Greta Gerwig names the director she always “loved”
Even prior to the wild commercial and critical success of Barbie, Greta Gerwig had announced herself as one of the best film directors of her generation, following on from her acclaim as an actor. With Nights and Weekends and Little Women to her name, Gerwig had already established herself as a serious talent behind the camera.
And one ought not to forget her remarkable 2017 film Lady Bird, which marked Gerwig’s solo directorial debut. Taking place in Sacramento between 2002 and 2003 and starring Saoirse Ronan in the lead role, the film tells of a high school senior and the difficult relationship she has with her mother.
During an interview with Slate, Gerwig was asked about the kinds of films that had inspired her when she was growing up in the same way that Lady Bird had likely done for so many young people when it was first released. After naming the likes of Pariah, Diary of a Teenage Girl and Edge of Seventeen, Gerwig turned her attention to one of her favourite directors.
“I, for one, selfishly am so pleased that these movies are being made because I’m interested in young women occupying personhood. It’s something that I didn’t see, actually, growing up,” Gerwig said. “There were films that had some edge of it, but it didn’t have the fullness of it. I felt like I was missing that. I loved John Hughes movies. I mean, I loved Pretty in Pink.”
John Hughes directed several classic movies of the 1980s, including The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and wrote many others, one of which is Gerwig’s favourite. Pretty in Pink was released in 1986 as a teen romantic comedy-drama starring Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer and Harry Dean Stanton.
The film, directed by Howard Deutch, is a classic coming-of-age story, typical of Hughes’ work, following a high school girl from a working-class background as she traverses the trials and tribulations of adolescence and the expectations of being a young woman, forever cementing itself in the pantheon of great teen movies.
Gerwig was asked whether she paid homage to Pretty in Pink in Lady Bird with the costume and makeup, and she replied, “With the hair and the dress, yeah. I did think of that. I mean, something Saoirse and I had talked about a lot was this idea of, ‘What is the movie playing in her head, which is not the movie that she’s in?’ She would think that she is in a movie where she is going to find ‘the one’.”
She added, “You can totally empathize with that viewpoint, especially if you grew up like I did, watching movies where there was a ‘one.’ That was a big part of what it seemed like you were supposed to be doing as a young woman, was looking for ‘the one.’ That’s the structure of the universe that these films would set up. But definitely, of those movies, I would say Pretty in Pink is my favorite.”
