Baumbach, Noah

American film director and co-writer of Jay Kelly

“𝐽𝑎𝑦 𝐾𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑦”: Noah Baumbach talks about his new Eurotrip family-dramedy

Andrea Cirla · Dec 7, 2025 · partial coverage

• Noah Baumbach
• *Jay Kelly*
• George Clooney
• Adam Sandler
• Emily Mortimer
• movie stars
• authenticity
• memory
• film directing
• Gotham Film Awards

Coverage note: full (about eleven minutes; automatic English YouTube captions, mostly clean with a few misheard names such as "Bombach" and "Mortar")

Core ideas

The film and its collaboration. Jay Kelly follows an aging movie star (George Clooney) who, on learning that his daughter is leaving for Europe before college, stages a meeting on a train to Paris with his team, including his manager Ron (Adam Sandler). Baumbach wrote it with Emily Mortimer: he had accumulated ideas for years, thought the film's internal journey needed someone to externalize it, and found that with a real collaborator it becomes "like a conversation" where nobody remembers whose line it was. The journey was as mysterious to the writers as to Jay Kelly. He often borrows names of people he knows when he starts writing, to ground characters; he writes for actors but they remain abstractions.

Casting Clooney, nostalgia for the movie star. Clooney was the first and only choice; the two had met twenty years earlier on the awards circuit, and Clooney had said "if you ever need an actor". Baumbach values his timeless quality and his habit of befriending older stars such as Paul Newman and Gregory Peck, so that he "could be a movie star in any era". The film is set in the present but is not an exposé of Hollywood: it has a nostalgic tone about movies that are no longer made, and a "shadow narrative" about the history of the medium. He thinks seeing a real face age on screen (Clooney, and European stars such as Mastroianni or Huppert) is beautiful, whereas some American stars, like Cary Grant, retired rather than be seen growing old.

Manager, friend, defenses. Ron is Jay's shadow: he caters to Jay as well as helping him, standing between him and the world, and as Jay's crisis unfolds, the entourage peels away, a metaphor for stripping our defenses to see ourselves clearly. Jay has an existential crisis; Ron has "a more ordinary" one about work-life balance. The film opens with a Sylvia Plath line ("It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself...") about performing versus authentic selves, and Jay, an actor as a job and as a personality, "needs to go mad to go sane". Baumbach says the film is essentially about trying to outrun mortality, and that the pleasure of the journey was intended for the audience. On the craft, he tells a Mike Nichols anecdote (a director just has to look decisive) and explains how memories were staged without CGI: sets joined two locations, so an airplane curtain opens onto a stage from an acting class thirty years earlier. Shooting took place at Shepperton, in Paris, Tuscany and Los Angeles.

Excerpts