FEATURE:
A Modern-Day Icon
PHOTO CREDIT: Jody Rogac/Trunk Archive
Greta Gerwig: Celebrating a Phenomenal and Inspiring Filmmaker
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APOLOGIES if this….
PHOTO CREDIT: Clement Pascal for The New York Times
is a return to film. I sort of said I would step away from non-music stuff for a bit. I did not know that it was Greta Gerwig fortieth birthday tomorrow (4th August). It seems timely going back to her and one more celebration of Barbie. There is news to share about that, an interview regarding the film I will share. I will not source interviews relating to all of her films, but I want to spend a bit of time with 2017’s Lady Bird. Barbie is her most recent film, though she has co-written the screenplay for an adaptation for Snow White, slated to arrive next year. I do wonder whether there will be a Barbie follow-up. It is interesting to see which way her career will go. If Gerwig wants to return to Indie films or is interesting in making bigger-budget pictures. I am going to come to interview soon. Before that, here is some brief Wikipedia biography – just to give you an overview of Greta Gerwig and her incredible success and influence:
“Greta Celeste Gerwig (/ˈɡɜːrwɪɡ/; born August 4, 1983) is an American actress, screenwriter, and director. She first garnered attention after working on and appearing in several mumblecore movies. Between 2006 and 2009, she appeared in a number of films by Joe Swanberg, some of which she co-wrote or co-directed, including Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008).
PHOTO CREDIT: Leeor Wild/The Observer
Gerwig collaborated with her partner Noah Baumbach on several films, including Greenberg (2010) and Frances Ha (2012), for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination, Mistress America (2015), and White Noise (2022). She also appeared in Woody Allen's To Rome with Love (2012), Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan (2015), Pablo Larraín's Jackie (2016), Mike Mills' 20th Century Women (2016), and Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs (2018).
As a solo filmmaker, Gerwig has written and directed the coming-of-age films Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019), both of which earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture. For the former, she received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and for the latter, she was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Gerwig was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2018. Her third directorial production, the fantasy comedy Barbie, which she co-wrote with Baumbach, was released in 2023 to critical acclaim and box office success, becoming the biggest debut in history for a film directed by a woman”.
Lady Bird is the first film of Greta Gerwig’s that I saw. Marking her out as a hugely influential filmmaker, it starred the magnificent Saoirse Ronan as the titular lead. A huge box office success (it made nearly $80 million), Gerwig was nominated for two Academy Awards – for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. One of only a few women who had been nominated as Best Director at the Oscars, Lady Bird was also up for Best Actress for Ronan, and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Laurie Metcalf. It is a huge oversight that it went away empty-handed! Considered one of the best films of the 2010s, it is a masterpiece that showed just how inspiring and truly phenomenal Gerwig is as a writer and director. She had written and directing a lot before, but this was the first major feature I guess. The breakthrough as it were. I admire hugely filmmakers who are also distinct and successful actors. Greta Gerwig has appeared in a lot of wonderful films – including recent 2018’s Isle of Dogs and 2022’s White Noise. I want to get to the first of a couple of interviews related to Lady Bird. Variety chatted with Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan in 2018 about how they found the voice of Lady Bird:
“Fusing their voices and talent, “Lady Bird” represents a seminal moment in the careers of Gerwig, the mumblecore actress-turned-indie It Girl-turned-screenwriter-turned-director, and Ronan, the 23-year-old Irish-American star whose performance has made her an Oscar front-runner for best actress.
This is the first movie Gerwig has written and directed, and just as she has emerged from the indie world, at 34, as a titanic filmmaking talent, Ronan, after a series of highly revered performances, raises her game to a new peak of emotional purity. There have, of course, been plenty of acerbic hipster high-school girls in movies, but none with this popping-off-the-screen intensity of searching, stubborn passion.
Ronan, as a stringy-red-haired parochial-school semi-misfit named Lady Bird (née Christine McPherson), occupies the furious center of a movie that looks outwardly small-scale. Yet “Lady Bird” possesses an uncanny quality, one that you saw in the New Hollywood films of the ’70s and the indie classics of the ’90s. It has a powerfully distinctive voice — bold, darting, sneaky and new.
Gerwig calls Lady Bird a character who makes no apologies. “She’s a young woman who’s able to stand inside her own desires,” she says. “She is lustful; she wants things. Not to get too gender studies about it, but she’s not waiting for anyone to look at her. She’s the person doing the looking.”
