Two years ago, writer-director Noah Baumbach looked back on his Brooklyn childhood with the tender, devastating “The Squid and the Whale”—and garnered an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. In his follow-up, “Margot at the Wedding,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival and hits theaters next month, Baumbach insists there are zero—zilch, nil—autobiographical touches in this movie.

This, despite the very suspicious fact that his main character, Margot, played by Nicole Kidman, is an emotionally erratic Manhattan writer who has alienated her family by penning intimate stories about their lives. Doth the writer-director protest too much?

In the film, Margot travels to the Hamptons with her teenage son (newcomer Zane Pais) to attend her sister's wedding (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black play the spouses-to-be)—and to try to repair their familial rift. In the process, old wounds are reopened, an ex-husband shows up unannounced and a war with crazy neighbors comes to a head.

Only a tried-and-true New Yorker like Baumbach could make a movie about a Long Island vacation that turns out to be no day at the beach. Here are a few things we learned about it at the New York Film Festival.

Village people

As the post-screening panel of Leigh, Baumbach, Kidman and Turturro (who plays Margot's ex) filed in for the press conference, critic and selection committee member J. Hoberman began by announcing sheepishly, “I’m feeling a little star-struck up here.” Hoberman really shouldn’t have been so tongue-tied: He’s known Baumbach since the writer-director's days as a young Village Voice intern.

Baumbach and Leigh, who are married to each other, are also downtown denizens, living and working in the West Village, not far from Hoberman’s Voice offices on Lafayette Street. Plus, Turturro and Kidman both keep residences in the city, so they’re all practically neighbors.

Hamptons share

The center of the action in the film—the family beach house on Long Island—served double duty as both a rehearsal space and a shooting location. The whole cast says this extra time together contributed to their ability to give such nuanced and complex performances.

“We had many weeks of rehearsal up in the Hamptons,” Kidman said, “and were able to embody the characters gently. It was a very beautiful process, and one that I know Noah really fought for on this film. All of that rehearsal begins to bleed into the work in a way you can’t fake.”

Baumbach said he used that rehearsal time to subtly tweak his script, and to mold it to fit the actors’ personalities. Although the director doesn’t rely on improvisation—the finished product is fairly close to what was scripted—he explained that he wanted the cast to “find out how they fit with the lines and to find their way into them.” The final result feels like a real family sniping at each other the way only your relatives can.

Home style

One of the film’s most striking elements is cinematographer Harris Savides’s stunningly naturalistic camera work. Baumbach told the festival audience that they achieved this unstudied look by using older, imperfect lenses from the ‘70s and shooting primarily with natural light.

“We spent a lot of time designing and testing setups before shooting,” Baumbach explained. “I wanted to capture that feeling of being inside without the lights on, and how I actually see the world. You don’t often see that in the movies.” Looks like Baumbach succeeded: “Margot at the Wedding” feels like an old photograph and evokes a nostalgia similar to the meticulous period details found in “The Squid and the Whale."