THE STUDENT BECOMES THE MASTER
Gerwig took lessons from other directors for new film Lady Bird
As an actress, Greta Gerwig has worked with some great directors, including Pablo Larraín, Todd Solondz, Rebecca Miller, Whit Stillman and Woody Allen. So she had a lot to draw upon for her solo writing and directing debut, Lady Bird. And she wasn’t above stealing some tricks.
“What’s interesting about film directors is that they generally only know how they make movies,” she says. “They’re never on another person’s set; they don’t know how another person does it.”
This extends even to her life partner, Noah Baumbach, in whose films she’s acted three times. “When I’d work with other people he’d say, ‘What do they do?’ And I’d say,” — ever the actress, she pauses dramatically — ‘You don’t know. Why would you know?’”
She continues: “I took big things and tiny things. From Noah — he forbids cellphones on set. It’s the best rule of all time, because nothing takes you out of the moment more than to look over and see somebody texting. If you need to text or make a phone call, you can leave the set and come back and be totally present.”
From Mike Mills, with whom she made 20th Century Women: “Every single crew member including him would wear name tags. Usually when you’re on set as an actor ... you won’t have enough time to remember the boom operator’s name or the second electric’s name. It makes them feel like they are their position, not full people.”
From Spike Jonze, with whom she shot a music video for Arcade Fire: “Big advice like you have to trust your gut and your hunches because that’s the only reason everyone’s there. You have to follow your north star.”
But he had quirky advice as well. “Like if you don’t like a shot and you don’t know why, just start turning off lights. And you do that partly because you probably have too many lights on, and also because it gives you just enough time to think about what you don’t like about the shot.”
Lady Bird is the story of Christine (Lady Bird) McPherson, a headstrong woman finishing high school in Sacramento, Calif., in 2002. Gerwig was born in 1983 and grew up in Sacramento, leading to the inevitable question: Are you Lady Bird?
“I am from Sacramento and I did go to a Catholic girls’ school,” she says. “But I was so much more of a rule follower, a people-pleaser type of person who wanted the gold star. I never made anyone call me by a different name or really coloured outside the lines in that way. But (Lady Bird) was an exploration of things that maybe weren’t accessible to me as a teenager, this sort of wildness and bravery and a little bit of cockiness that I admired and never really let myself have.”
Embodying that wild spirit is Irish actor Saoirse Ronan, who met Gerwig in the fall of 2015 at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“We read the entire script out loud; she read Lady Bird’s lines and I read everybody else’s lines. And I just knew she was the person.” So much so that when Ronan told her she was heading to Broadway in the spring to star in The Crucible, Gerwig said she’d wait, and delayed the film by eight months.
“We had a year of knowing each other before we started shooting,” she adds.
When they finally did, “we’d laid down all this sediment, which was so incredibly useful.”
Gerwig also had time to hone her script, which is remarkably lean. Best original screenplay is one of several likely Oscar nominations for the film.
“People were trying to figure out if there were scenes we could cut,” she recalls of post-production. “A line producer would say, ‘Well maybe we can cut this scene.’ And then I’d say, ‘Well no, because that’s when this thing happens, and then that, and then also this other thing, which connects over here.’ And they’d be like: ‘Oh, that’s right.’”
She laughs: “Just try to take it apart; you can’t. I like things like that. It’s kind of an echo of when Howard Hawks was shooting his studio movies — directors at the time wouldn’t sit in the editing room the whole time. So what they’d do if they were smart and they were control freaks is they’d shoot in a way where there was only one possible cut. And I feel that I do that as a writer. You can’t take it apart because it’s impossible.”