Noah Baumbach on his portrait of a movie star, Jay Kelly: “It’s part of the culture in America that no-one ages”

Each Noah Baumbach film feels in some way distinct from the one before. After breaking out with neurotic, dysfunctional dramedies in the 2000s, Noah Baumbach embraced a freer comedic style with Frances Ha (2012) and While We’re Young (2014), collaborating closely with rising star Greta Gerwig, who he married the same year that they co-wrote her smash hit Barbie (2023). Another career shift came in 2017 with the first of four Netflix-supported films: The Meyerowitz Stories, an intimate and abrasive comedy about another dysfunctional family in the orbit of a withholding father.

Jay Kelly does not look or feel much like The Meyerowitz Stories, but – after 2019’s critically acclaimed Marriage Story and the divisive 2022 DeLillo adaptation White Noise – Baumbach brings us another melancholy comedy about living in an important man’s orbit. Jay Kelly (George Clooney) is a movie star still gainfully employed after decades of being a leading man. But after an old mentor dies, a former friend confronts him, and his youngest daughter shrugs him off for the summer, he heads to continental Europe chasing affirmation from her and adoring fans at a Tuscan film festival honouring his career. All the while, Jay starts to question and sour on his star persona, stumbling into difficult memories of his own career and relationships.

In a swanky, Jay Kelly-appropriate hotel room, Baumbach sat down to discuss why movie stars are such a rich window into universal human concerns.

With the purpose-built sets and cinematic locations, it feels like Jay Kelly leans into a classic film style. Is it a case of trying to match the material?

I think it is. It’s a movie on some levels about performance and acting and movies, so that informs the telling for sure. That opening shot sets a feel and tone that the movie builds off as it goes. Once [Jay] walks into a memory, suddenly there’s something available to the movie that maybe wasn’t available before. So that will affect the next memory and the next, all the way to him having the phone call in the woods. I’m always interested in how the language of movies develops as you tell the story.

I’m not sure if Jay Kelly, the actor, would do a movie like Jay Kelly. The difference between him and George Clooney is that love of sensitivity.

There’s this illusion that’s baked into George playing a movie star that George is playing something that’s close to George, when in fact he’s playing a character that’s quite different from him. If he were playing a dentist, nobody would ask the question. If you cast a movie star as a movie star, it’s putting some mirrors up against each other that is going to provoke a sense of identification. We identify with movie stars anyway. They’re there for us to project on to and identify with. So it’s kind of like directing the mirror back at the audience, in some weird way.

You couldn’t make a movie about a movie star without seeing he is seen by people close to him, like his manager Ron (Adam Sandler) and publicist Liz (Laura Dern). Jay is very emotionally padded. Was it important to show the perspectives he’s ignorant of?

It works on a specific level, a movie star’s protective bubble, but it also works more generally about how we build up defences around ourselves. We don’t necessarily have the arsenal Jay has, but we have ways of protecting our vulnerabilities. At moments in our lives, we relinquish some of that, whether it’s in a relationship with someone or just in an ordinary, everyday way. Am I going to risk seeing the side of myself that I’ve been hiding from myself? Doing it in this way, we get to see people literally leave the movie.

Right, he sheds people.

It’s a combination of people rejecting him and getting tired of the role they’re playing in this ecosystem, this codependency, but it’s also him pushing people away at the same time, because there’s some side of him that knows he needs to face himself. Ron is hanging on, but it’s Jay who pushes Ron away, which in a sense is him rejecting himself. He’s rejecting Ron, but he’s rejecting himself.

All the supporting characters feel concise and pitchable in terms of what their relationship to Jay is. What was the process of assembling the ensemble?

Part of it was that everybody suggests a life much bigger than the moment they’re in. You have these actors that, in many cases, the audience has their own history with, so they feel bigger than the moment in some way, which is important. They do it themselves because they’re all such formidable actors. They’re both playing these specific people but they’re also playing parts of Jay’s psyche in some way. They’re all playing in reference to something that Jay has going on in his life, while at the same time suggesting that the world doesn’t revolve around him.

To ask a spoilery question, when was the ending of Jay watching his own tribute reel first imagined? Did it come from years of seeing them and wondering what somebody watching their own tribute was feeling?

It was an opportunity to put someone’s life in front of them, which we actually did with George. I played him that reel for the first time and filmed it, and that’s what’s in the movie. We all know those reels, we know what that thing is, but coming into it from the context of Jay’s journey, it means something else. Because it’s also about mortality, and it only goes one way. Movies create this sense of immortality, movie stars create that for us, that they’re always going to be consistent in there. So when you watch the reel, I think it provokes [two] feelings. One is, yes, they are there for us for all time, they mark our history as we’ve grown up with these things. But they also show somebody ageing; then we see him in the audience. It both preserves and stops time, and doesn’t.

We’ve been inundated with discussions of “the last movie stars”, but usually the onus is put on to the younger generation. Did that topic factor into this film? The idea of an ageing star is not necessarily a new one.

No, but I do think it’s rare in American movies that movie stars are allowed to play their own age. European movie stars do it more, or did it more. It’s part of the culture in America that no one ages. But we were always aware of it. I never felt like we needed to highlight it in any way, but the current role of movies and movie stars in our culture and “where is that now?” – that was always going to be there.

You brought up the European perspective. The film is co-written by Emily Mortimer. Were there differing perspectives on Hollywood and American movie stars in the writing process?

It’s always hard with a really good collaboration to be able to break it down or remember who did what or who brought what perspective. I know Italy pretty well, but Emily had been going there since she was a kid, so she had a perspective on Europe that was different from mine. I think really what happens is there’s, like, a third thing that happens in the room when you’re working well together. There’s something that neither of you would have done on your own that happens. It’s some hybrid. People have asked me [about writing] from a female perspective – I’ve been asked this with Greta as well – and I don’t know. Ultimately, it becomes hidden for us.

Jay Kelly is in cinemas now and on Netflix from 5 December.