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- To what extent is art autobiographical?
Noah?
- Phillip Roth has a great quote about,
that he always started by taking two stones of reality
and rubbing them together to spark the imagination.
And I find, I respond to that, because I often,
I like shooting in New York, I like to shoot on streets
that I have memories from childhood.
And again, it doesn't have to have any resonance
with the specifics of the movie,
but it puts me in a place of creativity, you know?
I feel like so much of what we do
is a kind of conversation with the child we were,
and it's that place of play.
I try to use all of these things, and I put,
then, familiar people in the movies.
Friends, my doorman, our doorman.
Yeah, because I mean, when your mom is.
- My mother, my father, my friends.
- Yeah, I know, and whether you know it or not,
you connect to something personal.
It goes to what we were talking about, how we like our sets.
I like to feel kind of at home,
and as relaxed and calm at home on a set,
and I feel like then I can, chaos can come from that.
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- What do you most like about the filmmaking process
and what do you most dislike?
- I like sets and I like being on set.
I feel very deeply that movies are made in prep.
By the time you're on set, it's too late, it's happening.
I feel quite vividly that every you spend doing one thing
is a second you don't spend doing something else.
Now that's true for your entire life,
but I feel it most vividly on a film set.
Whatever the negotiation of time and art is,
it's absurd to have a timed art form.
- Exactly.
- But it's also beautiful to have a timed art form.
- I think I know what you mean by that.
- You're always dealing against time
and negotiating with yourself.
- That's painful.
- It happens, you have to do this.
- It's the only art form that exists, yes?
Where you actually have to get it done on a schedule.
- Fighting has deadlines, people have deadlines.
- It's different, yeah.
- Your deadline is not when the sun goes down
because it's not the only day you do that.
- To have that location.
- 'Cause you have that location
with all the hundreds of people that you've got.
- [Todd] It's true.
- It's different.
And deadlines are good, too.
- Yes.
- You wanna create, where there aren't parameters
in filmmaking, I think all kind of we create our own rules
because you wanna have those things.
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- Noah, you and Greta are a couple.
How does she influence your work?
How do you influence hers?
- I mean it's beyond advice,
it's like the roots, she's in there from the very beginning.
It's not things that we've discussed even about
things we might wanna write together or other projects.
Sometimes we'll end up taking,
Greta has lines in all my movies, that are actually hers.
- Yeah.
- Maybe things she's said in life
but also things she wrote that I say, can I use that?
- 'Cause we're always writing.
- Yeah, we're always sort of thinking about things.
Like somebody had asked me, what was it like showing Greta
Marriage Story for the first time?
I was like, I don't even think of what the first time.
I mean there was a first time, but it was,
I felt like she knew kind of what she was gonna see
because we were so in it together all the time.
- It's all the time, and all the time,
we'll see something, I think he talked about with you,
when we saw Silence and there was the moment
of the way you shot the scene
where they're talking to the Monsignor.
- Oh yes.
(laughs)
- And he paused it and he was like,
it's actually, it's great, it's wrong but it's great.
- We got in trouble and I didn't know what to do.
Eye line, it was the eye line.
- Yes.
- I wanted the eye line to each person,
so Rodrigo looked at me, he said,
well that means we're gonna have to go,
because the two priests are here
and the bishop is there, the cardinal or whatever.
- So you jumped the line on it?
- Well you go from Monsignor to Monsignor.
- [Todd] Oh, I got it.
- It'd be like Lulu's left shoulder
and my right shoulder to Stephen,
it'd be like cutting between the two.
- And when we were cutting it together,
Thelma and I, she looked at me and says, is this crazy?
I said, I don't know.
Yeah, let's do it the other way.
We looked at it the other way, she says,
terrible, go back the other way.
(laughs)
And we got back to the mistake, which really,
a mistake, it was like we were forced into it.
- [Noah] And I lifted that mistake.
- [Greta] For Marriage Story.
- In Marriage Story I do this a few times,
'cause the movie is so much about perspective
and who are we with, and so when they're talking
in the very beginning of the movie to the mediator,
I do that exact thing and I did it again in the courtroom.
And I always, of course, it was actually yesterday,
I asked Marty, but I had a feeling,
it felt in the best way like kind of something,
a mistake that worked.
- It developed on set.
- Because you could have always cut through 'em.
- But on set, on set is where it happened,
when we looked at each other and said, okay, let's do this.
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