Episode 98: Noah Baumbach, “White Noise”

By: Alison Herman

Host Alison Herman talks to writer and director Noah Baumbach about the adaptation process, how his frequent collaborators influence and inform his work, and much more.

Noah Baumbach is the writer/co-writer and director of more than a dozen feature films, starting with KICKING AND SCREAMING in 1995. His 2005 film THE SQUID AND THE WHALE and his 2020 film MARRIAGE STORY were both nominated for the Academy and Writers Guild awards for Original Screenplay.

Most recently, he wrote and directed the absurdist dramedy WHITE NOISE. An adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo novel of the same name, the film follows college professor Jack Gladney, whose comfortable suburban life is upended when a nearby chemical leak causes “The Airborne Toxic Event,” releasing a noxious black cloud over the region that forces the Gladney family to evacuate.

WHITE NOISE was released in November 2022 and is available to stream on Netflix.

Alison Herman is a staff writer for The Ringer, where she writes about culture in general and television in specific. When not fighting a losing battle against Peak TV, she tweets at @aherman2006.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: Hello, you’re listen to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America, East. In each episode, you’ll hear from the writers of your favorite films and television series. They’ll take you behind the scenes, go deep into the writing and production process, and explain how they got their project from the page to the screen.

Alison Herman: I’m your host, Alison Herman. I’m a member of the Guild as well as the staff writer for The Ringer. And our guest today is the writer and director of a dozen feature films, beginning with kicking and screaming in 1995, and the co-writer of Several More. His latest project White Noise is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel and is now streaming on Netflix. Before we start, just a quick note that this episode will include spoilers about White Noise as we’ll be discussing the film in its entirety. Now that that’s out of the way, I am so thrilled to be joined today by Noah Baumbach. Noah, thanks for joining us.

Noah Baumbach: Thank you, Allison.

Alison Herman: So maybe a good place to start would just be your relationship to the novel. Would you mind talking a bit about when you first encountered White Noise and what stuck with you about it?

Noah Baumbach: Sure. I read it I think a few years after it came out. I was a teenager and my father had recommended it to me and I loved it when I read it then. And I think a lot of people, or at least anecdotally when I picked it up again at the end of 2019 and started reading it again, when I would ask people like, “Have you read White Noise or have you read it recently?” Almost everybody said yes about 20 years ago or whatever, because they’d all read it at the time. But I found rereading, it kind of revelatory because it was on a personal level. I was thinking of my father because it was a book that we shared and talked a lot about. And he passed away a couple years ago. And also realizing that while my father was the age of Jack Gladney, the main character of the book back when the book came out in the ’80s, now I was that age.

And so, I was having a kind of life kind of feeling about the whole thing. And I was also struck just by the book’s, I suppose. I don’t know that I want to call it even precedence because the book is so much about its moment. But there’s something uncanny about the book that it feels like it was written for any moment in modern American history, I think. And so, while I was rereading it, I kept reading passages aloud to Greta and then, she started to reread it as well. And then, just as I was finishing it is when the pandemic happened and we were in New York and it seemed to be speaking to me in entirely new ways as well.

Alison Herman: What were some of those themes that felt especially resonant from our contemporary vantage point when you were rereading it?

Noah Baumbach: Really, so many things. I mean the world of it, the White Noise of the title, which means many things I suppose. I mean, in the book and the movie and this sort of influence of TV and radio and how we tend to echo the things we overhear and repeat them. And things start to lose their meanings, but they start to lose their meanings in some cases. But they also start to create what feels like new truths. I mean there’s the line of Murray’s family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation, which I think is a wonderful line. And I was interested in this notion of family in some ways is a microcosm of the culture. In my past work, I’ve been very interested in family mythologies and the stories we tell ourselves collectively as a family, the stories our parents tell us. And then, our own individual truths and our own senses of finding our own identity in a group.

And what I found in DeLillo’s novel was those themes were all there, but it also was looking at things on a kind of cultural level in terms of how we take in information and we make it useful for our own arguments. And the truth gets sort of left out of that. And there’s kind of more benign ways you hear the kids in the movie talking and it’s funny and they have their own facts and we don’t know if they’re true or not. And then, of course, you tie that to Jack teaching Hitler studies and the rise of fascism and that takes on a whole other meaning. I mean, that’s just one aspect. Of course, the toxic cloud say COVID, certainly seemed… The toxic cloud, I don’t know. I was just going to say which comes first. The toxic cloud comes first in the novel, but COVID came in reality. But they both seemed to just the sort of parallels I suppose, were just sort of uncanny.

