Composer Nicholas Britell

Early on in the writing stage of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, the filmmaker knew he wanted a musical accompaniment that was full in its old-fashioned pleasures, brimming with orchestral melody and emotion. For this, he turned to Academy Award–nominated composer Nicholas Britell (Moonlight, Don’t Look Up). 

After an hours-long meeting where the duo discussed what they loved in film scores, Baumbach (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale) sent Britell a draft of the script — a comedy-drama that follows movie star Jay Kelly on a European trip that unleashes a flood of memories. The composer used the draft for inspiration on a few ideas that he then played for the director, well before shooting had started. In fact, the work started so early that Baumbach was even able to play Britell’s work on set for the actors, an all-star ensemble including George Clooney in the titular role and Adam Sandler as Kelly’s loyal manager.

“There are certain types of emotions that I think are missing, sometimes, in movies today, and Noah is very comfortable with wanting people to feel those things,” Britell says of the Academy Award–nominated writer-director. “Music that has a happy feeling or a sad feeling can change depending on how you think about it, and that’s Jay’s trajectory. At different times in the film, I think the main theme can feel optimistic and sort of upward, and then at other times, it can feel inward and perhaps a bit forlorn.”

For Jay’s central theme, Britell was drawn to the felt piano, a variation of upright piano. “On a felt piano, you get all these material sounds and you hear more of the machinery and the mechanism,” Britell explains. “There’s something imperfect about it, and I think that’s very beautiful. There’s something about how Jay is not fully realized as a sound. He’s held back, in a way, and the film itself is a journey of him exploring these other parts of himself. ”

Britell was able to experiment further in the recording process, including the decision to record the entire score to analog tape. Though no longer common practice, it allowed Britell to more directly connect his work to the kind of film Baumbach was making. “The movie has buoyancy and a life to it that I wanted to feel inviting and warm, even though at the same time, it’s acknowledging our humanity in its complexities,” Baumbach says. “Nicholas’s music does just this in such a beautiful way. It is big and intimate and bold and delicate. There’s nothing he can’t do.”

Peter Mountain/Netflix

Production Designer Mark Tildesley

The efforts of production designer Mark Tildesley (The Two Popes) stretch from marrying Malibu locations with set builds in London to forging a dynamic collaborative process to produce the illusion of a cross-continent odyssey — not to mention crafting sets where actors could walk from the present into a memory of the past.“Mark’s work in this movie is so remarkable, but it’s going to be nearly invisible to people because he created such verisimilitude in all these sets,” Baumbach says. “They just feel like the real thing, which is what you wanted for this movie.”

For starters, a lot of thought went into Jay’s movie-star abode. Tildesley and his team searched all over Los Angeles looking for the right location. The goal was to find something that was modernist but also naturalistic, with a touch of warmth.“We were looking for texture and color and things that made the house feel like it was originally a family home,” Tildesley says. “It still had to be a superstar’s house, but there was an interesting contradiction, trying to find a level where it felt homey but also slightly cold, like there was a family there at one time, and now it’s empty.”

He did find a house in Malibu that was close to fitting the bill, one formerly owned by legendary actor Jack Nicholson, in fact. But the interior didn’t suffice for Baumbach and Sandgren’s planned camera movements, so they ultimately used the exterior and swimming pool before building the home’s interiors on a stage at Shepperton Studios outside of London.“One of our producers, Amy Pascal, who ran Sony for 20 years and has been on some of the biggest movie sets, came onto that set and said, ’This is the most amazing set I’ve ever been on,’” Baumbach recalls.

Other location considerations involved making the Milano Centrale train station appear to be a Paris station and scouring Tuscany for the right town to serve the film's third act. They ultimately settled on Pienza, south of Siena, which had just the right central square for the film festival's party in honor of Jay and his tribute. “It’s all about trying to put this puzzle of a journey together with different spaces and different places, not the actual ones,” Tildesley says. “Noah is a cinephile and he loves films, but he also loves the way they’re made. He loves the craftsmanship of filmmaking. Some directors just want you to get on with it and don’t want to get involved, but he is fully engaged with his design team.”

Peter Mountain/Netflix

Casting Directors Douglas Aibel and Nina Gold

The ensemble that Baumbach and co-writer Emily Mortimer (Doll & Em) crafted on the page required savvy and careful calibration. New York–based casting director Douglas Aibel (Succession, Little Women) has worked with Baumbach since The Squid and the Whale, and he was tasked with finding the right ingredients to surround Jay on the domestic front.“The film conveys characters from a lot of different worlds,” Aibel says. “There’s the backstage world of Hollywood — agents, managers, lawyers, actors, wives, children. Then you get to Europe and there are all sorts of hangers-on and enthusiasts. Then in the memories, you have the younger versions of Jay and different periods from Jay’s life. You needed to put all the pieces together.”

Casting director Nina Gold (Game of Thrones, The Power of the Dog) joined the team to help construct the ensemble. With all of the principal roles filled, Gold’s biggest challenge was populating the world Jay enters in Europe. Once he boards a train from Paris to Tuscany, where he’s set to receive a tribute award at a film festival, it’s a completely different spectrum: “On that train, just about every possible member of humanity is represented,” Aibel explains.

Even though some of these roles were not particularly large, “the detail of how each person would play even a small role was something Doug, Noah, and I obsessed on,” Gold says. “I also think the casting of the film crew in the first scene is a good example of how, even though those parts are moving through quite quickly and it’s all quite impressionistic, the people playing those parts are properly excellent actors with real nuance and subtlety and make it totally believable. That really does create the world.”