There’s a way to read the current moment that connects “Lady Bird” to a new world of opportunity for women filmmakers. Gerwig came of age admiring directors like Claire Denis, Agnès Varda (Gerwig on Varda: “You’re just as good as Truffaut, or Godard, or your husband!”) and Kathryn Bigelow (when she won the Oscar for director, it said to Gerwig, “This is a job available, to you”). And in a year ruled by the pop gender explosion of Patty Jenkins’ superheroine blockbuster “Wonder Woman,” and one that has ended with nothing less than a paradigm shift in the issue of sexual harassment, “there’s something coalescing,” says Gerwig. “Every year they come out with the numbers. You know, out of the top 100 films, by gross, 4% are directed by women. I think those numbers are going to shift. And it seems like it’s going to be less and less its own category. There are just going to be … directors.”
In the two months since “Lady Bird” was released by A24, the indie maverick behind 2016’s Oscar-winning “Moonlight,” Gerwig’s film has become the rare independent feature that’s a crossover hit ($30 million and counting), a critical darling (99% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and a major awards player. Showered with praise from critics groups, and with four Golden Globe and three SAG Award nominations, the film is now being talked about as a serious contender for best picture at the Academy Awards. Yet what all the success adds up to — and can’t entirely measure — is that “Lady Bird” has become a touchstone, a generational movie landmark hailed for its declaration of a bold new way of seeing.
“I’ve had girls, really smart girls, come up to me, and they’re so excited that they’ve finally got their movie,” says Ronan. “A lot of them say, ‘That was me! I was Lady Bird.’ The film has actually made them understand that whole period a bit more. You feel like it’s almost a photo album you’re looking back on.”
Gerwig has always wanted to direct movies, going back to when she got her start in indie films like “Hannah Takes the Stairs” (2007), which were openly collective efforts. “When I was acting in those little movies,” she recalls, “I was also able to write while I was acting, because we had the characters and the plot devised, and we were speaking improvisationally. It felt like a way of sort of testing what worked as a writer.”
She didn’t dive headfirst into screenwriting until the two films that she co-wrote with her partner, the filmmaker Noah Baumbach. The first, “Frances Ha” (2012), is a remarkable little movie, and watching it you can see the formative stage of the Gerwig aesthetic: It, too, is a film that finds its truth in the flow of moments.
Gerwig constructs her scripts that way, but it’s more than a matter of stringing together anecdotes. “It almost feels like weaving,” she says. “I’ll put everything out in front of me when I’m writing, and I’ll almost arrange it like a quilt. And I feel like I’m pulling things through. As you move from moment to moment, it doesn’t feel like anything’s signposted for you, but a third of the way through you realize it’s starting to catch under you”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Jean Roy
Even though it is paywalled and it is a very long interview – it should be made free, as it is essential reading, but I can understand why they want to monetise it -, Vulture’s in-depth chat with Greta Gerwig from 2017 is really revealing and deep. There is more about Lady Bird but, as we look ahead to tomorrow and her fortieth birthday, the interview takes us back to her teenage years and young adult life. I will get to that part, but I was particularly struck too by the first part of the interview:
“Dave Matthews Band is generally not considered cool anymore. Almost certainly, it never was in the downtown New York world of which the actress and writer Greta Gerwig has become a cool-girl-real-girl avatar in recent years. But in a time and place (America’s vast, yearning middle-class suburbs, in the cultural desert of the Clinton and early Bush years) and to a certain kind of person (such as a teenager aching for the jazz-adjacent cred that jam-band fandom could provide but more comfortable with white ball caps and lacrosse than ponchos and hallucinogens), Dave Matthews Band was Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in 1966. And so there is a crucial moment in Lady Bird, Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, in which the title character, a Sacramento high-school senior in 2003, confronts the cruelest heartbreak imaginable to her by blasting the band’s ballad “Crash Into Me”: “Sweet like candy to my soul / Sweet you rock and sweet you roll.” The result is both sympathetic, and very funny.
“There was no other song it ever was going to be,” Gerwig said. “In preproduction, I realized I didn’t know what I was going to do if Dave said no [to its use]. I wrote him a letter. ‘Dear Mr. Dave Matthews … ’ ”
Gerwig was sitting at a small corner table near the window at Morandi in the West Village, not far from where she lives with the filmmaker Noah Baumbach. “I thought it was a really romantic song when I was a teenager. I would listen to it on repeat on a yellow CD player,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine a world in which a guy would feel that way about me.”
