Don DeLillo’s tome “White Noise” has frequently been a title thrown into the “unfilmable novel” sweepstakes due to its massively descriptive, interior, dreamy prose, but adaptor/director Noah Baumbach and cinematographer Lol Crawley not only found a palatable visual modus to reintroduce DeLillo’s 1985 characters into the 2020s, but put the most bliss-out cherry-on-top imaginable, a nearly 10-minute, expressive dance number featuring the film’s entire cast traversing the aisles of the production designer Jess Gonchor’s impressively-mounted A&P supermarket set, set to an infectious new tune by LCD Soundsystem.
“I think we probably did that dance sequence in a day, but had three different scenes [in that supermarket] so I can’t remember where we landed,” says Crawley, collaborating with the usually more demure Baumbach for their first-ever project. “We followed them around to the pace of somebody pushing a shopping trolley, so it’s fairly controlled. By the end of it, it gets more ambitious, and becomes more choreographed, and it becomes faster. So then we employed the use of Steadicam so that we could really get some speed up and get some energy out.”
Needless to say, the scene is something of a bop (and best seen with a full audience if at all possible), and was accomplished through the use of remote cameras, dollies and eventually a crane shot that pans up to reveal the entire parameter of the supermarket, leading to a multi-minute, unbroken take of everyone shakin’ their groove thing to the concluding strains of “new body rhumba”, the LCD Soundsystem banger that sends audiences out on a high.
But interestingly enough, everyone was grooving to something completely different in the filming. “They were actually listening to another LCD Soundsystem song [“Daft Punk is Playing at My House”], it had the same rhythm and the same beat to it.,” says Crawley.
And the filmmakers wanted this sequence to cap off what costar professor Don Cheadle tells fellow teacher Adam Driver early on about the supermarket being a place of reintegration, even if it represented a much different visual scheme than the noir-inspired landscape they approach in most other scenes.
Says Crawley: “You’re trying to find this balance between a recognizable space and a recognizable life, but not being completely at the mercy of something that is aesthetically a little ugly, you know, and we very much wanted the supermarket to feel like a place where people want to go. It’s like a template to consumption.”
Crawley, unlike many directors of photography of late, has rarely worked with the same director twice in his incredibly varied career (director Brady Corbet is an exception, for whom he most recently photographed the pop saga Vox Lux). He credits Baumbach’s screenplay for White Noise as having all the elements needed to translate DeLillo’s novel to screen, which includes a marvelously staged highway pile-up, leading to “The Toxic Airborne Event,” a disturbingly prescient episode including bold lighting and VFX, not something Baumbach has ever previously been known for.
“By the time I came on board the script was truly its own thing by then,” says Crawley. “[For the overall look], we looked at a lot of Robby Muller’s photograph, but also a lot of William Eggleston and Gregory Crewdson. Greg’s work has that kind of uncanniness, it isn’t like horror, but it has an unsettling feel that you think, ‘oh my God, something terrible has just happened or is about to happen!.’ So we tried to lean into some of that as well.”
And what results is a wonderfully controlled chaos, much like DeLillo’s tone in the book, and Crawley and his crew were reassured continually by their onscreen subjects, especially Driver and Greta Gerwig, who have worked with Baumbach going into the double digits between them. “What’s amazing was just the stamina and sort of professionalism that they all had,” effuses Crawley. “Adam and Greta had a really good chemistry, especially with all these scenes where all of that dialogue was overlapping, which is kind of the white noise [of the title]. I think it’s faithful to the book in that regard, It’s not the naturalistic delivery or dialogue of Noah’s other movies.”
“White Noise” is now playing in select theaters and will begin streaming on Netflix on Dec. 30