Alison Herman: Do you remember what your original impetus was for revisiting the book in 2019? Were you already thinking of adapting it or was it just completely personal?

Noah Baumbach: Not at all. And I didn’t think, it wasn’t something at all that I was thinking of adapting. It really was personal. So I think some people, my friends at A24, Daniel Katz and David Frankel were talking about it and they had the rights and so, just hearing about it got me thinking, oh, that might be interesting to revisit it. And as I was reading it, I wasn’t thinking even of adapting it either. Although, I did find myself really caught up in the language and thinking in terms of the language and being inspired by the language as initially I was thinking as maybe for my own original thing, that it would be a kind of inspiration. But it really was when COVID happened in some ways, even just for my own sanity, I sort of looked at it as an exercise. I’m going to see, could this make a movie? Do I think I could make a movie out of this?

Alison Herman: So once you made the decision to try to make it a movie, what was the process of lining it up to become an actual movie?

Noah Baumbach: I started writing it without having the rights, I just did it. I started in the middle of the script because the second part with the airborne toxic event is more linear and more. The translation was a little more direct in terms of writing it as a movie. And then, I went back and looked at parts one and three and I started from the beginning and then, of course, once I got to the airborne toxic event, again, in the script I rewrote it. But, parts One and three took the most sort of wrestling, I suppose, to find the movie equivalence of what he was doing in such a brilliant literary way. But because the book is so much about American culture and American entertainment, I saw an opportunity to find sort of cinematic analogs for these literary elements and to have fun with the sort of movies of a lot of the different genre elements that were inherent already in the story.

Alison Herman: Perhaps the non-linearity of the process is kind of its own answer here. But I know you’ve collaborated on some adaptations in the past, but this is your first standalone film, I believe that is an adaptation. And I was curious how that process was different than when you’re working on one of your own original scripts, if at all.

Noah Baumbach: Yeah. Well, of course, it’s different because on the face of it, it almost felt easier, but that’s deceptive. But because at least you have something that’s already written that you can work off of. You already have a story, you already have characters, you already have first and last names is even a big deal. I feel like when I’m writing an original, it’s like, what am I going to call this person? Whereas, with an original script, I really do feel like I begin as an amateur every time. I mean, I’m starting all over again and it’s all up to me and or me and a co-writer if I’m working with someone. But then, of course, the deceptiveness is then once you start to bring this novel into a screenplay form, it does, it changes immediately.

And also, with DeLillo’s book, you have kind of an elevated reality. There’s like a reality. I see it sort of existing a few feet off the ground the way it’s real and unreal. I think it’s also why it spoke to the feelings I had during COVID because it’s that feeling that we all have. You can have it on an ordinary day, but I certainly feel like it’s something that I’ve experienced a lot after more traumatic things have happened. Either collectively traumatic like 9/11 or COVID or the death of my father, the divorce, I mean things that really turn your world upside down. And I feel like DeLillo captures that kind of feeling on an everyday level, that strangeness and unreality that feels like a form of reality, if that makes sense.

And so, I wanted to find the sort of movie version of that and maintain that tone, but find the sort of movie version of that tone, which I think requires a different way of watching it in a way. You can’t come in on a clearly emotional level. You might Marriage Story where you’re following characters and have an emotional investment in them. It’s a different thing. That’s an extrapolation of what you asked, I guess, but it was why this book felt different to me, I suppose, than something that was my own original idea.

Alison Herman: Definitely. I mean, maybe it might be helpful to talk about a specific scene that I feel like does kind of encapsulate that cinematic transposition of what’s originally a very literary exchange, which may be from the first act, which you said was more difficult to crack. The competing Hitler Elvis lectures, which is just a wonderful scene in terms of acting and editing and it really coheres into something that’s quite entertaining and engaging to watch. And I just wanted to ask you how you conceived of that and how you ended up translating it to the screen?

