news Noah Baumbach Still Wants to Make a Musical

With its rumored nine figure budget and apocalyptic source material, Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” marks a bit of a departure from the director’s previous sensibilities. But after successfully adapting Don DeLillo’s unfilmable novel, Baumbach is already thinking about his next challenge.

Speaking to IndieWire on the red carpet of the New York Film Festival, Baumbach made it clear that he’s not done experimenting with different genres. In fact, he’s starting to think about tackling a musical.

“I would love to make a musical at some point,” Baumbach said. “Many of my movies tease a musical at some moments.”

After seeing the dance sequence set to a new LCD Soundsystem song in “White Noise,” the idea of the “Kicking and Screaming” director taking on a musical might not seem so far fetched. But while he loves the idea of making a musical, Baumbach doesn’t have any concrete plans to share yet.

“I don’t have one that I’m just sitting on or dying to do,” he said, before ruling out one possibility. Baumbach had previously talked about how he had discussed adapting Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” with Adam Driver, but is no longer interested due to the overlapping material with his last film. “I feel like after ‘Marriage Story,’ we made our ‘Company’ in a way.”

No one can deny that Baumbach has been expanding his horizons lately. In addition to “White Noise,” he contributed to another big studio film by co-writing Greta Gerwig’s upcoming “Barbie.” Viral photos from the set of that film have prompted endless speculation about the film’s mysterious plot, but if Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s outfits are any indicator, it’s going to be a wild ride. In a recent interview with IndieWire’s Eric Kohn, Baumbach made it clear that he embraces the chaos. The director said that his reputation as a filmmaker who exclusively works on small indie films is a bit misleading because he has always worked in a wide variety of genres.

“If you really look, you know I’ve really done it all in ‘Madagascar 3,’” Baumbach said. “These things are not as alien to me as they might appear from my work.”

Vincent Perella contributed reporting to this story.
 
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