Maybe it was because of her sexy dirndl skirt of a name, maybe because of her squinting physical resemblance to indie Gen-X avatar Chloë Sevigny, maybe simply because of her distinctive delivery. But since the very beginning of Gerwig’s career, she has been a generational lightning rod of sorts. As what the New York Observer once called “the Meryl Streep of mumblecore” — the hyperlow-budget late-aughts movie movement led by directors like Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers — Gerwig was near-instantly labeled an “It” girl and invested with all sorts of theories about what her success and acting style meant. Her brand of hipness was confusing — was she really that earnest? Were they all that earnest? How could that possibly be cool? Critics, especially those of an older generation, were suspicious.
When Gerwig was young, her parents made a point of taking her to local Sacramento theater — she proudly ticks off the names of the companies, and the playwrights whose work they put on, and even the directors. At Barnard, where she studied playwriting, she became a Kim’s Video devotee, methodically working her way through the director-organized shelves. (It was Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail, she said, that made her shift her focus from theater to movies.) She rejected traditional paths like law and medicine. “Chekhov was a country doctor, spent all his time with people and in their homes. I was like, Well, that’s good, and then I was like, Well, I’m not interested in it, and also I don’t like blood, and there are no country doctors anymore,” she said. “The idea that I would become a doctor to become more like Chekhov is a pretty circular route.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Jean Roy
After college, Gerwig lived all over Brooklyn — East Williamsburg, Prospect Heights, deep Park Slope, or “Park Slide,” as she says fondly. She had odd jobs, including at the Box, the Lower East Side cabaret, and began working with Swanberg, whom she had met through a college boyfriend and who was making interesting movies that were unlike anything that had been done before, for almost no money.
Mumblecore was a big deal, for a small movement, in part for what it seemed to reveal about a certain slice of young, college-educated, mostly white people trying to figure out how they related to the world. It was hailed in the Times as something that “bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube. It also signals a paradigm shift in how movies are made and how they find an audience.”
Gerwig now physically cringes at the mere mention of the word mumblecore. “I just hate it,” she said. “It feels like a slight every time I hear it. Because of the improvisational quality of those movies, and the fact that everyone was nonprofessional, I have had a bit of an uphill battle just to say ‘I know how to act.’ I didn’t stumble into this. I wasn’t just a kid.” But she credits her roles in those films — Nights and Weekends, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead — with helping teach her to write. “We called them ‘devised films,’ because we’d know the characters and what was supposed to happen in the scenes but not the words. It was a way of writing while I was acting.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Jean Roy
It was also that set of films — which made a bigger splash in the indie-movie scene than in the culture at large — that put her on Baumbach’s radar. (He actually recommended her to his agent before the two had ever met.) When Baumbach cast her in 2010’s Greenberg, released when she was 26, it was her big break. Shortly after he divorced his wife, the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh (Gerwig had trained for the role, in part, by working as an assistant to Leigh’s mother), the two began their romance. Baumbach and Gerwig turned an email correspondence into a project: The duo co-wrote Frances Ha and Mistress America, both starring Gerwig and both markedly sweeter than anything Baumbach had worked on in the past. “I liked what she was writing so much that it made me work harder with my own to impress her,” Baumbach said.
This collaboration led to a spate of headlines referring to Gerwig not as a partner on the works but as their muse. “The actress Greta Gerwig has had the same liberating effect on Noah Baumbach as Diane Keaton had on Woody Allen: she has opened him up, lending his films a giddy sense of release,” went one typical summation in the Economist.
“I did not love being called a muse,” said Gerwig bluntly. “I didn’t want to be strident about it or say, ‘Hey, give me my due,’ but I did feel like I wasn’t a bystander. It was half-mine, and so that part was difficult. Also I knew secretly that I was engaged with this longer project, and wanted to be a writer and director in my own right, so I felt like the muse business, or whatever it was, was a position that I didn’t identify with in my heart. But I think one thing I learned early because of the group of movies that are called mumblecore” — she slowed down, a little archly, over the word, to acknowledge again her discomfort with it — “is not to attach too much to the moment you’re living through from a press perspective. I also had this sense of, Well, they’ll just eat their hat one day”.
