Fictional story, real emotions

Writer-director Noah Baumbach insists his coming-of-age drama, “The Squid and the Whale,” is not autobiographical.

Set in New York in 1986, the film revolves around two brothers, 16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline, the son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates), trying to cope with their parents’ separation and divorce. Laura Linney plays their mother, a housewife who is finding success as a writer; Jeff Daniels is their snobbish father, a once-popular novelist who now teaches literature in college.

In real life, Baumbach and his younger brother grappled with their parents’ divorce. And his parents are both literati: His mother is Georgia Brown, a former film critic for the Village Voice; his father is Jonathan Baumbach, a novelist and critic.

“In real life, I was 14 and my brother was 9,” Baumbach explains. “From the very beginning, I moved the characters older because I wanted Jesse’s character to be more in the world of girls ... getting closer to that point in his life. The whole thing was fictional from the start, but the emotion was real.”

Writing the script, says Baumbach, was a creative breakthrough for him. “Whether the script had worked out or I got the movie made, it really was at the time a big deal for me to connect as closely as I could to something that felt emotionally raw.”

“The Squid and the Whale” earned Baumbach best-director honors at the Sundance Film Festival. The title for the film, which opens Friday, comes from the giant diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York of a sperm whale attacking a giant squid. It’s a place Baumbach recalls visiting as a child.

“Though we lived in Brooklyn, it was like we were traveling into this magic city of Manhattan,” he explained. “That diorama was always frightening to me, but I was always intrigued by it.”

Baumbach wrote and directed the comedies “Kicking and Screaming” -- that’s the 1995 dramedy about young adults trying to find their way, not the kids’ soccer comedy -- and “Mr. Jealousy” (1997), and co-wrote last year’s “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” with his good friend Wes Anderson. But he never set out to temper his current film’s dramatic elements with comedic moments.

“I never thought, ‘I don’t want this to be too serious or too funny,’ ” he said. “I just interpreted as I saw it. I was ready to write this stuff. I never felt it was too painful. I was just trying to tell the story as honestly as I could.”

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-- Susan King