“A language-driven filmmaker”: Greta Gerwig names her favourite director
Since making her solo directorial debut with Lady Bird in 2017, Greta Gerwig has won over the hearts of millions of cinema-goers. She’s progressed from muted mumblecore pictures to pink-fuelled blockbusters, but she has always maintained a focus on telling vulnerable tales of womanhood with an unmatched warmth and intimacy. It’s this element of her work that has endeared her to so many young women who see their own experiences reflected on screen.
Somewhere between the messy nostalgia of her debut, her gorgeous take on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and a record-breaking adaptation of toybox staples Barbie and Ken, Gerwig has become a firm favourite among modern film fans. But who takes the title of her own favourite director?
Gerwig has named her favourite filmmaker of all time as Howard Hawks, who was putting famous blondes onto cinema screens decades before she was even born. Throughout his filmmaking career, Hawks was unafraid to explore all possibilities of filmmaking. He delivered an iconic gangster film in Scarface, ventured into the realm of film noir with The Big Sleep, and teamed up with Marilyn Monroe for the endlessly referenced Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
No matter which genre he was tackling, though, Hawks always maintained a specific filmmaking style that Gerwig admired. The Barbie director spoke about her love for Hawks during a conversation with The Film Experience, noting that he was “both an incredibly visual filmmaker and a language-driven filmmaker”.
This is certainly an approach that Gerwig has employed in her own directorial career. From the ambitious Barbie sets to the arguments Lady Bird has with her mother, she always holds style and substance in equal regard. Perhaps this stems from her early beginnings as a writer when she penned mumblecore flicks with her romantic partner and writing partner, Noah Baumbach.
As she has grown into a career behind the camera rather than in the writer’s room, her visual prowess has only grown. Buying out pink paint stocks to create an entire Barbieland for Margot Robbie and her castmates to reside in, Barbie marked Gerwig’s most ambitious scope yet, but visuals have always been at the forefront of her mind.
During the making of her debut, Lady Bird, Gerwig’s visual concept for the cathartic airport drop-off scene guided her process for the entire film. “One of the central images of the movie that I saw early was when she’s dropped off at the airport,” she remembered, “You have this intuitive sense that you should stay with the daughter. But then you stay with the mother.”
Gerwig held onto that image, to the idea of subverting visual expectations by following the mother’s point of view rather than Lady Birds, and deemed it a “formative image in shaping the movie”. It’s easy to see how this informed her approach towards the rest of the movie, which focuses heavily on the relationship between its central mother and daughter.
Like her favourite filmmaker of all time, Gerwig has honed a filmmaking style that excels both in its language and in its look. She always ensures that her visuals serve the story and vice versa. Whether she’s telling coming-of-age tales about self-given nicknames and tough parental relationships or adapting the story of the most famous doll in the world to screen, she approaches each project with this cinematic understanding.
