Stay vital by keeping up with all of the news about the film about a couple trying to stay vital: While We’re Young has dominated the cultural discussion over the last few days. (Naomi Watts attends a hip-hop dance class, Noah Baumbach looks at Ben Stiller looking longingly at Adam Driver as a living, breathing and enviably tall symbol of the person he’ll never be again!). Today has seen the release of several interviews with the director. At The Dissolve, Baumbach discusses the universality of the film’s central theme:
The thing about the While We’re Young story that engaged me was that it had that idea—it hangs over the film, and it’s part of what these characters struggle with—just the notion of aging. Everybody at some point thinks, ‘I was just 25.’ ‘I was just 18.’ That feeling is very human. And I think this notion of becoming and accepting the person you are, vs. the person you thought you would be, or want to be—I think that’s also very human.
At Vulture, he spoke of his collaboration with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy (this was their second time working together, after Greenberg) on the While We’re Young soundtrack, and how Murphy decided to cover David Bowie’s “Golden Years” with a glockenspiel:
That was James going beyond what I’d hired him to do. It was always in the script that the movie started with a lullaby version of ‘Golden Years’ because, when you have kids, you’re suddenly aware of all of these lullaby versions of all the songs you grew up with. It’s a way for parents to have the hits of their childhood done again for the baby. That said, the lullaby versions that I found of ‘Golden Years’ just weren’t right, so I had James do it. He helped. You can recognize the song, but he also brought this sort of beautiful-yet-eerie quality to it.
No matter how obsolete and uncomfortable While We’re Young’s Josh (Stiller) and Cornelia (Watts) may feel navigating and being exotically aged guest-stars in the Brooklyn “youth” scene, surely these party-goers from historic Greenwich Village would feel far more discombobulated if thrust into these DIY, analog and artisanal food-fetishizing lifestyles. Likely more disorienting would be their attendance of this drone obstacle course that’s coming to the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, or their spotting of an army of drone butterflies while frolicking through a field they presumed to be filled with purely old-fashioned bugs (who knew butterflies, too, could become obsolete?).
Those early 20th century NY socialites might also find Arca’s (Alejandro Ghersi’s) music inaccessible — or purely bloodcurdling — and find his notion of “how an Electret condenser microphone works” highly unsettling. But we modern folk can’t get enough of it. In this interview with Butt, the electronic musician, producer, mixer and Björk and Kanye collaborator talks about everything from the battle between desired introversion and needed extroversion in successful musicians to moving to NYC from Caracas to his decision to come out in New York. “I’d never met any openly gay person in Caracas,” he says.
Ever since Game of Thrones became a truly immense thing, we’ve seen enthusiasts of the TV show and the books on which it’s based express all manner of impatience waiting for new seasons, new books, for the new season to catch up with the new book, for the new book to beat the new season so that the new season doesn’t catch up with the new book — basically, the waiting for anything GOT-related really seems to frazzle people, no matter what. Now Indian audiences will get to experience the same inexplicable level of anxiety, as a loose adaptation starring Indian television actress Sakshi Tanwar — in which she’ll be playing a Daenerys-based character, is currently in the works. According to The Independent, “Online rumours indicate that although the series will take its lead from the fantasy books and TV series, it will be set in the year of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 – so is unlikely to feature dragons.”