The Life Aquatic: A Conversation With Writer Noah Baumbach
by David Fear | 00.00.0000

A new Wes Anderson film is always a big deal, but a Wes Anderson film that he’s co-written with Noah Baumbach is akin to that miraculous day when peanut butter and chocolate combined forces. Baumbach’s first movie as writer/director, 1995’s Kicking and Screaming, might be the best film about post-graduate malaise next to that Dustin Hoffman movie about the same thing. The intelligence and zip to his dialogue ("I like a bartender who drinks. Otherwise, I feel like I’m being poisoned," from the aforementioned Kicking and Screaming, for instance), coupled with his metropolitan sophistication and urbane wit, it would seem that Noah and Wes would fit together like some vintage puzzle found in that game closet from The Royal Tenenbaums. These guys could be the next Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett...if they wanted to be.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou stars Bill Murray as a washed-up deep sea documentarian who may, or may not, have met his long-lost son: an Air Kentucky pilot played by Anderson regular (and previous co-writer on Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums) Owen Wilson. Wilson joins the roving band of adventurers known as Team Zissou, as they embark on their final mission: to capture and kill the jaguar shark that killed Zissou’s partner and best friend. Plus there’s pirates, sealife created by the legendary Nightmare Before Christmas animator Henry Selick and esoteric music (vintage David Bowie tunes translated to Portuguese and sung by one of the Brazilian actors—buy this soundtrack now!). What’s not to like? No, seriously, what’s not to like?!?

How did you and Wes meet, and how did the idea of collaborating on something come up?
Wes and I met right before Rushmore came out, when he moved to New York from L.A. Both of our first movies came out around the same time, and both underperformed at the box office beyond our wildest expectations [laughs]. So we got the same backhanded compliments all the time. "Your movie is great? Why has no one seen it?" That kind of odd pat on the back that never really makes you feel so great. So I’d known about him for a while before we met through [filmmaker] Peter Bogdanovich. We became friends pretty quickly, and then I happened to show him this script I was working on called The Squid and the Whale. He was really encouraging about mining my real life for the piece, since it’s a very autobiographical story, and we got in the habit of tossing ideas back and forth. Then one day he mentioned he had this story about an oceanographer. That’s when it started.

It originated with him...
Yeah, he’d had the idea for a little while. He’d been kicking around the whole father-son notion for a bit, and the central character was basically the same. He was called "Steve Cocteau" in the earlier draft we worked on.

How long did you guys work on this?
About a year. We met every day at an Italian restaurant in Soho. We both keep odd hours, so we’d always plan to meet at 1pm then someone would show up late. Then one of us would anticipate that the other person would be late and the time would consistently pushed back. Then we’d go, "Okay, tomorrow, we actually meet at one!" Naturally, one of us would be late. But we’d stay through dinner, and just keep working on the script. We ended up using a lot of the items on the menu to name the fish. Some of the regular patrons’ names ended up in there as well which we used for the crew members and such.

Wow, I want to find this restaurant so I can order the jaguar shark!
That actually came from somewhere else.

Oh.
Sorry.

You and Wes have pretty similar voices in your scripts, but Wes obviously sets his films in "Wesworld." Were you at all worried that by collaborating with someone whose signature is on every frame of film, you’d be sort of swept aside?
No. When we went into it, it was never like we were going to write a script and see what would come of it, or whether we’d be wondering who would be right to direct it. It was always Wes’ film. For me, it was a way to find a voice in an environment that I normally wouldn’t have come up with. There were things I felt strongly about that I fought for stayed in, and we really did collaborate and hash things out together. We worked on this for a long time, so by the end it was something we both felt connected to.
Working with Wes was good for me as a writer. He’s really disciplined. He wants to work on something—a piece of dialogue, or a description of something—and come up with the best possible version of that before we move on. It helps you a lot as you’re writing stuff later, because the foundation is set. You know you’ve nailed something because you’ve dwelled on it for hours and you’ve come up with what you wanted to use.

Was there an exchange you came up with that you’re particularly proud of?
The stuff you end up thinking is the funniest that cracks you up at the time, but then later…there was a line that we wrote during the pirate attack, after all this crazy stuff has gone on, where Zissou just says, "What a fucking nightmare." For some reason, when we wrote that, it busted us up. We just laughed forever about that. It was after all this tense and strange stuff has happened so…well, the line may not play well in the scene, but man, it was funny at the time.

Can you say anything about the Roald Dahl project you guys are working on?
Well, we will be doing it together. It’s animated, and Henry Selick be helping us with it again. That’s all I can say so far.

It sounds great, I can’t wait to see it.
You may need to wait.

Oh.
Sorry, Dave.