Jay Kelly, George Clooney. George Clooney, Jay Kelly. The similarity of the names is, according to Noah Baumbach, a coincidence. “It’s not conscious,” he tells me in Corinthia Hotel, in between sips of coffee. “I had a lot of different names, and I liked the way that sounded.”

Baumbach is the 56-year-old filmmaker behind smart, grounded dramas like Frances Ha, Marriage Story, and The Squid and the Whale. He’s also the co-writer of strange, genre-bending comedies like Barbie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Fantastic Mr Fox. His latest directorial feature, Jay Kelly, combines both strengths: clearly based on real-life observations, the lived-in Hollywood satire embraces the playfulness of the medium with a post-Barbie, fourth-wall-breaking swagger.

It’s surprising, then, that Jay Kelly’s name is unrelated to Clooney, who almost plays the title character as if it were a biopic. Like Clooney, Jay is a sharply suited, photogenic A-lister who’s swarmed by fans wanting selfies, assistants guessing his every potential need, and the expectation that he’ll always be “on” as George Clooney – I mean, Jay Kelly.

The loose plot follows Jay on a trip from his LA home to Tuscany for a film festival, where, he hopes, his youngest daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), might join him. In a meta moment, Jay studies a montage of his career that comprises clips from Clooney’s filmography: it’s effectively Clooney playing Clooney watching Clooney playing Clooney.

On Fantastic Mr Fox, Baumbach and Wes Anderson wrote dialogue to complement Clooney’s knack for reciting rat-a-tat, screwball jokes. On Jay Kelly, Clooney similarly delivers witticisms by Baumbach and his co-writer, Emily Mortimer, while looking like he’s walked off a Nespresso advert. As the film progresses, though, Clooney gets de-Clooneyed.

“The character has these crises in his life, but he’s keeping up appearances,” says Baumbach. “He’s had someone die. He’s been confronted by his friend. He thinks he’s going to be the father that he hasn’t been before. He has this certain charm and energy, but the movie strips that away, revealing the person inside. What George does so beautifully is that, without telegraphing it, he starts to crack. I haven’t seen him do that before.”

I refer to a New York Post report from 2022 with a headline of: “Noah Baumbach Netflix movie with Brad Pitt and Adam Sandler is on the way”. Baumbach sighs, saying, “Things get reported all the time that aren’t true, particularly when you haven’t even finished the script yet. I’d love to do something with Brad, but I felt like George was the right person for the movie. There’s a timeless quality about his movie stardom as an actor.”

Sandler, though, does appear in Jay Kelly as Jay’s manager, Ron, a workaholic who prioritises his client over his wife, Lois (Greta Gerwig), and their children. Likewise, Jay’s publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), further damages her work/life balance when Jay punches a fellow actor, Timothy (Billy Crudup, the film’s stand-out performer). Baumbach himself has a memorable cameo as one of Jay’s directors. “We used our own crew in a lot of that scene, too,” says Baumbach. “Sometimes you want actors you don’t have a whole history with. But it felt right for this movie to have prominent, famous people, like Patrick Wilson and Billy Crudup, come in and leave.”

This movie is about movies, and how memories are movies that we make for ourselves

A prime example is Jay’s phone call with his elder daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), who materialises in front of Jay in a forest through his imagination. If a similar trick was utilised in Greenberg or The Meyerowitz Stories, it’d be immediately jarring. “This movie is about movies, and how memories are movies that we make for ourselves,” says Baumbach. “It has cinema things built into it. The thing with the forest feels like it’s part of the movie’s language.”

Since 2016, Gerwig has practically retired from live-action acting outside of Baumbach’s movies. Together, the married duo has written three movies, including Barbie. Baumbach compares writing Jay Kelly with Emily Mortimer to writing with Gerwig. He met Mortimer a few years ago as her children play Adam Driver and Gerwig’s offspring on White Noise. “I came to Emily in a similar way to how I approached Greta about writing the first time, which is that I just like them. I like her take on things, and I like myself in our conversations. I started telling her about the movie, and I liked it in ways I wasn’t sure I liked it before.”

Baumbach is always secretive about his upcoming projects. In September, the New Yorker reported that he’s adapting Andrew Ridker’s novel Hope as a TV series for A24, while Deadline claimed further back that he’s writing a memoir for Knopf. On Hope, Baumbach states, “It’s not even kind of true. It’s just totally not true.” As for the memoir, he says, “It’s something I’ve sort of thought about.”

What’s likely is that Baumbach won’t return to action set-pieces. Emphasising that his complaints about White Noise are “not about White Noise as a movie itself”, he’s now more open about what it’s like to spend eight months shooting a $140 million sci-fi thriller. “It was Covid. The shooting was difficult. It’s not my favourite kind of filmmaking, doing very large set-pieces. As a viewer, I like watching action scenes, but I’m not interested in it as a filmmaker. It’s not something I’m eager to do again – standing on a highway at 4am at night with fake rain.”

Would Baumbach’s version of an action scene instead be the screaming argument in Marriage Story? “I wouldn’t call that fun, but it was an enriching, exciting thing to be part of, because you’re watching actors do what they do so well, whether it’s emotionally, internally, or psychologically. It’s like scenes in Jay Kelly where you watch people really ride through the dialogue.”

Still, Jay Kelly is a big-screen movie designed for cinemas, not laptop screens, and Londoners should really try to catch a 35mm presentation if they can. In many scenes, Clooney is a shrunken figure in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio that packs in the splendour of its European locations. “It has scope by design,” says Baumbach. “The frame opens up as the movie goes on. The world is less controlled by the character. He becomes a victim to the landscape.”

So it’s the opposite of Frances Ha? “But Frances also had a big score. It was in black and white, but had a cinematic quality to an ordinary life. What they both share is that they’re a celebration of movies and life at the same time. For some of us, that can co-exist.”

Jay Kelly is out now in cinemas, and is streaming on Netflix from December 5