How did Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach meet?
It was unclear who was going to be the saviour of cinema in post-pandemic Hollywood. At one point Marvel did a lot of heavy lifting, releasing Spider-Man: No Way Home which momentarily gripped audiences, and then Tom Cruise helped the industry along with Top Gun: Maverick, but truly no one has done more for the cinematic revival than Greta Gerwig and her spectacular Barbie movie.
A statement on gender politics, hidden beneath the glitz and glamour of a summer blockbuster, Barbie is Gerwig’s greatest box-office triumph, setting the record for the highest opening weekend box office figures for a female filmmaker. Starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, among countless others, Barbie is a camp cabaret of cinematic frills that also has a lot to say about the contemporary state of gender roles.
It is only able to convey this message through the power of its screenplay, however, which Gerwig collaborated on with her partner and fellow filmmaker Noah Baumbach, who has previously helmed such celebrated favourites as 2005’s The Squid and the Whale and 2019’s Marriage Story. Creating a modern power couple in the industry, the duo met way back in the late 2000s.
It was during the production of the 2010 romantic comedy Greenberg that the pair first met each other, with Gerwig starring in the Baumbach-directed movie alongside the likes of Ben Stiller, Chris Messina, Brie Larson and Juno Temple. Still in a relationship with actor Jennifer Jason Leigh at the time, it wasn’t until Baumbach divorced the star in late 2010 that he considered getting together with Gerwig.
Their first collaboration as a couple came in 2012 with the release of Frances Ha, a twee drama written by both Baumbach and Gerwig, with the latter starring in the film alongside Adam Driver. Gaining considerable love from fans and critics, the monochrome indie movie was Gerwig’s first great writing success, despite having been penning scripts since 2007 with the film Hannah Takes the Stairs.
Speaking about his creative collaboration with Gerwig in Frances Ha, Baumbach stated at the London Film Festival in 2022, “I sort of started by saying, like, ‘Here’s sort of the thing I’m thinking about. Why don’t you write down a bunch of ideas and things…What I didn’t know is that Greta was this incredible writer, I mean, I had a feeling she’d be a great collaborator, but that writing really was kind of her thing when she was in college, and so I really lucked out. It was amazing”.
Frances Ha proved to merely be the first film in a long line of collaborations for the duo, with the pair working together again in 2015 for Mistress America, which Baumbach directed and co-wrote with Gerwig.
It was from here that the roles reversed, with Gerwig taking up more directorial duties in the form of 2017’s Lady Bird and 2019’s Little Women, where she also penned the scripts, whilst Baumbach pursued his own projects with 2019’s Marriage Story and 2022’s White Noise. Then, their career came full circle in 2023 with the release of Barbie, as Gerwig directed a script co-written by herself and Baumbach, creating a seemingly unstoppable partnership in the process.
