Noah Baumbach

“That's the nice thing about collaborating with someone: Your work becomes a conversation.”

“I'm curious how people build up the codes that they live their life by, and how they come to think that that's the best way for them to function.”

“There's something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don't know what their reaction will be.”

“I really like my first movie a lot, 'Kicking and Screaming.' I think it's a - I'm very pleased and proud of that movie, but it wasn't the - it wasn't 'Citizen Kane' right out of the box, you know? It wasn't 'Sex, Lies and Videotape.'”

“I didn't train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.”

“Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.”

“I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we're shooting, and that's always a challenge because, unfortunately, people on the street don't know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.”

“I'm sure I've said some pretty bad pick-up lines.”

“I think I was going through a lot of change at 27, but I didn't know it was happening until it was over.”

“I'm interested in music as an extension of character.”

“I always viewed life as material for a movie.”

“'Frances Ha' is the closest final product to what I had in my head of any movie I've made. I'm not entirely even sure why that is.”

“I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.”

“I think sometimes bad behaviour can be liberating for certain people. They need to behave badly to find themselves - to go off path to find their path. You see it with kids all the time: They're testing boundaries, and I think that's healthy.”

“I get a lot of responses to my movies. Some people say, 'Oh, I thought it was really funny - I hope that's okay!' And my answer always is 'Yes. It's totally okay.'”

“It's kind of major, learning to drive. I feel like it kicked up other stuff in my life.”

“I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so - which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.”

“When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.”

“I love black-and-white movies that are about contemporary subjects.”

“The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.”