Greta Gerwig’s surprising love for John Wayne
Greta Gerwig has made the successful transition from actor to screenwriter and director. Her early career is marked by her performances in Joe Swanberg’s ‘mumblecore’ films such as Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends. Since the beginning of the 2010s, Gerwig has collaborated with her partner, Noah Baumbach, on several highly-acclaimed pictures.
Interestingly, Gerwig is seemingly obsessed with the great actor John Wayne. Back in 2012, she said, “For me now, I think my fascination is with not a film, but an actor: John Wayne. For the last year, he’s really occupied my thoughts. I love John Wayne; I think he’s great. I love the movies he made with Howard Hawks, and I think as an actor, he embodied a whole kind of cinema. I hadn’t really appreciated him until this year, and now I can’t get enough. “
As with any actor, Gerwig takes influence from the many greats that have gone before her, and in this light, it appears that she is in great admiration of the iconic Duke. Wayne had starred in several films during Hollywood’s Golden Age, including a number of Western hits such as Rio Bravo with Dean Martin.
Gerwig continued, “I feel like I keep imitating him in odd ways, and it just makes me look crazy. But I think the movies John Wayne was in – there’s this idea that he wasn’t doing anything, or he was doing the same thing the whole time. But I find him almost psychically different from movie to movie. He can be really scary in movies like Red River, or he can be very gentle.”
Red River is a Howard Hawks-directed 1948 Western that provides a fictional account of the first-ever cattle march from Texas to Kansas. John Wayne plays a cattle rancher who moves along the Chisholm Trail with his herd, although he encounters a number of problems that arise between himself and his adopted son.
Wayne was known for not rushing his takes or lines, allowing a sense of tension and intrigue to build. Gerwig said, “I like how much time he takes for everything; he really takes his goddamn time to walk, or to talk. Maybe because I struggle with it as an actor – taking your time, you don’t have to rush anything – watching him, it’s such a generous amount of time he takes with everything, and the way he looks at people, it’s almost like he’s moving at a slower frame rate. That’s what I always aspire to.”
“I look at him and think, ‘How?’ Film is so precious,” Gerwig concluded. “I know he’s making big Hollywood movies, but it’s still actual film. It’s not digital; they have to print this stuff. And he’s like, ‘I’m gonna take five seconds to walk to the door, ’cause that’s what I’m doing right now.’ Everything is just so unhurried, and there’s something great about that.”
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