I might wrap up with songs from Greta Gerwig’s films (ones she has written and/or directed). There are a few Barbie bits that I want to continue with. I will start with an interview that I sourced a couple of times when I was concentrating on Barbie and the buzz around it. Rolling Stone’s incredible interview takes us inside a box office-busting film that must rank alongside the best of the past decade. It is certainly one of the funniest and most important (and discussed/dissected) of the past decade or two:
“Well before Barbie, Gerwig had one of the most fascinating careers in 21st-century Hollywood. First, she brought a new kind of daffy comedic naturalism to screen acting, from early mumblecore triumphs like Hannah Takes the Stairs to a string of brilliant collaborations with her partner, Noah Baumbach, including Greenberg, Frances Ha, and Mistress America. She co-wrote the last two movies before shifting gears to auteurdom in 2017, writing and directing the exquisite coming-of-age comedy Lady Bird, and 2019’s revisionist take on Little Women.
Barbie, which stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling (and was co-written with Baumbach), is her biggest and most mainstream project. But she insists it doesn’t feel that way. “I’ve never been part of anything like this,” she says. “But in a funny way, it feels like the fundamentals are the same. Even though it is Barbie and it is an internationally known brand, the movie feels very personal. It feels just as intimate as Lady Bird or Little Women.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Ellen Fedors for Rolling Stone
I know you tend to resist autobiographical interpretations, but when Barbie says, “I don’t wanna be an idea anymore,” something about that really reminded me of your transition from a much-discussed actress to a writer-director.
You know what? It’s so funny. That did not occur to me at all. But now that you say it, of course! When you’re directing something, you have to be a bit stupid about yourself, or a little bit unconscious. And, yes, you’re totally right. And also, I had no idea. But that’s true. It’s completely true.
There are things like I grew up in Sacramento, and Ladybird takes place in Sacramento. But so many of the things that are personal that come through your movies are never the things that are the most obvious to you. The things where you really feel unconsciously seen are things like that, where you realize, “Oh, man, I didn’t hide anywhere.” And that’s always part of the joy of making art for people, is sometimes they understand it more than you do, which is unsettling.
Sorry!
No, but it’s good.
How did you come to decide on Barbie’s arc in the movie?
I hope two things made that journey feel surprising but inevitable. I started from this idea of Barbieland, this place with no death, no aging, no decay, no pain, no shame. We know the story. We’ve heard this story. This is an old story. It’s in a lot of religious literature. What happens to that person? They have to leave. And they have to confront all the things that were shielded from them in this place. So that felt like one thing.
There’s a lovely scene where Barbie sees an older woman — a sight she’d never encountered in Barbieland — and tells her she’s beautiful.
I love that scene so much. And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She’s a legend. It’s a cul-de-sac of a moment, in a way — it doesn’t lead anywhere. And in early cuts, looking at the movie, it was suggested, “Well, you could cut it. And actually, the story would move on just the same.” And I said, “If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”
The feminism in this film comes out so naturally, just by placing Barbie and Ken in the real world. It starts the moment they arrive in Venice Beach. Ken feels that people are suddenly looking at him with respect, and Barbie doesn’t have the words for it, but she feels she’s being objectified. Did that flow out as naturally as it seems?
I think of the film as humanist above anything else. How Barbie operates in Barbieland is she’s entirely continuous with her environment. Even the houses have no walls, because you never need to hide because there’s nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed of. And suddenly finding yourself in the real world and wishing you could hide, that’s the essence of being human. But when we were actually shooting on Venice Beach, with Margot and Ryan in neon rollerblading outfits, it was fascinating because it was actually happening in front of us. People would go by Ryan, high-five him, and say, “Awesome, Ryan, you look great!” And they wouldn’t actually say anything to Margot. They’d just look at her. It was just surreal. In that moment, she did feel self-conscious. And as the director, I wanted to protect her. But I also knew that the scene we were shooting had to be the scene where she felt exposed. And she was exposed, both as a celebrity and as a lady. To be fair, Ryan was like, “I wish I wasn’t wearing this vest.” [Laughs.] But it was a different kind of discomfort.
When I hear you use the word “humanist,” I feel like I need to gently push back on behalf of the fans who are going to love this movie and perceive its message as unabashedly feminist.
