With Jay Kelly, director Noah Baumbach holds a mirror up to the movie star

I am early for my interview with Noah Baumbach and find myself with time to kill.  This gives me the perfect excuse to drop into Julia Jeuvall’s iconic stationary emporium Choosing Keeping. Whilst browsing the edible faux keyrings, I search amongst the clementines, oysters and cherries for cheesecake, a running joke in Baumbach’s latest film Jay Kelly. Although my gifting mission fails and I land instead on a Japanese Life notebook for Noah, I march across London to meet him with a spring in my step. 

20-minutes, as it turns out, is not enough time with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Noah Baumbach, who I could talk to for hours. Born in Brooklyn, Baumbach, 56 inhabits the natural warmth, charm and energy of a true New Yorker. 

We are here today to discuss Jay Kelly, which he co-wrote with British actor Emily Mortimer. Starring silver fox George Clooney as a Hollywood movie star (much like Clooney himself) this transatlantic pair have written an introspective, soulful film about family and memory, told from the perspective of a film star coming to terms with the life he has lived along with his relationships with those around him. These include his long-term manager Ron played by Adam Sandler, his publicist Liz played by Laura Dern along with his daughters Jessica and Daisy portrayed by Riley Keough and Grace Edwards.

When Daisy breaks the news that she is going to Europe for the summer, facing the reality that his youngest daughter is flying the nest, Kelly shocks his team by pulling out of a big movie and deciding to follow her with his entourage in tow. He uses the excuse of collecting an award at a film festival in Tuscany in order to justify his mission to follow his daughter. There are glimmers of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty in this charming portrayal of a movie star’s recollections of lost youth.

Baumbach is elegantly dressed in dark, muted colours and standing in a room flooded with crisp winter light. In the beginning, he “had the idea of an actor going through a crisis and on a journey. I felt this would benefit being established through a conversation, taking it out of my head as it’s already an introspective idea,” says Baumbach of working with Mortimer, which began like many great creative partnerships as a “good feeling”. Baumbach recalls that Mortimer would always fight hard for things to exist in the script if they weren’t there already, saying “why are we making the movie if this isn’t in there?”. 

For Jay Kelly, the pair loved the rhythm of classic screwball comedies. Baumbach explains that he has always written scenes that have aspects of that, like the fight scene in Marriage Story which is “designed like a screwball comedy where people go in and out of rooms.” I mention that I love the musical quality to Jay Kelly, like the opening, where George Clooney’s character Jay is playing a character on a movie set that looks like a New York street in a classic MGM musical. The cobbled stones are lit with a blue hue, while Kelly sits against a building that flanks a gorgeous city skyline like in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Noah tells me that “the film opens on a set, so there’s this movie quality to it that was always there from the beginning” reiterating how Jay Kelly is a true love-letter to cinema through its subject matter, cinematic style and tone. 

With George Clooney, Baumbach “talked about Jay Kelly for a long time before they were actually together.” They had two weeks of official rehearsal where Noah brought many of the other actors in, such as Billy Crudup, Stacy Keach, Patrick Wilson and Sandler. In those rehearsal rooms they explored the “histories of those relationships” that exist in Jay Kelly. They also had Charlie Rowe and Louis Partridge come in who play the younger versions of Jay and Tim, Billy Crudup’s character,“we had the younger actors come in and I had George and Billy play their scene in front of them. There is a lot of shadowing in the film, like Adam and George are sort of versions of each other so it was useful to explore this physically in the rehearsal room”. 

Baumbach describes not wanting to “go too far” in rehearsals, recalling “when I was younger, I had a couple of times where I felt like actors did what I wanted and I would be chasing that” and therefore being careful to “leave a little”. 

As a director, Baumbach has long been a favourite of mine, for films such as Frances Ha (2012) and Marriage Story (2019), along with The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), The Squid and the Whale (2005), and Kicking and Screaming (1995). In 2024, Baumbach also co-wrote Barbie with his wife, the filmmaker Greta Gerwig, a bubble-gum-pink box-office smash-hit starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Back in 2022, Baumbach directed comedy-drama White Noise, which was adapted from the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. 

I have felt particularly connected to Noah Baumbach’s films about divorce as my parents split up when I was nineteen. I ask why he chose not to delve into Jay’s romantic life. “There wasn’t an intellectual reason for it except that the real love story is about him and his manager Ron and so other aspects of his life are implied, ” he responds. Baumbach explains how him and Mortimer wrote Jay’s memories as they came to them, rather than strategically plotting which aspects of his life would be explored. Baumbach explains that these often initially appeared “insignificant” and were triggered “unexpectedly”. “It would make us go, why did I just think about this? But there’s often a significance hidden in the random resurgence of memories”. 

There’s a great scene in the film where Jay Kelly is looking at himself in the mirror on the train and repeats the names of great actors Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Robert De Niro and even his own name. Noah tells me that he loved a scene in Paul Newman’s memoir The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man the section where “the actor talks about becoming famous and losing his name. It makes you understand why people invent stage names for themselves. I remember Dustin Hoffman saying that to me too. Even he felt weird saying Dustin Hoffman like that because it no longer was him anymore.” In this picture, Baumbach explains why Jay does this in the mirror: “Is he dissembling? Is it a breakdown? Is he building himself up? His identity is disappearing but at the same time he is harnessing it – like he is trying to put his power back together”. 

Jay Kelly celebrates transatlantic cinema  with incredible work from production designer Mark Tildesley, casting directors Nina Gold and Douglas Aibel, composer Nicholas Britell, along with costume designer Jacqueline Durran, whose work as ever is sublime.  Baumbach tells me that “the whole movie is about who we represent and who we are” and so collaborating with Durran on this film was no doubt crucial to the film’s DNA. Noah and Durran wanted Jay to play on the iconography of the movie-star, working so that his “wardrobe would have some connection to the kind of movie history without it being something you recognise”. They looked at the wardrobes of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Marcello Mastroianni and Cary Grant, along with even Clooney himself. 

Like his previous films, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly reflects on family and friendship, exploring the complexities of these relationships while simultaneously flooding his narratives with joy, art, laughter and light. There’s something charming in the film’s imperfections, reflecting how all of us are muddling through life and Jay Kelly is in some ways a memento mori, a reminder that were it all to end, what would we regret? 

Jay Kelly is available for streaming on Netflix from 5th December.