Ad-Rock has a new movie. 

In the indie film While We’re Young, Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz has a supporting role playing Ben Stiller’s best friend. Josh (Stiller) and Cornelia Srebnick (Naomi Watts) are a happily married middle-aged couple whose career and marriage are overturned when they befriend a charming and spontaneous young couple, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Horovitz has dabbled in acting over the last thirty years, but we definitely look forward to seeing more of him on the big screen. He spoke about his work in the film below:

How did you get involved?

Ad-Rock: Noah asked me to do it. And so, I said, yes. Noah asked me to do it and I love his movies that he makes and I love these guys and what they do. Someone like Noah says will you do it, you just do it. I mean not anything, but some things.

Do you feel connected to this film?

Ad-Rock: I did. Being in a band and stuff, as you put out records, as years go by whole new styles of music come out. So there’s always the thing do you follow that? I feel like we never followed specific things. It’s interesting to be like the guy that didn’t follow the thing in the movie.

Writer/Director Noah Baumbach and the cast also reflected on the project:

At what point in your real life did you feel a disconnect with younger people, when you felt, “OK, I’m a grown-up now”?

Ben Stiller: When I realized all I listen to is the Beastie Boys. Having kids was the first time for me that I started to feel like I had to not think of myself. I have never really not thought of myself as older, but you start having these responsibilities and then after you do get to a certain point where you realize taste in music. Where you just can’t keep up. I remember that like years ago where you’re just feeling not aware of that, and it’s just too much work to have to listen to. I’ll try to listen to the stations, the different stations like alt nation or something on Sirius, but I always find myself going back to like … Eighties on eighties.

How do you all feel like the advancement of technology is impacting the quality of relationships?

Amanda Seyfried: Besides negatively? Maybe. Sometimes.

Ben Stiller: I think there’s good and bad. You know, I’m on location now for a movie I’m just able to FaceTime with my kids is something that’s kind of amazing and great. Skype-ing. Those things is really incredible … It’s also easier to hide behind the technology not have actual human interaction. Like, you know, kids in their twenties hardly talk on the phone with each other. You know, texting is talking. Not that I know what kids do.

What did you learn from your character?

Amanda:  I didn’t learn any lessons. She doesn’t seem to worry about much. I mean there’s this whole  burden I carry on my shoulders constantly and I’m really actively working on loosening up, kind of being mindful and she’s got that, I don’t know I think she’s born with it.

Josh is passionate about bringing authenticity to his documentaries. What do you think about that in real life, as far as actual art and film?

Ben:  I think that Josh in the movie, he’s kind of more concerned with himself. This idea that, you know, truth in his work in cinema. I feel like for me, I don’t know I feel like all art is based on other art. To a certain extent, but I think what Noah’s talking about in the film is a very real thing. That’s been going on for a while. Reality television has sort of blurred the lines in a lot of ways between what’s real and what isn’t, and what’s scripted and what isn’t, and what people want to see in documentaries in particular. Because they want to be entertained. When I think of the documentaries that can actually tell you a truth and be entertaining, draw you in, where is the line?  I don’t know. I’m not a documentarian, so it’s something they have to deal with I think. But it’s probably tougher I imagine today because people are so used to being entertained by quote unquote the reality television … There’s a crossover there that sort of blurred the lines between what’s actuall truthful. Even I think great documentarians seem to know how to fashion a story and still make it dramatic, make those choices. So those choice are always artistic, creative choices that have to be made by the film maker. A lot of times biopics or movies about real life subjects that are dramatic, you know, not documentaries, they are always making those choice and creating scenes that didn’t necessarily happen but to try to imbue you with the idea of what happened.

https://youtu.be/NRUcm9Qw9io

 

Noah, why did you decide to make Josh a documentary filmmaker, as opposed to a narrative filmmaker? 

