The movie that changed Greta Gerwig’s life: “It was a huge thing for me”
It’s been an interesting path for Greta Gerwig from indie trouper in the 2000s to the auteur behind one of the decade’s biggest movies with Barbie.
Gerwig’s climb into the cultural limelight has been a steady one, with roles in films by mumblecore mastermind Joe Swanberg paving the way to opportunities to work with big names like Wes Anderson and eventual husband Noah Baumbach. From there, it was a straight shot to the director’s chair, with the critically lauded Lady Bird in 2017 leading to Little Women and Barbie, each increasing in complexity, scope and audience acclaim.
But Gerwig herself marks one moment in her 20-year career in particular as life-changing, and not just because it marked the first time she was directed by future spouse Baumbach. Speaking to the student newspaper of Columbia University, Gerwig detailed how her turn in 2010’s Greenberg proved influential on her life.
”I love that movie so much,” she said. ”It was a huge thing for me to get that movie. It changed my life. I loved the character of Florence so much, and I was desperate to play the part and was so glad I got it.”
Baumbach’s seventh directorial effort – co-written with then-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh – stars Ben Stiller as a shiftless aged hipster named Roger Greenberg, who’s forced to grapple with his own shortcomings during an extended stay at his brother’s house in Los Angeles. Gerwig appears as the love interest and fellow tortured introspective Florence, a role she said helped her to understand the city where she would come to butter her cinematic bread from behind the camera.
“When we were shooting in LA, I went there early, and I spent time there working as a personal assistant for people, and I experienced the feeling and melancholy of LA and the unexpected beauty,” she explained. “By the time we were shooting, I felt like I understood it for my performance.”
It was not only the crystallisation of Gerwig’s relationship with Tinseltown but also the beginning of a creative and personal partnership with Baumbach that lasts to this day, with the latter co-authoring the Barbie script. More than that, it appears Greenberg offered her some important lessons on how location affects character, with the car-obsessed city of Los Angeles playing home for harried personal assistant Florence.
“One of the things I learned from [the character] is that people wear their cities in their bodies and on their faces,” Gerwig said. “Her particular isolation and depression and vulnerability has to do with the way Los Angeles makes its citizens transport themselves. They are all so separate. If you put that same character in New York, she would have been a different person. She would have carried herself differently. She might have still been depressive, but she wouldn’t hunch in the same way or speak softly in the same way.”
It’s an interesting thought, suggesting storms of mind could take a different countenance in any city on the planet – especially LA’s kind of depression alongside the distinct flavour of Manhattan melancholia. Perhaps, too, there is the London take on the black dog or the particularly Parisian mal humeur.