Aibel adds, “A lot of times people think of casting as a craft, and it is a craft, but I also think that it’s an art. In a way, you’re helping the director create this canvas, and in this case, a really large one, almost a triptych of all the worlds merging together in this man’s mind and heart as he’s going on this journey. You have to make sure that every single element is right and alive and true.”

Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran

For a film concerned with identity and aspects of self-reflection, centered on a movie star no less, the look of that character becomes part of the very fabric of the storytelling. For the task of outfitting Jay on his whirlwind journey to Tuscany, Baumbach tapped Academy Award–winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran (Little Women, Anna Karenina).

“What Jacqueline did, which was so sophisticated, was she had this sense that Jay’s outfits would be essentially inspired by iconic looks from movie stars of the past,” Baumbach says. “It wasn’t about referencing anything specific, though in some cases they were outfits like Cary Grant in a magazine or the blazer from North By Northwest, or Marcello Mastroianni’s white suit from La Dolce Vita. And yet, once we see them on George, they become Jay Kelly and it never takes you out of the movie.”

Durran worked with Italian designer Caruso Menswear for the majority of Clooney’s tailoring in the film. As for the ensemble surrounding him, she was tasked with creating individualism within a set of “types,” from Jay’s manager to his publicist to his stylist, to say nothing of the many people who enter and exit his journey along the way. Durran says she wasn’t working with an overall color-story arc in mind, though she did make specific choices related to locations. When Jay arrives in Paris, for example, it felt right that he would wear blue. When he gets off the train in Italy, he’s wearing white. “They were just instinctive choices that were possibly not rational, but still appropriate for the scene and for the location,” she says.

When the story finally settles into Italy, there was real consideration given to how the locale would emanate both authentically and aspirationally from the screen. For Durran, the choices in that section were about being both organically Italian, and also somewhat arrantly so, which made for a delicate exploration. “We tried to really embed those characters in Tuscany, to not bring a kind of British or American sensibility to what they looked like,” Durran says. “But our selection process was also about what Italy represents in the movie and what Italy represents to a broader group of people outside of Italy who aspire to that kind of life.”

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Editors Valerio Bonelli and Rachel Durance

“I really felt like I had to live up to the experience of making the movie when I was in the cutting room,” Baumbach says of the transition to post-production and his work with editors Valerio Bonelli (Darkest Hour) and Rachel Durance. “I wanted it to feel as joyous and emotional and rewarding as the shoot felt. Both had a great sense of the film’s rhythm, of going with the smooth buoyancy of the journey and moving with Jay’s energy, knowing when to slow it down, when to take time.”

The ensemble nature of the film set quite the task for Bonelli and Durance to navigate the characters from scene to scene. “Noah loves getting the actors to perform fast, overlap with one another, and deliver lines in a way that they are often on top of each other,” Bonelli says. “He asked the sound recordist to have radio mics for almost every single character. So, there’s a lot of separation that you can get through lines of dialogue. That allows us in the editing room to sometimes dilate or reduce.”

The pace is very particular as memories and circumstances fly at Jay throughout the journey. “The pacing is very much led by the blocking and the camera movement,” Durance says. “Noah and Linus [Sandgren], and choreographer David Neumann, spent a lot of time choreographing the actors’ movement and how they interact with each other. They did an incredible job with that and kind of did a dance with the actors.”

Baumbach’s exploratory nature with the actors on set also lent itself quite well to Bonelli and Durance’s efforts, providing them with many different versions to dial the tone up or down from scene to scene.“George was very good at showing the side of Jay that is a façade,” Durance says. “Then he would just sort of switch that up in the next take and play it a little bit more, but without that acting façade. That gave us a lot to work with.”

For Bonelli, the most rewarding scene to cut had to be the culminating moment: Jay’s final reckoning with his life and career as he watches it all unspool onscreen at his film festival tribute.“The story to tell was kind of simple, but very difficult at the same time,” Bonelli says. “When he turns around and sees the audience’s reaction and realizes what impact his career has made on people — I remember feeling I was in a kind of magic place with that sequence.”

Cinematographer Linus Sandgren

When it came to lifting the story off the page and into the realm of visual storytelling, Baumbach turned to a new collaborator in Academy Award–winning cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land). Sandgren had always been impressed with Baumbach’s ability to apply the appropriate visual language to his films and the naturalism they manage to harness. He came into Jay Kelly with the expectation of exploring that brand of naturalism, but the look of the film evolved considerably as he and Baumbach dug in.“We talked a lot about the introspective journey of the character,” recalls Sandgren, “and whether the memories should just be flashbacks, or could it be that he actually visits these memories physically? We built sets that could create this without visual effects and that was very fun to work out.”

With that, the central stylistic exercise of Jay Kelly took flight. Sandgren and Baumbach, in tandem with other department heads, conceived a string of in-camera, practical applications that would allow Jay to casually drift into his memories of youthful ambition, lost love, and fractured family connections. It was a bold choice, one meant to convey a sense of how memory actually tends to work as thoughts of the past float in and out of one’s mind.“[We] explored the methodology of the memories for months. Discussion led to tests,” says Baumbach. “Our memories aren’t regressive for us, they live simultaneously with our present. They can feel incredibly present. We wanted to convey this in the way we designed and shot them.”

Sandgren and Baumbach also made a subtle choice in how Jay is framed in the film, keeping him quite dominant and central in the early scenes where he is this larger-than-life movie star, and then gradually framing him off-center, then smaller and further away as he becomes immersed in the world at large and engages with everyday people. What may have initially read to Sandgren as a movie calling for a “naturalistic” approach ultimately gave way to a far more exploratory production, one that centers Jay Kelly as an ode to cinema from artists enamored with the history of the art form.

This feature originally appeared in Issue 22 of Tudum Magazine.