I'm always looking for overlooked post-Dylan singer-songwriter records from the '70s.
— Noah Baumbach
I was late to the Knicks. My dad was a big fan. But I first started watching baseball; I became a Red Sox fan. My dad was a Mets fan. I wanted to have my own team and league.
Wes Anderson's films, 6-year-olds are crazy about them.
I'm sure I've said some pretty bad pick-up lines.
I've had great experiences or joyful experiences making a movie that people found very disturbing.
'Frances Ha' is the closest final product to what I had in my head of any movie I've made. I'm not entirely even sure why that is.
I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.
Being funny, in some ways, is about being connected to psychology.
It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum.
I watch movies all the time, so it's hard to pick certain specific directors that have inspired me in the aggregate.
I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.
I think I've always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.
Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.
I know people who are incredibly successful who still dress the way they did when they were 18, just because they still think that's how they look good.
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.
I think all my movies are about transitions to some degree.
Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.
I try to procrastinate, if I can, productively, like I'll work on something else as procrastination. Or I take a walk. Because often I find, if you get out, more things come to you.
It's nice being friends over a period of time with people whose music you like so much, or other filmmakers, seeing people change, go through trials.
I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.
Dance is a profession with an expiration date for many people.
I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we're shooting, and that's always a challenge because, unfortunately, people on the street don't know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.
I love black-and-white movies that are about contemporary subjects.
A film set becomes its own family anyway, and all family dynamics come out during a shoot. The trick is hiring people who know how to handle that.
As a kid, I thought of myself as a funny person who secretly wanted to be serious, but now I think maybe I'm a serious person who secretly wants to be funny.
I can feel pretty critical of people, and I understand that sort of feeling of when you're going through something that's painful, taking it out on the world and projecting onto other people, finding faults with other people because it's harder to find faults in yourself.
Peter Bogdanovich is a good friend.
Many of the crew members I work with and continue to work with were friends or have become close friends, and so we keep working together. And I like casting friends of mine or people I know in parts I know would be perfect for them. I like to bring things and people that mean something to me in to my work.
I like the way corduroys feel. I like the sort of jean aspect of corduroys, but also the texture of them. They probably remind me of my childhood, too, I think. I wore cords, and my dad had a corduroy jacket.
I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.
I always viewed life as material for a movie.
I do like having books on my shelves. I do value that life.
I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with these huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.
We expect forty-year-olds to have grown up at some point, and to be engaged and adult and take responsibility, and doing nothing would seem to go against that.
When you find yourself on the Internet when you're supposed to be writing, you've already lost. It's even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet.
A lot of black-and-white films generally have a color version that will be used for TV.
I've definitely been in situations where I could tell someone was interested in me, but I could tell they were insulting me in some passive/aggressive way, so I felt bad about myself at the same time.
It's going to start really interfering with your quality of life, your health, if you don't adjust to life as it's happening to you.
When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.
I'm interested in the way major events don't necessarily announce themselves as major events. They're often little things - the drip, drip of life that changes people or affects people.
I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.
I'm a huge proponent of therapy and analysis, but it's something that, in a nonprofessional way, can be abused.
I didn't train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.
Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.
I like shooting in New York because I have such a connection to the city. I have so many memories there.
The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.
We all have these notions of cool that come about at different points in our lives, and it's interesting in how it evolves or doesn't evolve in different people.
I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.
I don't like when you necessarily know that this is the end of the movie. I like when a movie ends abruptly. You go through this, and some of the scenes are uncomfortable, and some are funny - and then suddenly it's over.
I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.
