LADY BIRD BOSS
ON HER STAR, THE SCANDALS AND ‘GROWN-UP’ MOVIE LOVE Writer/director talks of finding Saoirse Ronan inspiring and waiting for ‘women to take charge’
Greta Gerwig wants it to be known that she’s never leapt out of a speeding car, even if the protagonist does so in Lady Bird, her acclaimed new film.
Why would anybody think she’d do such a thing? Well, maybe it’s because Saoirse Ronan, the Irish actor who plays the rebellious teen title star, does such a grand job of making us think of Gerwig, the popular comic actor ( Frances Ha, Mistress America) who remained behind the camera this time as writer/ director of her debut feature.
Lady Bird lives in Sacramento, Calif., Gerwig’s hometown. Her mom’s a nurse, she goes to an all-girls Catholic school and she embraces life with a cockeyed optimism. Ditto Gerwig.
So the Oscar-buzzed film, which opened Friday in Toronto, is at least semi-autobiographical. But let’s clarify the car incident, which happens when Lady Bird is having one of her many “discussions” with her mother, played by Laurie Metcalf.
“I never jumped out of a moving car,” says Gerwig, 34, during a recent Toronto promotional visit.
“I did get out of a vehicle once (during a dispute), but it was a stopped car. The car scene in the movie felt like, emotionally, completely realistic. Everybody knows the feeling of when you’re in a car and you’re fighting, and you want to push them out or you want to jump out, or some combination of the two. You’re literally trapped with the person in the space . . . I just always knew that’s how I wanted to start the movie.”
Gerwig does have a talent for coping with difficult transport issues. En route to Toronto late last month, she was stranded by bad weather at the Washington, D.C., airport. Realizing she was going to miss her Q&A at a Toronto preview screening, she bought herself a pizza, got out her smartphone and conducted her own amusing Q&A inside the airport terminal, which she emailed to play at the screening.
When she finally made it here the next morning, attired in a patterned dress and smart black blazer, she was ready to talk more about Lady Bird.
Saoirse is great as Lady Bird, but did you worry at all that she could do an American accent without the Irish lilt?
She read the script and she really responded to it. Then we Skyped and she said, “Listen, I know I’m from a tiny town in Ireland all the way across the world, but I know this story, I know it in my bones and I know this character, and can we meet up?” And we met up in Toronto, at TIFF in 2015 — she was here with Brooklyn and I was here with Maggie’s Plan — and we sat in her hotel room and we read the entire script out loud. She read all of Lady Bird’s lines and I read everybody else’s lines, and I knew right away that she was the person. But I selfishly wanted to hear the whole script read out loud by her.
I knew she was right for so many reasons, but one of the reasons was I just started getting ideas right away of how I wanted to shoot it, and the kinds of actors I wanted around her, and how I wanted to dress her. I suddenly had all these impulses, which is, I think, when you know you’re on the right track.
She did a perfect Valley Girl accent in an interview with me in the same year at TIFF, when the Star was asking celebrities about their secret talents.
Yes, she’s a master of transformation. She really has that double ability that some actors have, where she can be quite technical — she can do an accent and take on a whole person that she’s not, with the walk and the hair — and, at the same time, she can stay completely open to spontaneity and what’s happening in the moment. The technical side of it never hampers her life. That’s the quality I think a lot of the greats have.
The rest of the cast is also impeccable, especially Laurie Metcalf as Lady Bird’s mom.
I know! It felt like it was a really deep bench and every day it was just such a sheer pleasure for me to watch them work. It’s one of my favourite things to do, which is to watch actors say lines that I’ve written, and figure out the best way to capture them and capture the moment. It’s a very pure, addictive feeling.
You wanted to be a playwright growing up, but is your real life passion being an actor, writer and director for the movies?
Initially, I wanted to be a playwright; it was sort of what I was interested in college and I actually applied to graduate school, although I didn’t get into any of those programs. But I had started falling in love with cinema when I was in college.
If theatre was my first love, then cinema was my grown-up love. But it wasn’t something that I imagined I could have a career in, because it just seemed so unlikely that I would be able to do it. I was writing all the time and making things all the time, and acting in other people’s things and film felt like it was kind of the Wild West . . . it all seemed like someone was going to call me and say, “OK, now you have to find a real job.” But as I learned more and more, and grew into it more and more, I just became certain that what I wanted to do was write and direct.
Is there anything you want to say about what everybody’s talking about right now, all the sex scandals that are erupting out of Hollywood?
I guess what I want to do is shine a light on the women that I have admired my whole career and also who I’ve had the privilege to get to know, especially with this film, these directors and writers and producers and leaders of the industry. The ones who are classics, like Kathryn Bigelow ( The Hurt Locker) and Sofia Coppola ( Lost in Translation), and also Patty Jenkins ( Wonder Woman), Dee Rees ( Mudbound), Maggie Betts ( Novitiate) and Valerie Faris ( Little Miss
Sunshine). I just feel like that’s the answer. I’m heartbroken over it (the scandals) and I’m heartbroken for all the women and men who’ve experienced what they’ve experienced, and I’m also so ready for all these women to take charge.
We’ll soon be seeing you on the big screen again, in Wes Anderson’s new film Isle of Dogs. Can you tell us anything about it?
Well, I play a human; I don’t play a dog. But my human has great hair and awesome, wonderful costumes, if you can call them costumes, because it’s all animated, but stopmotion. It’s going to be great.