Movies

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig break down that bonkers White Noise dance sequence

The big-screen adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel concludes with a lengthy piece of choreography set to a new LCD Soundsystem track.

By

Clark Collis

Published on January 7, 2023 09:00AM EST

Warning: This article contains spoilers for White Noise.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise doesn't feature many major deviations from Don DeLillo's 1985 novel about the Gladney family and their encounter with an "airborne toxic event." The one big exception comes at the conclusion of the film, when Baumbach has his characters literally dance away from the text in an extended choreographed sequence which accompanies the end credits. The scene takes place in a supermarket and finds the cast, including leads Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, grooving through the aisles to the sound of a specially-recorded LCD Soundsystem track entitled "new body rhumba."

"The book ends with them in the supermarket, and they are kind of left suspended, there's confusion, they've rearranged the shelves," says Baumbach. "I thought, well, if we really looked at ourselves from fifty feet, we would look like we're dancing when we're shopping. I worked with David Neumann, this choreographer, throughout the whole movie, so that even sequences in the kitchen with the family or the lecture with Jack (Driver) and Murray (Don Cheadle), the escape from the camp, all these sequences had a kind of almost hidden choreography in them. The cloud changes things in the movie, in the third part of the movie different things become possible that weren't possible earlier in the movie, and so I thought, well, maybe the kind of choreography that we've been working with could beak open and become actual dance choreography."

Gerwig is a longtime admirer of the film's choreographer.

"I've been a fan of David Neumann since I was in college," she says. "He's so great at creating movement that is both choreographed and pedestrian at the same time. It's very special. He's good at capturing the absurdity of every day movement and seeing these patterns that are quite beautiful. He started sending Noah these videos of dancing with cereal boxes that are stuck to his hands. They'd start with him pulling a cereal box off the shelf, and realizing it's stuck to his hand, and he just kept finding things like that. One of my favorite moments, it's sort of in the background, there are people just laying down on vegetables. It's absurd but it's only as absurd as life is."

The sequence was shot on a vast supermarket set whose construction was overseen by production designer Jess Gonchor.

"[He] did such a brilliant job," says Baumbach. "That was an empty Home Depot that he built an '80s supermarket in. It was a masterpiece of a set. I would go in there while they were working on it, and I would just get ideas because of what they were doing was so detailed, and it was also so epic at the same time."

Gerwig recalls actually filming the sequence with a mixture of fondness and amazement.

"It was two days of shooting dancing and it was like being in a proper musical, it was wonderful," she says.

Was Gerwig exhausted when she got up on the third day?

"No, no," she says. "I feel like a could have done it again, it was so much fun!"

White Noise is now available to watch on Netflix. See the film's dance sequence below.

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Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig break down that bonkers White Noise dance sequence

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