I thought we should talk I don't know how to start I'm Noah Baumbach and this is a key location from my movie marriage story it actually gives me anxiety to be in this space a little bit the scenes that were shot here all were quite emotional so we spent a lot of time here we were sort of like living in this complex we had rooms upstairs we'd sort of come down it was like a boxing ring or something how about that great picture of Henry on the Staten Island Ferry aren't you in that one I
guess it took a long time to find this apartment because I had definite ideas of what it should be one thing that was very important to me was having this line here in the middle of the space that way when he's here talking and she's you know standing over here you have two people who can't see each other talking to each other but we can see both of them and it just seemed like so much of the movie at this point is this together and separate thing that's going on between them and this could illustrate
that you change it so I could take him it's just one night he's looking for a movie making is a combination of both sort of practical decisions and storytelling decisions like you know what would be the kind of furniture you would just find in a place like this it was it was a pre furnished apartment in our minds we solve these kinds of couches and things that many of the references and places we visited because there's so much negative space in this apartment and there always was going to be because there's nothing really on the
walls when somebody sits you really do feel the room above them that there's a kind of smallness in this space even though it's not that biggest space but we also liked the sort of hard edges of you know this kind of table just that thing of discomfort in a way even just in things that are supposed to be comfortable we also like to sort of sharp angles because the way of the apartment is sharp angles versus say the proscenium of their Brooklyn apartment which feels inviting hey where's Henry he's with Cassie her kids at laser
tag this scene when Nicole comes to talk to Charlie and maybe try to find some kind of common ground I felt like the story of this sequence which is about 11 pages in the script it was the story of them trying to find voice in a sense I'll take it to sponge the juice box initially came from the fact that I thought well okay well Charlie's living here alone he doesn't have much but what came from that is of course is that then she has the juice box and she ends up making her way over
to this chair here and and laying it down on the floor this all leads to the final shot of the scene which is this wide shot as he falls to the ground and I felt like the juice boxes Henry's presence in their lives and in our lives as an audience you know that he's not in the scene he's not here but but he is there and he's really powerless in this situation I'm sorry there's a lot of movement in this room there long scenes but they have real story beats as we go through them so
I wanted movement to convey that in also different locations in a sense within the same location to convey that and something that I thought a lot about was that the blocking in a sense should parallel their relationship up until this point in the movie and what came out of that was the sort of notion that Charlie is the one moving away and kind of in a sense deflecting he walks in here and does a dish you know she's the one sort of coming and trying to get him to sort of come out I mean it's
almost like coaxing a scared animal out and then she finally says something that gets him angry enough to come out but then he still doesn't want to confront the situation because he knows the cost you know how painful it's going to be things about all of these people the process is cinematographer Robbie Ryan and I by the time we're rehearsing in here we've now shot listed the movie probably twice but then the actors are gonna feel their way through this idea and sometimes there's choreography that I have that build to say yeah and then other
times actually I don't think I should stand yet or I'd like to stand earlier or I don't know that I would come out on that line and then we all kind of get into it together about being married to you and that woman is a stranger to me when we do the close-ups after we've been somewhat wider for most of the scene and we go in we have some three versions of the clothes but it's like here then it's gonna here and then it really is you know in here and there's a sequence and last
picture show that Jeff Bridges and Timothy bottoms are circling a car and they start to have this argument and he gets in closer but he starts cutting back and forth within the same line so it gets really kinetic and if felt the seam wanted that for this sequence in particular because they'd almost becomes them just hurling insults at each other and it's like the train can't stop and we're just going in but again had to be very particularly staged and architected because we knew what words we were gonna cut on and so I would have
them do particularly Escher's on each line so it wasn't just the word it was also the movement so he would move his head you know back to being a hack and he would lean in and so it's almost like that they're like being thirld at each other editorially this wolfed was something we spent a lot of time figuring out and this really came out of all the rehearsals in the blocking which was exactly how high is the hole when he's gonna hit it we shot it repeatedly so he always had to hit the same spot
we had a fake wall put over this wall so that was more breakaway but Adam had ice on his hand and he still really had to hit it after hitting it so many times the people next door they weren't in there when we were shooting for obvious reasons but I guess he he went right through the wall [Music] when I was doing research for the movie and talking to couples it was a common theme with people talking that it brought up feelings of failure I think it's great to put sunlight on this thing that often
does feel like failure because it's not failure and partly what I wanted to say with the movie is that that endings don't have to be failings and that we can still celebrate the thing for what it was even if it's over [Music] you you