Noah: Initially, I liked the idea that that they could all have an occupation that would be visual and also something they could collaborate on. Just the way you capture documentary film, this notion that you are really just filming life. Which is not really what it is, but it’s at least that’s how we perceive it. I didn’t want them to be overtly staging something. It couldn’t be a fiction film. It really was more to create a way that their work could kind of represent them. Each generation’s work could represent them in different ways. That could be something that you could see and something that would be, an audience could kind of react to. Once I had this documentary idea though, I had to then engage in these questions of authenticity and things and there were arguments that I engaged in fully with the characters and through the characters but I didn’t come to conclusions myself. I thought I was telling the story of a marriage and I needed to kind of find a resolution to that that was satisfying for the movie and hopeful. The arguments were things that I wasn’t going to ever have an answer for.

Can you talk about working with costume designer Ann Roth on While We’re Young?

Noah: Anne and I started working together on Margot At The Wedding was the first one we did together. People don’t know she worked  Mike Nichols who most of his career … She sees the whole movie. It’s not just the clothing. The actors can speak to this. They’ll come in for fittings and she’ll have this whole back story and ideas. The first time I worked with her she started talking about the back story of one of the characters and I thought I had sounded stupid … I hadn’t even thought of the back story. She had this thing of maybe she sits on the porch. She had this whole other movie. I just kind of went along with it. But I’m now used to it. I can let her fill in the back story for me. She has a way of dressing people that — it’s that thing you can’t put your finger on. It kind of transcends whatever the clothing actually is and somehow she’s sees the movie. I’ll see things later in dailies that are just texture in a shirt or something and go, I’m so glad that’s there. I didn’t even realize when we picked it. It was important for this movie too because we’re dealing with now and but we’re sort of taught to be I suppose true to what’s going on now and what these people would really wear, but I wanted it to feel timeless.  I knew we weren’t going to try to imitate Brooklyn youth culture. We would never catch up if we tried to document what was actually happening now. With her, we just invented our own kind of style. She’s the one to do that. She’s great.

 

Ben, how do you relate to your character? In real life, are you skeptical when a younger, less established artist approaches you with a project or for friendship? 

Ben: I relate to a lot of the issues that are going on in the movie, though. Noah has such a great way of illuminating these little things, these little details about life and interactions between people. What it is to live your life. These little experiences that don’t necessarily get translated to the movies that often. Movies are usually about bigger, more dramatic events. Noah will find the drama in these little moments. That’s what, to me, is so interesting about his stuff. As an actor, it’s fun getting in to that stuff. You’re like Oh yeah, I know that. I had that experience or just like how they make a runner in the movie where Jamie is never really picking up the check. Those kinds of things, the little sort of mini dramas in our life. That are big to us, because you think about something like that for the rest of the night.

Ben and Noah, While We’re Young is the second film you worked on together. Greenberg was a very L.A.-centric movie, and “While We’re Young” is centered in New York. 

Ben: Definitely very different experiences … I was using the word laconic, is that right? I don’t know. I said probably it was more laconic, laid back feeling when we were making Greenberg in LA. They’re both very small crews and Noah works in a very focused sort of way. But I do think that the energy of both places is so different. I feel like that’s what is sort of captured in both movies. I really like the energy that Noah captured of LA and Greenberg. I think this movie is much more New York centric movie and has that feeling to it.

 

Noah:  In both cases I wanted the city to exist as it would around our fiction within it and I like that feeling in movies where you can feel real life around something that’s clearly scripted. The challenge becomes how can you get Ben’s story in to the world without people ruining your takes.

Noah, can you talk about the  soundtrack? 

Noah: The two songs that were in the screenplay were the Tupac “Hit ‘Em Up” song, where [Josh and Cornelia] had to learn the dance to that specific song. Amanda, I think, still performs it. And [Survivor’s] “Eye of the Tiger” was also in the script. But some of the music came from thinking about the taste of the characters, particularly continuing with that technology joke that the younger people are analog and the older people are up-to-the-moment digitally. I felt like the younger people would play music from Ben and Naomi’s generation.

So thinking about “All Night Long,” the Lionel Richie song and the Psychedelic Furs, the idea that they were presenting this culture back to the older in a new form that makes them think, “That was a good song.” That really happened to me with “All Night Long.” I really sold that song short. When I was a teenager, I did not like it. I did not like that record at all. But now, I think it’s great.

The film is now playing.