Director Noah Baumbach on the set of Margot at the Wedding Ken Regan/Courtesy of Paramount Vantage

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To fans of Noah Baumbach's 2004 sleeper hit, The Squid and the Whale, a painfully funny semi-autobiographical look back at the collapse of his parents' marriage during his tumultuous teenage years, it has been a long wait for the screenwriter and director to deliver his next film. In Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach gets to work with longtime girlfriend Jennifer Jason Leigh and Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman as he dissects complicated familial relationships, exploring the complex love-hate, push-and-pull sibling rivalry between adult sisters.

Margot (Kidman) decides to escape the mess of her failing marriage to Jim (John Turturro) by attending her sister Pauline's (Leigh) wedding. With son Claude (newcomer Zane Pais) in tow, Margot's reunion with her sister becomes fraught with a myriad of overlapping volatile emotions that veer from resentful envy to love and adoration when Margot voices her dislike of Pauline's choice of husband-to-be (played by Jack Black).

In this exclusive interview with PREMIERE, Baumbach talks about the script developing from a single simple image, his secret weapon, and why the film is not called Nicole in the Country.

Can you tell us about how Margot at the Wedding came about and why now, over two years after The Squid and the Whale?
I'm as curious as you are. I had an image of a mom and son on a train. I was writing another script that wasn't going very well and something about this image of a mom and son on a train made me want to write more of it. And so I started filling that out, and that's what eventually became Margot at the Wedding.

From a single picture you developed the entire script?
Yeah. When I'm writing I like to keep things somewhat unknown to myself. I don't want to try and enforce predetermined ideas or plot points or things. I want to remain open to whatever comes. If you had asked me at the time, what is that movie? I could tell you I knew that there was a movie there, but I couldn't tell you specifically what it was.

Wasn't it at one time called Nicole in the Country?
It was called Nicole in the Country and as soon as Nicole Kidman said she wanted to do it, I had to go into the final draft document and find, replace, and come up with a new name.