It was somewhere on a deserted highway in Ohio at about 4 A.M., with a rain machine, while I was shooting “White Noise.” I think I felt, Oh God, I don’t know that I like doing this. That movie was just very difficult for me for several reasons. We shot during COVID, which was a big part of it. It was such a fraught time. I’m proud of the movie, but the making of it was so hard. Then, when I was writing “Jay Kelly,” I went [to London] and worked on “Barbie” with Greta, and the filming of it—that was a really great shoot. Watching her—as she has many times for me—she led by example. I had a really good time on that, so I felt like, well, maybe I do still like it. It’s a thing, I guess, where you have to check back in with yourself. Because it’s something that I dreamt of doing, it’s something I always wanted to do, and I’ve been doing it for a long time now. So I was sort of, like, Well, am I doing this only because I do it? You know, maybe I want to hit Restart. So part of the energy of “Jay Kelly” is my affection for the medium—the movies themselves, but also the making of them.
I remember reading about the pajama parties on the set of “Barbie.” It must have been a very different vibe.
I didn’t go to those, but yeah.
They were girls-only, I guess. But it must have been very different. I’m thinking of you filming that scene with the car in the river in “White Noise.”
It was hard. Yeah, it was really difficult. And it’s not my favorite kind of thing to be doing in movies.
It’s almost an action movie, actually.
It is. I was doing it because it was what the material required. Sometimes I write something, and then when I’m directing it I kind of realize, Oh, now I have to actually interpret what I wrote. With that film in particular, I realized sort of too late how ambitious it all was—too late for my own pleasure.
I mean, it’s hard to write something and say, I’m going to fall in love with movies again. I mean, it could have not paid off.
The opening line of “Jay Kelly” is, “We’re coming to the end.” I kept thinking, if I’d seen that in a script, I would think of a Beckett play. It has a kind of a valedictory feel. So even though the whole movie is a love letter to the movies, there’s also a sense of you as a mature artist, reckoning with your work in the same way that Jay Kelly is.
Things ending is another aspect of the movie. And that was implicit in the feelings I was having about Do I love this? Also, now that I’m older, I have a family—I have other things that I could be spending more time doing. And: Do I love this enough? So that feeling of facing the end in life, as well. I mean, in “Jay Kelly,” they’re facing the end of the movie, but also, Jay Kelly’s facing his mortality.
I was talking to Ian Parker, one of our writers who wrote a great Profile of you twelve years ago, and he reminded me of something that Greta had said, which is how the first lines of your movies basically tell you everything that’s about to happen in them. At the start of “The Meyerowitz Stories,” Adam Sandler is trying to parallel-park and he says, “Am I fitting?” I need to add here that you are the poet laureate of parallel parking.
And I didn’t get my driving license until I was forty.
And in the beginning of “Greenberg,” Greta is trying to merge into traffic on the freeway, and she says, “Are you going to let me in?” “The Squid and the Whale” opens with one of the sons saying, on the tennis court, “Mom and me versus you and Dad.” It feels like it’s a conscious decision to give the viewer a CliffsNotes to the movie before it even begins.
