits he experienced a “quiet crisis” in the aftermath of “White Noise,” questioning whether he even wanted to continue making movies. And yet, from that same creative collapse came a new spark, meeting Emily Mortimer and co-writing “Jay Kelly” with her.

I don’t quite know why I asked her to write it with me. But I liked myself with her. I liked how I felt inspired. She brought so much of herself to this, but I also felt that I was funnier and more charming and more profound than I might be without her.

Ask five people what “White Noise” cost to make and you’ll get five different answers. The official Netflix party line is $100M, but multiple sources have whispered for years that the real figure may have been over $140M. Given the scale of the shoot, that number wouldn’t be shocking.

The production itself was, by all accounts, a chaotic and prolonged affair. What was initially expected to be a relatively straightforward few-month shoot ballooned into something far more unwieldy. Baumbach reportedly swapped cinematographers midway through, ditching Michael Seresin and bringing in Lol Crawley to finish the job.

The scope of the production naturally pushed the schedule longer than Baumbach’s usual fare. “White Noise” was Baumbach’s first film involving heavy VFX and action choreography, and I highly doubt he ever wants to go back to that type of filmmaking ever again.