The latest top awards title to screen at the 63rd New York Film Festival is Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” starring George Clooney as an actor approaching the end of his tether. The Netflix film premiered last month at Venice, with co-stars Adam Sandler and Laura Dern. The latest movie from the “Marriage Story” and “The Squid and the Whale” director opens in theaters from Netflix on November 14 before streaming December 5.
We caught up with Dern on the red carpet, talking about how David Lynch music collaborator Dean Hurley finally brought “Twin Peaks: The Return” to the big screen over the summer. New York City’s Metrograph Theater was the first to show the full version of the series the way Lynch intended. “I think he would love it,” Dern told IndieWire of what she thinks the auteur would think of the feat.
“I think it’s so profoundly cinematic,” she continued. “Filmmakers, including Noah, including so many who have movies here, have talked, obviously, about David being their muse, [as well as] David being so profoundly important and ‘The Return’ being so important. To hear the specifics of why ‘The Return’s’ bravery shaped movies of the last four or five years for specific filmmakers has been so inspiring.” In the series, she played Diane Evans, longtime secretary and confidante of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper.
Though the Oscar and Emmy winner couldn’t say much about the upcoming confirmed Season 3 of “Big Little Lies,” she did tease that the cast is her “favorite people and one of my favorite characters ever, so I can’t think of a better time.”
We also briefly chatted with Clooney, who reflected on the work he’s done with Baumbach. This is technically the second time they have worked together, as the director co-wrote “Fantastic Mr. Fox” with Wes Anderson, and Clooney played the title character. “First of all, he’s a good writer,” he told IndieWire. “I didn’t know how good. I’ve never been on a set with him when he was directing. The very first scene is a 12-page one and I thought, “Well, this is a really ambitious, tricky film he’s trying to make.’ I was very excited by the work he wanted to do.”
Clooney also recalled the story, which he’s shared before, of auditioning for “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” with Francis Ford Coppola. “I thought I was really good. Coppola called my agent and asked if I was drunk.”
In David Ehrlich’s review of “Jay Kelly,” he writes that it “is a bubbly champagne drama that tries to wring a few tears from the unbearable lightness of being rich and famous, but the fact that it looks like a Lavazza commercial and bemoans the isolation of flying private is ultimately in service to a more relatable story about the trade-offs that all of us are forced to make in this life — the one-way roads we take on the long and circular journey towards becoming ourselves.”