Mr. Baena also co-wrote the 2004 film “I Heart Huckabees,” a dark comedy that stars Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin and Mark Wahlberg. The film, about an environmentalist who hires “existential detectives,” was not a box office success but developed a cult following for its quirky plotlines and characters.
“My parents were divorced, so I’m sure the trauma of divorce helped inform my sense of humor,” Mr. Baena said in an interview on Fresh Fiction, a YouTube channel, in 2022. “Most comedy probably comes from drama.”
He decided to become a filmmaker at 11 years old, he told Fresh Fiction, when he was flipping through cable television channels and tuned into Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” He was so intrigued by the film that he asked his father to take him to a video rental store, where they rented the 1963 Federico Fellini film “8 ½.”
“I was always drawn to weirdo movies,” he said on Fresh Fiction. He said he was exposed “to a lot of stuff that I think was a little bit left of center, and so that was normalized for me,” adding, “I sought it out.”
Jeffrey Baena was born on June 29, 1977, and grew up in Miami. He graduated from New York University in 1999, where he majored in film and minored in medieval and renaissance studies, according to The New Yorker.