Noah Baumbach: Yeah. Well, of course, that is in the novel, that idea. And it’s also something that happens when you adapt something. And particularly something that is not kind of obviously realistic, is that once you cast it with actors and put them in real locations, it grounds the material in a way which creates it is immediately different than what’s in the novel. When you read in the book, Jack is a professor of Hitler studies, it’s the sort of satire of it, the humor. It’s just different than when you actually see Adam Driver playing a character who’s teaching Hitler studies. And so, that was something I always wanted to be. It was very aware of and wanted to be in control of. So in the Hitler Elvis lecture, I saw again, sort of an opportunity to do some things that the book didn’t do because it’s a visual medium that we were working with, that we could intercut the train crash with the truck, which we only hear about in the novel. You don’t see it.

This was also inspired by, of course, because I start the movie differently than the book, which is this lecture on car crashes that Murray gives car crashes in cinema and how it’s kind of a cause for celebration rather than it’s a celebration of American ingenuity. And so, that also inspired me to show a crash in the movie because I felt like I had already introduced this concept and we needed to carry it forward. And so, in developing it in the script, I came up with this idea of inter-cutting the crash. And I described it in the script again, not knowing exactly how this train crash would look. But I described it in the way that I intended to shoot it, that these images would speak to each other and be kind of connected visually, almost like part of the same movement, part of the same dance.

And so, when we shot it, I worked with David Neumann, the choreographer who also choreographed the dance at the end of the movie, both with the actors so that they would have this kind of dance within their lecture. I mean, there’s the movement of it and then also the overlap of their dialogue creates this other kind of music where Hitler and Elvis kind of almost intertwined where it’s almost like a call in response. But you almost can’t tell who’s talking about who at this point, they’ve almost become one person. I mean, which I find also is very going to your earlier question, just to digress for a second of another interesting element of the book is this sort of notion of academia and the commodification of academia.

And also, this sort of iconography is something the internet does, ways that the book couldn’t even predict really is flattening out all of this sort of iconography. And so, everything becomes of the same value. So you have Hitler and Elvis. But as part of this lecture and talking about their relationships with their mothers become the same thing when, of course, we know that there’s a world apart between them. So anyway, so that was all in the script. But then, what we did is then organized the truck and the train crash to visually connect with the moves that Jack was doing and Adam was performing for the classroom.

Alison Herman: The train crash in the airborne toxic event that ensues from it is a great example of how White Noise is at a larger almost blockbuster scale than some of your prior work, which tends to be very grounded and realist. And I was wondering if for you as a writer, it was exciting or challenging to script those bigger almost actiony scenes?

Noah Baumbach: Yeah, I mean, although it was something that almost occurred to me in retrospect because at the time, I really was just trying to tell the story. And either adapting stuff that was in the book or working off of that, like the car and the creek is kind of suggested in the book, but it doesn’t go to the ends that we take it. But it gave me ideas to, again, think of it as a movie, what would be fun to see this car actually drift down the river. But when I was done with it, I kind of realized I’d written a movie in much bigger scope than I had done in the past. But in the minutiae of it, in the working of it, I really was just trying to adhere to the story and tell the story as best I could and into the idea of the sort of stylization.

I think my movies before White Noise I think are, they feel realistic, but they’re also quite stylized. I mean, when I write them, the dialogue and everything is quite stylized, it’s quite musical. But the idea of it is so that when it’s interpreted correctly by the actors, it actually then simulates something that feels quite real and intimate and grounded. Whereas, Delillo’s writing is stylized in a way that I kind of wanted to acknowledge and let the language help create this sort of other reality that the movie takes place in.

Alison Herman: Yeah, I mean, in dialogue and also in plot in other aspects is quite a faithful adaptation. Was that something that you knew you wanted to assume as an approach from the beginning? Or did you find that in the process?

Noah Baumbach: Well, I was inspired by things in the book that I thought would translate well to movies. I mean, think in terms of a lot of his dialogue I find very funny and I find it very playable too. I mean, it takes rehearsal and it takes a kind of understanding of the languaging and the familiarity with it. But with having Adam and Greta and Don and the kids and Lars, who plays Mr. Gray, Willie Mink at the end. And I mean, they all play it so wonderfully and they both play it very kind of realistically, but also, acknowledge this sort of performative quality of it.

