How Joan Didion became Greta Gerwig’s “patron saint”
Despite starting her career as an actor, Greta Gerwig is now one of the most successful directors of the 21st century. After co-directing Nights and Weekends in 2008, she made her solo directorial debut in 2017 with Lady Bird, a tender coming-of-age tale about suburbia and mother-daughter relationships.
She swiftly followed Lady Bird with Little Women before releasing Barbie, the most anticipated film of 2023. While the earlier two efforts were well-received, the buzz around Barbie became a cultural phenomenon, spawning merchandise from every shop under the sun, with some of pop music’s biggest artists providing the soundtrack. Barbie fever was inescapable upon the run-up to its release, and, thanks to its resounding success, Gerwig has become the first female director to gross over $1 billion with one film.
While Barbie is defined by flashy visuals, artificiality, and bright colours, Grewig’s first feature, Lady Bird, is much more subdued. Set in Sacramento, California, where Gerwig was raised, the film is a love letter to the experience of being an outsider, desperate to fit in with your peers while also feeling nothing like them. However, Lady Bird is also dedicated to Sacramento, the eponymous character’s hometown that she dreams of escaping from. However, once she leaves, she finds a new appreciation for those familiar streets and shops, realising that she will always love her hometown.
Yet, Gerwig’s deep adoration for her home might not have been articulated so well if she had not discovered the writing of fellow-Sacramentan Joan Didion. Best known for her essays on counterculture and California, Didion found success in the 1960s, becoming one of the most acclaimed writers of her generation. She continued to write for decades until she died in 2021, but she never lost sight of her beloved Sacramento. Didion greatly inspired Gerwig, who once called the writer “my patron saint”.
Talking to Francis Ford Coppola for Interview Magazine, she recalled her discovery of Didion’s work. “It was the first time I’d read something by an artist—a great artist—who was working in the same place I was from and writing about it. And it was the first inkling I had that maybe I didn’t need to be a different person in order to make something that was worth anything.”
Gerwig instructed Saorise Ronan to read Didion’s work in preparation for her leading role in Lady Bird, telling her, “She said Joan Didion would give me a sense of where Lady Bird comes from”. The writer’s presence was never absent from the film’s production, which opens with a quote about Sacramento penned by Didion. According to Gerwig, discovering that Didion was also from Sacramento was “as shattering as if I’d grown up in Dublin and suddenly read James Joyce”.
She continued, echoing her conversation with Coppola: “It was the first time I experienced an artist’s eye looking at my home. I had always thought art and writing had to be about things that were ‘important’, and I was certain that my life was not at all important. But her writing, so beautiful and clear and specific, was about my world.”
