Greta Gerwig comes of age with ‘Lady Bird’
FILM ONE OF THE EARLY AWARDS FAVOURITES
Greta Gerwig has been an actress in 25 films, a co-writer on five and co-director of one. She’s assembled wardrobes, done make-up and — thanks to her 5 ft.-9 in. height— held the boom mic. She has, in a sense, been building up for a long time to her directorial debut: “Lady Bird.”
“I was accumulating my 10,000 hours,” Gerwig said in a recent interview in a tucked-away room at Lincoln Center. “When I finished this script, I thought: You’re still going to learn things but you’re not going to learn anything more by not doing it. Whatever learning happens now is going to happen by doing it. I just decided to take the leap.”
It’s at this moment while contemplating the culmination of her professional life that a famished Gerwig first spies her lunch. “Oh my goodness, it’s a sammy,” she exclaims — a revelation quickly followed by another. “Oh, my feet are so dirty from standing outside barefoot.” For Gerwig, it comes natural that the most earnest inner ambitions can appear, from the outside, a little funny, too.
Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” which opened Friday in New York and Los Angeles, is a loosely autobiographical coming-of-age story about a high-schooler named Christine with the self-proclaimed nickname “Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan) who aspires beyond her middle-class Sacramento life. From Catholic school, she dreams of New York or at least “Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods.”
The film — richly detailed, shrewdly observed, altogether a beauty— has already found some of the best reviews of the year, placing it among the early awards-season favourites. It boasts numerous revelations — including the performances by Ronan and her fictional mother Laurie Metcalf — but none more so than this one: Gerwig is an exceptional, fully-formed filmmaker, right out of the gate.
“She nailed it in the way that she did because she’s incredibly open to people and characters and places,” says Ronan, speaking by phone from London. “One of the reasons why she’s such a fantastic storyteller is because she’s incredibly sincere. Everything that comes out of her, whether it’s on the page or when she acts or when she directs, it only comes from the most genuine place.”
Why is it that Gerwig, at 34, has made the leap to directing so flawlessly? It could be that she was a writer from the start. Her most recent scripts were “Frances Ha” (2013) and “Mistress America,” both co-written with Noah Baumbach, with whom Gerwig has been in a relationship for several years. Even her acting — simultaneously natural and self-aware — has, as Baumbach has said, carried with it something “authorial.”
Gerwig is also a proud cinephile. Claire Denis’s “Beau Travail” first awakened her to cinema as something more than theatre-on-film. “I thought, ‘That is its own country,’” she remembers. During production on “Lady Bird,” her email was overrun with screen grabs she snapped of relevant films. A sampling of inspirations: the low-key naturalism of Mike Leigh, Agnes Varda’s “Cleo From 5 to 7,” Eric Rohmer’s blocking, Howard Hawks’ dialogue (“I make talkies,” says Gerwig), “America Graffiti” (shot in nearby Stockton, California), Chantal Akerman’s rendering of a woman doing house work in “Jeanne Dielman.”
“Plainness with a purpose never gets rewarded the way it should,” she says. “Our catch phrase for the way the film looked was: ‘Plain and luscious.’”
It goes without saying, but Gerwig plans to direct again.
As a filmmaker, she has arrived. Tracy Letts, who plays Lady Bird’s father, seemed to capture the general feeling by cheerfully flashing at a festival premiere a T-shirt that read, simply, “Greta Gerwig.”