By Lindsey Bahr, Film Writer
VENICE, Italy (AP) --Noah Baumbach started re-reading Don DeLillo's "White Noise" in the early days of the pandemic. The 1985 novel, a biting satire about a blended middle-class family in suburban America, didn't feel like a period piece. It felt relevant and familiar.
So Baumbach, known for directing original films like "The Squid and the Whale" and "Marriage Story," started working on his first-ever adaptation.
"White Noise" opened the Venice International Film Festival on Wednesday night (8/31), where it is in competition.
The film stars Adam Driver as Jack Gladney, a college professor focused on the study of Adolf Hitler. He lives with his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their children and stepchildren, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and Steffie (May Nivola).
Like the book, the film is divided into three sections, "Waves and Radiation," "The Airborne Toxic Event" and "Dylarama," and how the family deals with various dangers and threats on macro and micro levels.
"The movie is about life and death and how we have to acknowledge that they're the same, rather than exist as two separate things," Baumbach said in Venice on Wednesday. "The movie is about how we create these rituals and strategies to hold off danger and death … and sometimes it comes for us and we don't know how to react."
Driver, Gerwig and co-stars Jodie Turner-Smith and Don Cheadle, who play Jack's colleagues at the university, joined Baumbach to discuss the film before its world premiere.
Gerwig, who shares a child with Baumbach and has starred in and co-written several films with him, said she started re-reading the book when he did.
"It makes you, while you're reading it, want to look up and say 'listen to this.' It had a performative quality to it. It seemed to be emotional and intellectually exciting," she said.
Long rehearsals, she added, helped make the characters become real people and less abstract.
Driver, who was reuniting with Baumbach after "Marriage Story," said he liked getting to play a character who was "so stressed" but "pretending not to be stressed."
The part of Jack also required some physical transformations, including a wig to simulate a receding hairline and some actual weight gain.
"I'm very satisfied where things are going," Driver said about seeing himself on screen as Jack. "We had a backup stomach. We didn't need the backup stomach."
Some have already noted to Baumbach that the film is a departure for him, stylistically and tonally. He said the material had never called for it before, and DeLillo's material did. The novel's 1980s setting inspired the look, feel and sound of the film, which was shot on 35mm anamorphic film in Ohio.
The score was done by Danny Elfman, who Baumbach encouraged to revisit some of his own scores from the time period that he had long put to bed — like "Midnight Run" — to inform the music.
"White Noise" also features LCD Soundsystem's first new song in five years, "New Body Rhumba." Baumbach said he told the band's front man James Murphy to "write a really catchy fun song about death" as though he were writing a song in the 80s. He wanted something to go with a dance in a supermarket.
"The story is the story of American culture and being surrounded by American culture," Baumbach said.
The next stop for "White Noise" is the New York Film Festival, where it will also be the opening night film. Netflix is debuting the film in theaters first on Nov. 25, before it is streamlined on Dec. 30.
SCHROM x Yacht Club and Be Electric Studios Launch Electric XR for Virtual Production
SCHROM x Yacht Club, a full-service live-action, tabletop, and postproduction company, has teamed with Be Electric Studios, a soundstage, equipment rental, and virtual production company, to launch Electric XR, a virtual production collective.
Industry veteran Thomas Rossano will lead the new venture, which provides advanced virtual production solutions across multiple facilities. He brings over 25 years of experience in live-action, tabletop, postproduction and talent curation to enhance Electric XR’s offerings as a resource for brands and agencies, as well as other production companies in need of virtual production solutions. Additionally Rossano continues to serve as EP at XR New York (XR-NY), a role he’s held since December 2022. SCHROM x Yacht Club originally established XR-NY to help provide XR services for third-party rentals. While XR-NY will continue to function independently for SCHROM X Yacht Club, it now operates under the Electric XR umbrella.
Rossano’s expertise spans producing live-action commercials, branded content, interactive and experiential content. In addition to leading Electric XR, he holds responsibilities at SCHROM x Yacht Club which include driving business development, collaborating with sales reps and expanding the company’s creative talent network. Rossano’s career includes serving as an exec producer at Hungry Man for about 11 years, right from that company’s inception. He then went on to become a partner at Station Film where he also had a lengthy tenure. Later he was a partner at PRISM. Then after the pandemic hit, he became a freelance EP for nearly two years, looking into opportunities in virtual production, which led him to XR NY and now Electric XR. Over the years, he has produced high-profile... Read More