Even Noah Baumbach gets emotional when he revisits his 2005 indie dramedy The Squid and the Whale. In 2016, when it was added to the Criterion Collection, he watched the film again for the first time in years. It hit him hard: “I couldn’t stop crying watching it,” he tells Vanity Fair.

Though The Squid and the Whale was Baumbach’s third feature film, it now feels like the beginning of his career as a writer and director. The story, about two brothers ( Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline ) whose parents ( Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney ) are going through a divorce, came from a deeply personal place: The filmmaker also has a brother, grew up in Brooklyn, and watched helplessly as his intellectual writer parents divorced in the ’80s.

It’s not just the script that reflected Baum

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