Don DeLillo’s tome “White Noise” has frequently been a title thrown into the “unfilmable novel” draw due to its dreamy, interior, and massively descriptive prose, but adapter/director Noah Baumbach and cinematographer Lol Crawley weren’t. They only found a passable visual mode to reintroduce DeLillo’s 1985 Characters in the 2020s, but he put on the happiest icing imaginable, an expressive dance number lasting almost 10 minutes with the entire cast of the film walking the aisles of the set of impressively staged A&P supermarket from production designer Jess Gonchor. , set to an infectious new tune from LCD Soundsystem.
“I think we probably did that dance sequence in one day, but we had three different scenes. [in that supermarket] so I can’t remember where we landed,” says Crawley, collaborating with the usually more demure Baumbach on his first project. “We follow them at the pace of someone pushing a shopping cart, so he’s pretty controlled. In the end, it becomes more ambitious, more choreographed, and faster. So we employed the use of Steadicam so we could really rev it up a bit and get some power out of it.”
Needless to say, the scene is something of a bop (and is best viewed with a full audience if possible), and was accomplished through the use of remote cameras, dollies, and finally a crane shot moving toward up to reveal the full parameter of the supermarket, leading to a multi-minute non-stop shot of everyone rocking their beat to the final chords of “new body rhumba,” LCD Soundsystem’s crowd-lifting hit.
But strangely enough, everyone was enjoying something completely different on the set. They were actually listening other LCD sound system song [“Daft Punk is Playing at My House”]it had the same rhythm and the same rhythm,” says Crawley.
And the filmmakers wanted this sequence to cap off what professor co-star Don Cheadle tells his colleague Adam Driver early on about the supermarket being a place of reintegration, even if it depicted a very different visual scheme than the movie-inspired landscape. black they get close to in most other scenes
Says Crawley, “You’re trying to find this balance between a recognizable space and a recognizable life, but without being completely at the mercy of something that’s kind of ugly aesthetically, you know, and we wanted the supermarket to feel like a place where people wants to go. It’s like a template for consumption.”
Crawley, unlike many cinematographers of late, has rarely worked with the same director twice in his incredibly varied career (an exception is director Brady Corbet, for whom he recently shot the pop saga Vox Lux). He credits Baumbach’s script for White noise for having all the elements necessary to translate DeLillo’s novel to the screen, including a beautifully staged highway collision, leading up to “The Toxic Airborne Event,” an eerily prescient episode featuring bold lighting and visual effects, something that Baumbach had never met before. by.
“When I got on board, the script was already its own thing,” says Crawley. “[For the overall look], we saw a lot of pictures of Robby Muller, but also a lot of William Eggleston and Gregory Crewdson. Greg’s work has that kind of strangeness to it, it’s not like horror, but it has an unsettling feeling that you’re like, ‘Oh my God, something terrible just happened or is about to happen!’ So we try to lean into some of that as well.”
And what results is wonderfully controlled chaos, much like DeLillo’s tone in the book, and Crawley and his team were continually reassured by their on-screen subjects, especially Driver and Greta Gerwig, who have worked with Baumbach reaching double digits. among them. “What was amazing was the stamina and the kind of professionalism that everyone had,” Crawley enthuses. “Adam and Greta had really good chemistry, especially with all these scenes where all that dialogue overlapped, which is kind of white noise. [of the title]. I think it’s true to the book in that sense, it’s not the naturalistic delivery or dialogue of the other Noah movies.”
“White Noise” is now playing in select theaters and will begin streaming on Netflix on December 30.
