Biografia

According to himself, he tends to return again and again to making movies about people who have an image of themselves they can't live up to.

Is a close friend and collaborator of Wes Anderson.

When directing on set, prefers saying 'Begin' or 'When you're ready', instead of 'Action!'.

Has a son, Rohmer Emmanuel Baumbach (born March 17, 2010), with his ex-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Had his script for Il calamaro e la balena (2005) hand-delivered to Laura Linney by his friend Eric Stoltz during the filming of La casa della gioia (2000) in 2000. Linney agreed to do the film immediately, but it took four years to raise the financing.

I always viewed life as material for a movie.

I grew up in the heat of 70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art. My film is emotional rather than meta, and that's my rebellion.

"I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford's "Good Solider" or something I wasn't equipped to understand".

Somebody could easily go through and link everything to different points in not just my family, but people I know - but I don't even really care. For me, the movie is a protection - a completely reinvented film. [on 'The Squid and The Whale.']

I don't outline. And when I've done jobs either in television or for a studio, and outlines have been part of the deal, it seems completely artificial to me and, I think, made it harder for me to write the script afterward.