Of course, I am a feminist. But this movie is also dealing with [the idea that] any kind of hierarchical power structure that moves in any direction isn’t so great. You go to Mattel and it is really like, “Oh, Barbie has been president since 1991. Barbie had gone to the moon before women could get credit cards.” We kind of extrapolated out from that that Barbieland is this reversed world [where Barbies rule and Kens are an underclass]. The reverse structure of whatever Barbieland is, is almost like Planet of the Apes. You can see how unfair this is for the Kens because it’s totally unsustainable”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Greta Gerwig had the cast and crew of Lady Bird wear name tags to create a warm atmosphere on set/PHOTO CREDIT: A24 via TIME
Before wrapping up, there are a couple of other articles I want to put in here. I will also drop in videos of interviews with Greta Gerwig, as I want to give you a big and wide an impression as I can – even if I am scratching the surface here. The Atlantic is the next interview that I will come to. You do not often get films where people dress up (in pink for Barbie, of course!). There is this whole scene and world. One of the most-discussed and people-connecting films of this generation, it is no wonder Barbie became the first studio comedy to gross more than $100 million in its first weekend, as well as scoring the highest opening in North America ever for a female director:
“Shirley Li: There are big ideas in this Barbie movie about self-worth and how what we consume—or play with, in the case of dolls—affects who we become. I noticed a little girl at my screening asking lots of questions during the film; she seemed a bit confused by the headier themes but was having a good time, especially when the dolls sang and danced. So I’m curious: When you and Noah were writing the film, who did you picture as your viewer?
Greta Gerwig: I don’t really have a strong sense of, Here’s stuff for kids; here’s stuff for adults. I know there’s stuff that is more heady, but when I look back at my viewing experiences as a kid, it was often the things that were just beyond me that were the most compelling, because they felt like a little window into a world that I was emerging into.
Li: Like what?
Gerwig: This is a very strange, very specific memory, but when I was 5, my dad was working in New York, and my mom and I got rush tickets to Gypsy. I didn’t understand most of it, but when Gypsy is performing in a burlesque club, there are these strippers wearing old-timey stripper outfits with sparkles, and I loved it. I didn’t understand half of what had gone on, but we got one of those big commemorative books, and I remember just studying the pages where all the strippers were, because I thought they were so beautiful. I didn’t have any sense of them being objectified. I just loved that they wore these beautiful, glittery outfits and big headdresses. There’s probably a ton of memories I have like that.
Li: Lady Bird is based on your own experiences, Little Women is a book you loved growing up, and you played with Barbies when you were young. Has using your films to revisit the touchstones of childhood been an intentional choice for you?
Gerwig: Honestly, it’s something that’s been somewhat hidden from me in the making of them, because on the surface they look so different. But now that I’m through this one, I can see that they’re all circling this idea. [Laughs.] You’re interested in what you’re interested in, and I’m interested in women. But I also think—and this sounds kind of silly—one of my obsessions, as it were, is that I truly kind of can’t believe that we live in linear time. [Laughs.] It’s a shocker. Obviously, when you have a kid, you’re extremely connected to that, but you can be connected to it within your life as well.
And I think that in trying to pull it together and understand where you are and where you’ve been, there’s always an ache in it. Clearly that was the way in which I approached adapting Little Women, because I saw the characters as adults, suddenly, in a way that I had never seen them when I was young. And with Lady Bird, it’s a story with a high-school student, and there are certain things that you feel it’s important to hit, like the prom, but actually it’s about your mother, and your leaving. It’s something I return to because cinema is inherently a time capsule anyway, so it already deals in time. It’s what I’m intellectually and artistically interested in, and the medium itself seems to have that already embedded in it.
Li: This is such a massive movie, and it’s a high-pressure moment in your career. You hold a lot of power as a filmmaker now, and I have to ask, what do you intend to do with it?
Gerwig: [Laughs.] What do I intend? Being a filmmaker is an amazing thing, because movies are hard, and you’ll never really get on top of the mountain. Because whatever you’re making next, you haven’t made—so then you’re going to learn what you don’t know about this movie, you know? It’s difficult, and that’s part of the appeal. But then, also, you’re only going to make a movie, if you’re lucky, once every two, three, four years. So if you start doing the math of a life, you realize, What am I going to do, make 15 movies? You know, not too many. But if I’m lucky, I can get to a life that will feel as meaningful as anything I could hope to do. I do want to make movies in my 60s and my 70s, and God willing, maybe I’ll make some extremely strange ones in my 80s.