So I diverted from the book where I felt the movie led me. I mean, bringing Babette more to the third part of the movie and having her at the motel and at the end of the movie, I came organically in the script even though it’s different than what the book does. And there’s a lot of moving stuff around because the book is more episodic and it’s telling. So a lot of things that dialogue that gets moved or somebody else says something that was said by somebody. I mean, there’s a lot of, like I said, a kind of wrestling of the book to get it down to the ground.

Alison Herman: Yeah. I mean, that definitely touches on the fact that adaptation is obviously not only translation, but it sometimes involves a certain measure of excision. And I know it’s been commented on that the most photographed barn in America is not a part of the movie. But just in general, not necessarily that specific example, how did you go about deciding what you wanted to keep in, and what had to be left out as part of this adaptation?

Noah Baumbach: Well, once, there becomes a kind of, this is true, even I think of an original script, I mean, I don’t know if you feel this way. But when I’m writing an original script, I’m working off of notes and scene lists and things that I’ve collected and put into a document. And then, as I start writing, I’m often trying to work in things either that I already have or I’m ideas I have for what I think I’m doing. And then, there becomes a point where it really transforms and it starts to take on its own life and starts to tell you what it is. And not that it’s always that clear in telling you. But it’s like the characters start to have more kind of emotional logic to them and you start to say, well, this person wouldn’t do that, so I can’t do this scene now because this wouldn’t happen.

And I felt that in adaptation too, that in the beginning, it was kind of like to more look at the trying to get the novel into a way that I felt would work as a movie narratively. And then, at a certain, point it starts to become its own thing and its own movie. So then, things get cut and things get moved around and I start writing my own version of things. Because I feel like the movie needs that and I’m not thinking about the book anymore or certainly not in terms of any kind of loyalty to the book. And I feel like that that’s when things start to work better is when you feel that kind of freedom.

Alison Herman: Sure. I mean, the body of DeLillo adaptations, cosmopolis accepted is obviously not very large and I think there’s a reputation that follows his work as being somewhat unfilmable or at least hard to adapt. I’m wondering if that was daunting or exciting or just challenging for you as you started to wrap your head around taking on this project?

Noah Baumbach: I didn’t think about it. I mean, I was drawn to adapt this book and that’s what I went ahead and did. The notion of unfilmable only was something I really came across once I started doing press for it. So to me, it felt like it could make a compelling movie.

Alison Herman: Sure. Both Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are actors you’ve collaborated with before and in Greta’s case, not just as an actress. But I was wondering how you factor in actors or acting while you’re writing. Do you ever consult with actors while you’re writing a role that’s potentially for them? Do you envision them in the role while you’re writing? How does that element of the collaboration work for you?

Noah Baumbach: Yeah, I mean, that’s a good question. I factored in a lot. I mean, over the last, I don’t know, maybe since Greenberg or something. I’ve always looked to people that I wanted to work with or I’ve already worked with, I want to work with again. And tended to reach out to them in the early stages to let them know that this is something I’m thinking about. And so, that I start a kind of dialogue with them as well while I’m writing. So I think it also helped in this case with the adaptation because I could think of it as Adam and Greta playing these parts that already helped take it out of the novel for me and change it from the Jack and Babette that are in the novel. I like it very much.

I find Adam and Greta read the book, we talked a lot about it. So as I’m writing, sometimes I’ll reach out to the actors and ask them questions or things that, I mean, in Marriage Story, I did this a lot also because of the themes, the divorce, that’s the center of it. Actors, Scarlet, Laura, who I was working with had also gone through divorces. So we were kind of sharing our experiences and some of those things, found their ways into the movie. Meyerowitz with Adam and Ben and Dustin’s, similarly.

Alison Herman: In the case of Adam Driver, I mean, it’s almost hard to say he has a type since he’s obviously a tremendously versatile and gifted performer, but to the extent that he does academic almost feels like playing against type a little bit. So I’m curious, what made you think of him specifically for the role of Jack Gladney?

Noah Baumbach: Well, I mean, really, the answer is because I like working with him so much, I think he can do anything. But when we first talked about it, we both wanted to tread sort of lightly and slowly in terms of committing him because I think we both felt like, well, the character’s older than Adam. As you say, it’s not written in a way that you would necessarily think of Adam. But I was interested in how, going back to this sort of notion of performance where Adam putting on weight and maybe raising his hairline a little bit and playing more of a part in it could be interesting.

