Greta Gerwig names her favourite writer of all time: “the main driver of empowerment”
When Greta Gerwig started her career as an actor, appearing in many low-budget indie movies and earning the crown as the queen of the mumblecore movement, she had no idea of the shape her life would take. By 2023, Gerwig had become the first female director to make a film that grossed over $1 billion.
After co-directing Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg in 2008, Gerwig wouldn’t make her solo directorial debut for another nine years, releasing Lady Bird in 2017. The film earned an Oscar nomination and significant critical praise, quickly finding a dedicated following who related to the film’s tender exploration of coming-of-age in a town you consider a dead end, desperate to both fit in and jump out of the fishbowl that suffocates all forms of expression and individuality.
The success of Lady Bird led Gerwig to direct a cosy adaptation of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, casting Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet (both of whom appeared in Lady Bird), Florence Pugh, and Laura Dern, among others. It was a success, securing six Academy Award nominations and winning one for ‘Best Costume Design’.
This was followed by Barbie, a cultural phenomenon which shook the globe, making history as one of the most popular films ever made. You couldn’t avoid images of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken for months, with iconography associated with the doll plastered on items from fast food restaurants to clothes shops.
Gerwig has been influenced by many sources, such as filmmakers like Agnes Varda and Mia Hansen-Løve, as well as many female authors whose work champions the female perspective, like the director’s work. Of course, she looked to Alcott for Little Women, but for Lady Bird, her main influence was Joan Didion, who often wrote about her hometown, Sacramento, which is where Gerwig also grew up and Lady Bird is set.
Yet, her favourite writer remains the Modernist icon, Virginia Woolf, telling United Worldwide that “She is just wonderful! The things she did, the things she accomplished have really had an impact on my work.” Born in 1882, Woolf wrote many esteemed novels, like Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves, To The Lighthouse, and the essay A Room of One’s Own. She advocated for women’s rights to independence and freedom from early in her career, penning pioneering works that played with form and stream-of-consciousness writing, creating vivid worlds that dealt with gender, sexuality, liberation, class, and war.
Gerwig explained, “Well, I think we all know that Virginia’s boom era was not a very ‘women-friendly’ era, yet she was such a good writer and so wonderful in everything she did that not even critics were worried about the fact that she was a woman.” She continued, “Sometimes I think they just legitimised her as an artist because it would have been a crime not to! I feel that she was the main driver of empowerment for many women, and when that is accomplished, there is certainly nothing more rewarding!”
Woolf’s intoxicating literary world has drawn in many readers over the years, and Gerwig once picked out To The Lighthouse as one of her favourite books. “A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again. The metaphysics she presents in the book are enacted in a way that allowed me to begin to understand that corner of philosophy,” she once told One Grand Books.
