Though the title might make you think of a romance, the dramatic and comic Marriage Story offers a complex look at the collapse of a relationship and the impact it has on the lives involved. The latest film from producer-writer-director Noah Baumbach offers a showcase for actors Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as an actress and theater director pushed to their limits. The Academy welcomed Baumbach, producer David Heyman and actors Julie Hagerty and Alan Alda to share how this intimate and emotional project was brought to life.
“I always thought of it as a love story,” Baumbach says. “There’s this sort of … notion that when something stops working, you take notice of it in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise. So a door doesn’t open, you look at the door. Otherwise you just open it, you don’t think about the door. We all deal with that with cars; you open up the hood, suddenly you’re like, ‘Well how does this thing work?’ … And I thought, well, in a sense, a divorce could reflect on a marriage the same way.”
Alda adds, “What impressed me the most was the beautiful writing of the whole script, which always interests me more than the character I’m gonna play. I don’t wanna be in a movie I wouldn’t wanna go see. I don’t know if everybody feels that way, but the thing that impressed me is that Noah managed to make a movie about a divorce that really is a love story, and the interesting thing is, in a marriage, you have to learn to collaborate. You have to learn to cooperate, but when that falls apart and you get a divorce, you actually have to cooperate better during the divorce than you did during the marriage, which is ironic, and Noah shows that. He shows how difficult it is, and how underneath it all, they do love each other.”
Heyman had his own view of how the film sprang from Baumbach’s mind and reflected the creative process that has resulted in several acclaimed dramas. “He has the film very much in his head,” Heyman notes, “and yet he is open to the process of collaboration, and he loves conversation and discussion. When we were talking about the script, we would talk for days about it. And Noah loves to sort of stress test his ideas and explore and go on the journey. And yet he has always such clarity, and he’s a brilliant, expressive communicator … He creates a very intimate space in which everybody feels safe to do the work, you can see that these actors and Adam and Scarlett … they’re very brave, and Noah and they dare to fail — which I think is a remarkable thing to be a part of, pushing the envelope and that sort of high-wire act.”
Creating the striking pair of “What I Love” montages at the beginning of the film was a strategic endeavor in itself, requiring shoots in Los Angeles first and then New York. “We shot it differently than we shot the rest of the movie,” Baumbach says. “It’s all handheld in the beginning, and there’s a certain intimacy to it.… We had already shot most of, or at least a big chunk of the movie beforehand, so we were changing styles in the middle of the shoot. I felt like it should have this immediacy and casualness, too, because it’s epic, because it’s just saying what you love about a person. I mean that’s everything, but it’s also just the stuff that passes by unnoticed.”
As for the lead performers, Hagerty explains, “The main thing that sticks out is their generosity. And true kindness, and fun, I mean trying to pick Adam up, you know, and sometimes because we did it a few times, he would try and be helpful. But [Noah] created a space for us all to have our freedom and joy, and trust, and playfulness.” That freedom included Hagerty’s musical Stephen Sondheim performance, a task that left her feeling “terrified!”
Alda adds, “Most of my scenes were with Adam, and I was struck immediately by how genuine he was, both on camera and off camera. He’s really himself, and he knows who he is as a person and that really helps him be who he has to be when he plays a character, and he’s able to find in himself the spare parts for whatever character he’s playing, no matter how different that is from who you see when you meet him. I saw him in the same week that I saw this movie for the first time, I saw him play a completely different character in Burn This on Broadway, I mean they’re polar opposites. And if you only saw one of them you’d say, ‘Well, of course, he’s just playing himself…’ We got to be good friends right away, which is easy to do because there’s no crap with him. He’s really honest.”
One of the more challenging scenes in the film was Johannsson’s lengthy monologue, which ran nearly seven pages in the script and allowed for fancy thespian footwork on her part as it was being delivered. As Baumbach explains it, “I wanted her to live it as she said it, that it should almost feel like a theatrical monologue in a sense of somebody in a play maybe walks down to the footlights and tells a story…. I felt like watching a great athlete do what they do best; she could make the adjustment while still doing everything in the same mode of the way she had done it before, things we liked, things we wanted again. And make these precise changes throughout, while being emotionally available, true to the moment — it was one of the earlier things we shot, and I really felt like it was a great way to get to know an actor.”
Watch the full discussion:
