Sometimes criticized as appealing to too much of a niche audience (self-professed intellectual liberal arts New Yorkers), Noah Baumbach actually speaks to something in everyone. Beneath all of the articulate nattering, brisk gags, and corduroy blazers of Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy was, it turns out, a terrifying and defining fear of life itself. In The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach has chosen to go straight to the root of this mortifying feeling of facing life ill-equipped, and to do it he’s pilfered liberally from his own oft-distressing adolescence. The film wins you early with its smart, cracker-dry dialogue and pitch-perfect performances (including Jeff Daniels in a career high), so you don’t feel hoodwinked later when drama and revulsion seize focus. With his second Wes Anderson screenwriting collaboration almost tied up, there’s no telling what treats his suddenly niche-less audience is in for.

REVERSE SHOT: Even though it’s very funny, cruelty and even brutality (lines like “You disgust me” and much of the sexuality) are vital to The Squid and the Whale’s total resonance. Was that an element that you knew would pervade the film from the beginning or did it naturally grow as you dug deeper into your past and the world of the characters?

NOAH BAUMBACH: I didn’t think so much about consciously balancing it, about where humor came from in the cruelty versus someplace where humor might kind of enhance the pathos. I think when I was writing it, I thought to some degree that I was writing a comedy, but a comedy that took place in the real world. And so the balance of all that and the combination of those elements is something that came more naturally as just how I saw the material. I’m not really sure where it comes from in any kind of deeper way or why that is but I guess that’s just sort of how I saw the whole thing.

RS: There’s no one from your usual stable of actors (i.e. Chris Eigeman, Eric Stoltz, Carlos Jacott) in this movie. Did you not cast them in order to free the material from associations with your past subject matter or did it just kind of happen that way?

NB: Well, I certainly don’t presume that enough people would come to the movie from the point of view of my past movies to worry about it being too close or self-referential or anything, but I think for me this movie was kind of a new thing in a lot of ways. It was a new way of writing. I sort of feel that I found myself as a director and filmmaker on this movie. Besides the fact that there aren’t really any parts for them. I guess Carlos could’ve played the school therapist or something. I love those guys; they’re all my closest friends, outside of just being collaborators. I mean, I just watched Chris Eigeman close the party for the movie at the Natural History Museum last night! I definitely want to work with them all again, but I wanted to — even from a personal standpoint — just have no other associations with what went into this movie, just kind of make it its own thing.

RS: You’ve cited influences such as American documentarians of the Seventies like Pennebaker as well as New Wave directors like Louis Malle. I also see something of Claire’s Knee, which you’re on record as loving, in Squid. They both feature aging, bearded intellectuals interested in younger women, first off, but on top of that I think there’s a similarity in the characters’ detrimental ambivalence to the feelings of people around them. Would you agree with the Rohmer influence? Any other influences you’d care to discuss?

NB: I love Rohmer. He was a big discovery for me a few years ago. I’d seen some of his movies in the past including Claire’s Knee but I don’t think I’d ever really gotten them. I think they are kind of — and I find this still with friends of mine who I think are very sophisticated — hard to find your way into. I think they have their own rhythm and language. I ended up seeing a Rohmer fest at Film Forum. The first one I saw was Chloe in the Afternoon. I really got into the cadence of it, and I just immersed myself in the world, and it got to be sort of like an addiction. I kept going back to see more of these things. Maybe it was the right time in my life. One thing I did think specifically about Rohmer in terms of this movie is a lot of his stuff — well, Claire’s Knee has this pastoral country setting — but My Night at Maud’s deals so much in interiors, and I thought a lot about how he shot interiors and about this notion of the interior world versus the exterior world with The Squid and the Whale. But I think Rohmer’s bigger themes that are in all his movies are things that I just relate to on a very base level. People who have an idea of themselves versus how they may actually be and how people can be very stubborn about sticking to their own worldview. How often it can be very funny but it’s also very sad, particularly in Rohmer’s earlier movies as people really stick to these ideas of not only themselves but how the world should be, how other people should be and in a lot of ways let things pass them by. Claire’s Knee is another example of that with Jerome’s complete disregard for Claire as he touches the knee. And that scene where he touches the knee is one of the great movie scenes. On one hand it’s erotic and you’re kind of rooting for him to touch her knee and on the other hand it’s so cruel. But then she’s also getting something out of it. This is the long way to say… I could probably talk about Rohmer forever. But for this movie I also looked at early Scorsese and Cassavetes, just for the immediate feel of those movies, really getting a camera into a room and following people around and kind of living with them. And Bergman, too.

RS: Which films?

NB: Scenes from a Marriage. When Criterion came out with the TV version that’s five or six hours I really ate that up. Not so much his visual style with that movie because it’s not quite the same thing, but it’s just so exciting to watch directors really capture people. In my movie, I really became interested in creating both an emotional experience, as you were saying, both on the funny side and also maybe on the sadder side, creating it as an experience for the audience rather than something that they can sit back and observe and take apart. I wanted something that you actually have to participate in in a way that people associate more with action films, the sort of rollercoaster aspect of movies. What Bergman, in some scenes, or Rohmer do in an incredible way is really make you feel that you participate to some degree in the action.

RS: The entire film has a naturalistic street quality which both keeps the lighter scenes loose and heightens the awkwardness of the more intense dramatic scenes. What kind of look and feel did you and D.P. Robert Yeoman set out to capture? Had you always planned on using Super 16 and handheld?

NB: We had that idea fairly early on. There was even a time when we thought we’d have more money to make the movie and we still wanted to do it that way, so it was actually a good thing when we realized we only had a million and a half dollars to make it. At least my visual style could adjust to that without much difficulty. I don’t know quite when I came to that. When I was writing the script I wasn’t thinking necessarily that that’s how it should look but the more I lived with it, it just seemed like the right way. In some cases budget dictated it. We couldn’t afford to shoot on the subway so we went on with the camera and the actor and just sort of…

RS: Stole it?

NB: Stole it all. And it has this great energy. You’re really riding the subway. You’re really documenting it. There’s something to that which, even in a fiction film, translates or resonates in some way. Not that you can’t fake it, but if you don’t have the luxury there’s something exciting about that, and I think that Bob and I, as we approached that and as we watched a lot of the movies that we were just talking about, I think we got more confidence to do it. To me, it also sort of connected me to Eighties independent film. You know, Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch’s first movies. Laws of Gravity was a little later, but…

RS: Oh man, I love Laws of Gravity. I’ve probably seen it 15 times.

NB: I really admire how in that movie the style is part of the content. It’s a really effective movie; Mean Streets being its precursor, it kind of has that same energy and I guess that was very influenced by Cassavetes. I also thought about more recent work like the Dardenne Brothers and The Dreamlife of Angels, letting the camera participate but not in a way that’s obtrusive or self-conscious.

RS: In your past films you’ve used various stylistic effects such as Kicking and Screaming’s slow-motion and Mr. Jealousy’s acted-out daydreams. Other than the repeated use of Pink Floyd, the new film is pretty raw and stripped of such effects, and it’s much subtler. Do you think the material required this kind of approach?

NB: I think the material did require a more naturalistic approach for me. One of the things I mean when I say I found myself as a filmmaker with this movie is I think it may have been a style I’ve kind of resisted in the past. Not that the other movies don’t have some of it, but at the time I was more interested in and influenced by more overtly beautiful or composed films in a more obvious and less kind of ragged way. I think the newer approach frees me up because it allows me to embrace a messier look which I find very beautiful in a whole other way. It was something that I discovered felt much more personal than I had known before.

RS: A common theme in your films is the exposure of naive and alienating arrogance. Would you agree that Squid ultimately indicts this mindset for the damage it can cause, whereas a movie like Kicking and Screaming or even Highball plays the academic fronting strictly for laughs?

NB: I definitely find that funny and it definitely can be damaging but — I’m not saying this to be evasive in any way — I don’t judge Bernard for what he does. I think some of the stuff he does is selfish and arrogant and self-preserving and all those things. But in a way for me to be able to write him and appreciate him I kind of had to love all that stuff, too, and understand it.

RS: So indictment would probably be far too strong a word.