And similarly for Greta, with things like and Don, things like wigs, which I usually would immediately rule out in the case of this movie felt right. It felt like makeup and hair and all these things that it did add this sort of element of disguise to everyone, which I thought was right for the movie. Whereas, in a movie like Marriage Story, for Adam was about playing it as close to the bone as possible. But that said, once they’re in their parts and in their wardrobe and wigs and everything. Also, they play these things quite honestly and truthfully and I think the movie has a lot of real emotional stuff in it. And so, and that case wasn’t particularly different from other things I’ve done.

Alison Herman: Sure. This may be slightly off topic for the purposes of this podcast, but I suppose songwriting is a form of writing. The movie concludes obviously with a new track from LCD Soundsystem. Their first in several years, and I wanted to know both how that came about, but if you had any conversations with James Murphy or anyone else in the band about what the song would actually feel and sound like?

Noah Baumbach: Yeah, absolutely. Well, James and I have been friends since I reached out to him on Greenberg. I was listening to Sound of Silver while I was writing, so I reached out to him and then he wrote music for that movie and then, we sort of stayed friends and become quite close. So he and I were talking while I was shooting and I wanted him to sort of, I didn’t expect him necessarily to write a whole new song by the time we shot it, but I wanted him to work on a tempo and think about a style. And the two big things we talked about were sort of like, well, if your band was making music in 1985, which in some ways it already feels like they are, but to think of those sounds? And also to write a kind of joyful song about death.

And James is always great with the kind of happy, sad thing. And so, that’s why I thought of him particularly for that. And then, when we worked, James and I, David Neumann was with me in Ohio. James was in New York, but we all spoke on the phone and talked about it and he looked at some of the rehearsal footage that David was doing of the supermarket dance. And so, we shot it to a temp beat and then, James wrote the song in post. But it was quite collaborative in that way. But at the same time, I was thrilled and when I heard actually what he was doing, because there’s no way to predict.

Alison Herman: Of course. We tend to ask on this podcast some more generalist questions of screenwriters and how their process works. So just in general, what are your writing habits? When do you tend to write, where do you tend to write, how fast, how slow, etc?

Noah Baumbach: Well, I guess, I find when I’m sort of writing all the time in a way in that I’m always taking notes and always writing as I’m sure you experienced as you can sit in front of the computer and feel like you get nothing done. And then, you walk to your next appointment and suddenly you have a rush of ideas. And so, the question is, when did the writing get done? Was it when you were at the computer or was it when you were speaking into your phone while you were trying to make the light? And I don’t know is the answer. But I find when I have a thing I’m thinking about or something that would qualify, if somebody said, “What are you doing?” And I’m saying, “I’m writing a new script.” I start to see at least an aspect of the world in the context of that story and those characters so that everything seems possible material for the thing I’m writing.

And so, I collect stuff and then I sit down and write. And sometimes it goes fast, and sometimes it goes slow. I mean, when I write dialogue, it often moves faster, but it doesn’t mean it’s all going to remain. It’s often a way to write myself into something. In terms of screenwriting, I guess, things I’ve been asked before. I mean, I don’t outline or do cards or anything like that. It’s more casual maybe than that. But I take a lot of notes and then, I kind of dump them into the script and start to write.

Alison Herman: Yeah, I mean, you now have a career that spans over 25 years of feature filmmaking. So has your process changed or adjusted at all over time?

Noah Baumbach: Yeah, I’m sure it has. But it doesn’t often get easier. I mean, they’re all different. They really are. And they all seem like magic when they’re done. You look back at the last one and you’re like, “How did I get there?” And the odd occasion I look at an old draft or notes of something or I’ll find notes that I wrote about a movie that’s two movies ago or something. And I think, “Oh, wow, that’s right. I had that whole idea of that whole thing.” And none of that is in the movie. I really try to remain as open to the mystery of each one. I mean, that sounds more wise than I actually am. Because really, when I sit down, I feel like this’ll never happen. I’ll never figure this out. But to try to embrace that and be open with it. I mean, some scripts I come into and I have more, I think figure it out in advance. And other ones I’m kind of groping around in the dark and it takes longer.

Alison Herman: As someone who does largely direct your own scripts, do you feel like directing and writing are separate rules for you? Or do they feel like they bleed into each other? And if so, how do they interact in your head?

