Noah Baumbach with Reggie Ugwu: White Noise

The director screens clips from his latest film and discusses adapting the notoriously unfilmable Don DeLillo novel.

Noah Baumbach is at least the third director to attempt to bring Don DeLillo’s National Book Award–winning novel White Noise to the screen. A family drama about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise was published in 1985 and remains one of DeLillo’s best-loved books. Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and their four children live in the small college town Blacksmith, where Gladney is the department chair  of Hitler studies at College-on-the-Hill. When the entire town is ordered to evacuate after an “airborne toxic event” sends a black chemical cloud over Blacksmith, Jack and Babette confront punishing revelations about mortality in themselves and with each other.

Baumbach speaks with Reggie Ugwu from The New York Times about White Noise’s unfilmable reputation, and how he brought it to the screen.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Noah Baumbach is an Academy Award nominated filmmaker. His films include the upcoming White Noise; Marriage Story which received 6 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and a win for Laura Dern for Best Supporting Actress; The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected); While We’re Young; Mistress America; Frances Ha; Greenberg; Margot at the Wedding; The Squid and the Whale, for which Baumbach received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay; Kicking and Screaming; and the documentary De Palma.

Reggie Uguwu is a culture reporter for The New York Times, where he covers creators in film, television, podcasts, and more. Based in Brooklyn, his first book — a narrative history of Black self-definition in American cinema — will be published by Bloomsbury in 2024.

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Courtesy Noah Baumbach

Courtesy Reggie Ugwu