‘Lady Bird’: How Greta Gerwig Found Her Unique Rhythm in the Written Word – Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast
Before she directed “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig brought a unique rhythm and cadence to the characters she played. The pinnacle of this came in “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America,” scripts she co-wrote with director Noah Baumbach, in which her characters’ graceful awkwardness and effortless rapid-fire line deliveries established her as one of her generation’s most exciting leading ladies. “Lady Bird,” Gerwig’s first solo directing credit, embodies so much of that Gerwig rhythm and feel — but with the actress behind the camera.
When Gerwig was a guest on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, she traced this back to her love of playwrights and not the DIY, improv-heavy microbudget productions that first introduced her to indie film fans.
“As a writer my writing was grounded in writing plays and admiring playwrights and in theater the playwright is king, you don’t change those words – you don’t change Kenneth Lonergan’s words, you say them,” said Gerwig. “I remember when I was in college, writing pretty strange plays, that the best feeling I ever had was when I stood in the back of the theater and actors were performing something I had written.”
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts to the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast
After graduating Barnard College, Gerwig was rejected from playwright graduate programs at NYU, Juilliard and Yale, and found herself – after a fortuitous trip to the 2006 SXSW Film Festival – as part of making a DIY crew of filmmakers – like Swanberg and the Duplass Brothers – using new DSLR cameras and making a new breed of indie films. This demystified the filmmaking process for her, but something was missing. Then Noah Baumbach sent her the script for “Greenberg,” in which Gerwig would star opposite Ben Stiller, and she started to figure it out. “I understood it right away, and the rhythm and musical thing,” said Gerwig about reading the “Greenberg” script. “I knew how it should sound intuitively and not line readings, almost the internal rhythms of the language.”
Working with Baumbach on “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America” helped embolden her approach. “He’s so meticulous with his language and he’s so careful about how he constructs something and that really went along with my sensibility,” she said, adding that it’s “hard to overstate how important that was to my development.”
While on the podcast Gerwig also talked about what her artistic dreams were when she, like Lady Bird, came to New York to go to college, her collaboration with DP Sam Levy in creating the look of the film and how her preparation on the visual aspect of “Lady Bird” allowed her to properly use her time on set.
The Filmmaker Toolkit podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, SoundCloud and Google Play Music. Previous episodes include:
- Darren Aronofsky: ‘Keeping Audiences on the Edge of Their Seat’ in ‘mother!’
- Jordan Peele Talks About His Worst Fear in Making ‘Get Out’
- Call Me by Your Name’ Director Luca Guadagnino Hates Actors Who ‘Act’
- ‘Mudbound’ Director Dee Rees Breaks the Rules of Narrative
- “The Florida Project” Director Sean Baker
- Andrea Arnold on “American Honey”
- Barry Jenkins on “Moonlight”
- Ezra Edelman on “OJ: Made in America”
- Paul Verhoeven’s refusal to be censored
- “The Witch” director Robert Eggers on adapting “Nosferatu”
- Eric Heisserer on adapting “Arrival”
- Mia Hansen-Love & David Ehrlich’s Top 25 Video Countdown
- Damien Chazelle and Editor Tom Cross on “La La Land”
- James Gray on “Lost City of Z”
- ‘Black Mirror’: Why Charlie Brooker Wrote ‘San Junipero’
- Sam Esmail on Shooting “Mr. Robot” Like an Indie Film
- Trey Edward Shults on “It Comes at Night” and Terrence Malick
- David Lowery on simplicity and time in “A Ghost Story”
- Kogonada on Transitioning from Video Essays to ‘Columbus’
- Safdie Brothers on Building “Good Time” Around Robert Pattinson
- Kirsten Johnson discussing her life as a “Cameraperson”
The music used in this podcast is from the “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present” score, courtesy of composer Nathan Halpern.
