Director Noah Baumbach always has made original films, earning respect for efforts he’s written or co-written that include “Kicking and Screaming” (1995), “The Squid and the Whale” (2005) and “Frances Ha” (2015).
After the release of his excellent, Academy Award-nominated drama “Marriage Story” in 2019, however, he didn’t have a plan for a next film, an original story he was ready to tell. As a result, he chose a doozy of a book for his first adaptation: Don DeLillo’s award-winning “White Noise.”
Baumbach first read the book relatively soon after its publication in 1985, after being given it by his father, a novelist himself and a lover of cinema. Baumbach revisited the novel in 2019, the year his father died, and says he was highly affected by DeLillo’s tale, which explores themes including consumerism, religion, mass hysteria and, especially, fear of death.
