Noah Baumbach's 'White Noise' to open New York Film Festival

In addition to opening this month’s Venice Film Festival, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” will also kick off the 60th New York Film Festival

Venice Film Festival White Noise

In addition to opening this month's Venice Film Festival, Noah Baumbach's adaptation of Don DeLillo's “White Noise” will also kick off the 60th New York Film Festival.

Film at Lincoln Center, which puts on the annual New York festival, announced Tuesday that “White Noise” will launch this year's edition on Sept. 30 at Alice Tully Hall. Baumbach's film, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, adapts DeLillo's classic 1985 novel about a toxic event in a suburban college town.

The Netflix release is already slated to open the 79th Venice Film Festival on Aug. 31. But Baumbach, a New York native, has a long history with the New York Film Festival, which he regularly attended as a kid. Six of his previous films have played in NYFF's main slate, from 1995's “Kicking and Screaming” to 2019's “Marriage Story,” which was the festival's centerpiece selection that year.

“In 1985 my father and I drove from Brooklyn to see Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’ open the 23rd NYFF, the same year that he brought home the hardback of Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise,’” said Baumbach in a statement. “Opening the 60th NYFF with ‘White Noise’ is truly special for me. This festival was part of my film education and has been a home for me and many of my movies over the years."

Dennis Lim, the festival's artistic director, called Baumbach's adaptation “an unequivocal triumph: a wildly entertaining and morbidly funny meditation on the way we live now that is also the director’s most ambitious and expansive film."

The New York Film Festival runs Sept. 30-Oct. 16.