NB: I guess I don’t feel like I indict anyone or any kind of behavior in this movie. I really just wanted to sort of show it take its course.

RS: I love Bernard and Walt’s passionlessly rattled-off criticisms of writers like Dickens and Fitzgerald. Have you heard these same speeches before?

NB: The nice thing about growing up in a very academic family was being introduced to all these things, these books and movies that in some ways were more sophisticated than I was ready for. So I was often in the position of dismissing things like Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins or On the Road or things like that without having read them. To this day I haven’t read On the Road. On one hand it was exciting to know to bring my girlfriend to a double showing of Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion but at the same time I wasn’t allowing myself to experience a lot of movies or books that were not taken as seriously by my parents. In retrospect I found that kind of kind amusing and also kind of sad. It was something I wanted to tackle in terms of what Walt’s going through.

RS: What influence from your working relationship and friendship with Wes Anderson would you say comes across in what’s on-screen?

NB: I think, umm…

RS: Mostly in the script, or...

NB: Yeah. Wes never will allow himself to be comfortable with what he has until he really feels he’s tried everything. When Wes first read an early draft of The Squid and the Whale, he really responded to it and he said he really wanted to be involved as a producer. Then he gave me a bunch of notes and I sort of thought, well, if you liked it so much where are all these notes coming from? And I realized that notes, for him, and keeping this critical eye going at all times is actually a form of affection. It was about making it better. It’s part of an important process and I think it’s something he got while working with James L. Brooks on Bottle Rocket. That was also a big influence on me when we worked on The Life Aquatic because he does it to himself, too. It was exciting once I went along with it and thought, you’re right, we shouldn’t get too comfortable with theses scenes. Even if a scene has been playing great from the beginning maybe there’s a better way to do it, a better way to say it. And just to keep trying to get it better. I mean, we’re friends, so it’s hard to quantify what you give one another as friends but there’re tons of things. Another thing is Wes really values the details. On this movie I got more confidence on my own as a director. I insisted on things that in the past, if someone said “you can’t have x for the scene”, I would’ve let it go because it’s probably not that important, it’s just a detail. On this movie I stood up for those things because I realized that these tiny things do add up in a lot of cases and it’s all part of the texture of the movie. Wes really values that. I watched him fight for things he really believed in and just because I’m working on a much smaller budget doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have those things too.

RS: Have you finished writing The Fantastic Mr. Fox?

NB: Yeah, we’re basically done with it.

RS: Squid is full of good music. Was there a special reason you chose to use, and in the case of Loudon Wainwright III, re-use certain artists?

NB: Some of the music comes from the characters. Like, obviously “Hey You” is very much Walt’s song and Tangerine Dream is very much Frank, and Lily listens to The Feelies. So there’s music that comes from taste, I think, or from characters’ taste.

RS: I was thinking maybe Wainwright and Reed, being so New York, would be more tied in to the setting.

NB: The Lou Reed song was a surprise for me. I had often thought of going for a Beethoven cue for the end of the movie but when I played it it seemed too treacly. Dean Wareham, who does the score for the movie, had given me Street Hassle around this time and I was playing it and I thought that the momentum of the beginning of the song would be great for Walt leaving the hospital and running to the museum. Then at one point I decided, why don’t I just extend it? I thought, well, Lou Reed singing - does that work at the end of the film? I mean, it’s so straightforward, it’s so Lou Reed! When I played it I realized that the reason I love Lou Reed is his voice has so much emotion in it, and it actually seemed so right for the scene suddenly and it was something I hadn’t anticipated. With Loudon Wainwright… When I was writing I think they remastered and put out Attempted Mustache. The first song is “The Swimming Song.” I had never heard that song before and it felt like childhood to me. It’s one of those songs… I can’t even articulate it. I met Loudon once and I told him how I felt and I just kind of babbled. It felt so emotional to me but it’s done in such a peppy, you know, banjo way. So I always wanted to use that at some point and there are also some Bert Jansch songs. There was a feeling of wanting to use singer-songwriters and people who have very much their own personal, stripped-down voice, who could in some way accompany the movie. They’re obviously not singing about anything in the movie, but it just adds another level of the personal.