Li: Now that you’ve done the big-budget studio tentpole, how do you envision your storytelling evolving? I imagine that you haven’t always been doing the math of a life.
Gerwig: I want to be able to make movies at all scales. I like having the skill set to make something tiny, and I like having the skills to paint with the biggest brushes. It’s always about what’s going to give you the most freedom creatively, and that can mean different things”.
Let’s finish things off. A very happy fortieth birthday to Greta Gerwig for tomorrow. I know it is uncouth and a little ungentlemanlike to mention her age, but it is a milestone. I do the same for artists, because you get a sense of how far they have come in that time. As Gerwig approaches her fifth decade of life, she will be looking at new opportunities. Now considered one of the most talented and distinct directors and writers (and actors) around, I guess some future plans might be impacted by the writers’ and actors’ strike in Hollywood. It is a shame that Gerwig cannot instantly build on the momentum of Barbie. Let’s hope things are resolved soon. On 25th July, The New York Times published an interview with Greta Gerwig. They asked her about the early success and box office receipts of a film that has been on everyone’s mind. It is obvious, after Lady Bird and Little Women, this will be Gerwig’s third film in a row (as writer and/or director) that is going to be nominated for Oscars:
“You just had one of the most consequential weekends of your life. How are you feeling?
I’m so grateful. I’m so amazed. I’m at a loss for words, really. I’ve been in New York City and spent Thursday and Friday just spot-checking different theaters, listening to the levels and making sure the picture looked nice and trying to relinquish control, which is difficult. But honestly, it’s been amazing to walk around and see people in pink. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine something like this. It’s just … it’s … sorry, I’m just disintegrating into noises.
What specific things helped you get a grasp on how much the film was resonating?
I think part of the reason I was so fixated on volume levels was because it was a thing I could concentrate on. But mostly, it’s been running into people on the street who are excited and happy and exuberant, because so much of this movie was an attempt to create something that people would want to experience together. So it’s the little things.
My producer David Heyman sent me an email from someone who lives in a tiny Scottish town, and there’s a movie theater there that has been struggling, and they had sold-out shows all weekend for “Barbie.” He was like, “The town is showing up!” And my brother and his sons and his wife all went in Sacramento and sent a picture, then they sent a text saying their oldest son was going back the next day with his friends. These 15- or 16-year-old boys from Sacramento are sending me texts saying, “It was great! We loved the Porsche joke!” Those are the things that feel so amazing. I’ve never quite had anything like this.
The thing I keep hearing from people in Hollywood is “I don’t know how she got away with it.” When a theatrically released movie is made at this budget level, anything idiosyncratic or challenging often gets whittled down by studio notes. How were you able to preserve your sensibility the whole way through this process?
I was originally meant to just write it with Noah, and then we finished the script and that was the thing that made me want to direct it. It felt so clear to me: If they didn’t want to make that [version], I didn’t need to make it. Margot, as the producer and star, was really the first person to line up and say, “I want to do it her way.” And then as we started adding collaborators and gathering more cast, suddenly there was a large number of people who were excited to do something that was this, excuse the pun, out of the box.
Part of me thinks that because it was all so idiosyncratic and so wild, it was almost like no one really knew where to start taking it apart. Like, where are you going to start hacking away at how strange it was? Maybe because there was this sense of sheer joy behind it, it was this hard thing to say, “Oh no, we don’t want that thing that’s sheer joy.” People wanted it to exist, in all its weirdness.
In your mind, is this movie the start of a franchise, or do you feel “Barbie” is a complete story with a definitive ending?
At this moment, it’s all I’ve got. I feel like that at the end of every movie, like I’ll never have another idea and everything I’ve ever wanted to do, I did. I wouldn’t want to squash anybody else’s dream but for me, at this moment, I’m at totally zero”.
A very happy birthday to Greta Gerwig! It is a good reason to celebrate someone who has helped create one of the best films I have ever seen. It brought people together, led to these conversations about feminism and the patriarchy and, more than that, it highlighted the incredible talent and visionary mind of Greta Gerwig. The Sacramento-born, New York-based writer, actor and director is going to be giving the world outstanding films for decades more. From her T.V. and film acting roles to her directing and writing, there is a very distinct Greta Gerwig style and feel. She puts so much character, intelligence, humour and, when required, emotion, into her work. It has been a pleasure, for the last time for a little while, to salute…
THE fabulous Greta Gerwig.