Noah Baumbach: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the more I do this, I do see them as all part of the same thing. What I do find is important in the writing stage is to try to maintain that freedom as a writer and not look at it quite yet as a director. Particularly the early stages of a script, is to be as open as possible to who these people are and what the story is and sort of to your thing about White Noise. In terms of the bigger set pieces, I wasn’t really thinking of it. I was thinking of it visually. I was thinking of it as set pieces. I was thinking of it as a movie, but I wasn’t thinking of it from the practical nature of it as a director of how am I going to do this? Which, of course, the director part of me felt very frustrated with later.

So I do like to try to maintain that openness and be a writer when I’m writing. But I do very much see it as part of is as a kind of link to how I’m going to interpret it later. And that I’m writing very much for myself to interpret it. And in subsequently editing, I look at it the same way. I really try to look at it, and I like to also involve the creative. I mean, to what you were asking before about it, bringing in actors. I also like to bring in cinematographer, production designer, costume designer people, anyone who I know I’m working with on this particular movie, an editor particularly, to bring them in the script stage and see what we can accomplish in the script before we get to the movie part where we suddenly have a clock on it and we’re spending more money.

Alison Herman: In addition to your solo writing and directing efforts, you’ve also done a few collaborations with the likes of Wes Anderson and Greta Gerwig. How has that process worked for you and what do you get out of it or how do you approach it that’s different from your more standalone work?

Noah Baumbach: I mean, I love collaborating. It’s sort of different material to me. Different ideas seem to ask for different circumstances. It’s something, I guess, it’s more in intuitive, but there are some things where I felt like, “Oh, I’d like to write this with somebody rather than write it myself.” And then, there are other things that feel more just, I don’t know, more, at least initially private in that way. And that I feel like I’m the one to do this alone. I don’t know why, but writing with Greta has been… I mean, we have a few official collaborations, but she’s sort of a part of everything that I’ve even written on my own. I’m always showing her stuff and getting her feedback and stealing lines from her if I can.

And subsequently, I work the same way with her on things that she’s done. But I always learn something. You learn something working with other people, it’s like it becomes this third thing when you’re working with someone else at its best, I think. It’s like I say something, she says something that makes it better, or she says something, I say something and then suddenly we have this other thing. And that’s sort of a pleasure in collaboration.

Alison Herman: Yeah, we’re approaching, I believe, the end of our allotted time together. But as a final question, I did want to ask about one specific upcoming collaboration between you and Greta, which is, you obviously work together on the script for the Barbie movie, which is to the outside eye, obviously, well outside I think both of your phonographies, but I’m just very curious. No spoilers, of course, but just how you approached that and what that was like for you.

Noah Baumbach: Yeah, well, we wrote Barbie sort of right after, I mean, I was still sort of rewriting White Noise. But after I had a draft of White Noise, we started writing Barbie. And this was all in the sort of, I suppose, what we would think of as the thick of the pandemic in terms of lockdown. And I think both of them benefited from a certain kind of insanity. And so, Barbie was a very freeing experience and really fun. And we made each other laugh a lot. And I think when you see it, I think it will feel more inside both of our phonographies than you might guess anyway. But that was very much that. So what I was describing that feeling of…

But what was different about it was that Greta was going to, I mean, actually Greta wasn’t sure she was going to direct it at first, and then we were liking so much what we were doing and that I felt jealous because I was like, “This is going to be great.” But we were thinking of it much more as sort of not as something. I wasn’t thinking of it as something as I was going to interpret, which in itself creates a kind of freedom too. And in a way a good exercise probably for me. Something else is to think, well, what if I’m not doing this? What would I do? And it gets you outside your own head. But I was really proud of what we accomplished.

Alison Herman: Did you find yourself transposing your DeLillo voice onto the Barbie material? I feel like that’s a hard 180.

Noah Baumbach: Well, it was a good way to write myself out of my DeLillo voice, but they’re more companion pieces. I mean, Greta and I probably will see this more than anybody else will, but they’re not thematically totally different and they also are, but for us, actually, they felt like companion.

Alison Herman: Well, I’m excited to see the movie and I’m excited for everyone listening to this to see White Noise. But Noah, thank you so much for joining us today.

Noah Baumbach: Yo, thank you. I enjoyed it.

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