“That knocked my socks off”: the movie that made the biggest impact on Greta Gerwig
Filmmaking is one of the most universal forms of art, and when you find a piece of cinema that you truly connect with, watching it becomes such a deeply transcendent experience. The feeling of discovering your favourite film, or one that leaves a significant impact on you, is something many of us chase – this force driving us to watch more movies in the hopes of finding the one that becomes our next fascination.
For Greta Gerwig, cinema became the object of her desire when she went to college. As she discovered the world as an adult for the first time, she also discovered the world of truly mind-altering movies – the kind that shake you to your core and leave an impact far greater than you could ever imagine. Following her time at college, Gerwig became an indie darling, starring in and writing various mumblecore movies, but her love of cinema ultimately inspired her goal of becoming a director.
She found success with Lady Bird in 2017, the humorous yet heartfelt coming-of-age tale that landed Gerwig three Oscar nominations, including ‘Best Director’, before following it with the equally popular Little Women. The filmmaker hit the big time with Barbie in 2023, however, becoming the first female director to gross over $1 billion at the box office.
Gerwig surely couldn’t have anticipated this level of acclaim when she was making low-budget dramas in the 2000s, but her drive to create enduring pieces of art has been a part of her since she started getting into cinema. In fact, there was one tremendous film that had a gigantic impact on Gerwig when she first saw it, and it has always lingered at the back of her mind since becoming a filmmaker.
Talking to The Dissolve, Gerwig revealed: “I think the movie that had the biggest impact on me—I saw the Claire Denis movie Beau Travail. That knocked my socks off. It felt like greatness. It was beautiful, and emotional, and surreal, but also deeply satisfying.” She continued, “I think I was also probably responding to the dance element, and the choreography in the bodies in space. I think in some ways, that blew the top off for me in terms of what was possible and what was happening.”
Denis’ film is widely considered one of the greatest releases of the 1990s – a stunning foray into masculinity that draws our attention to the physicality of the characters alongside the emotional turmoil they face. We follow Denis Lavant’s Adjudant-Chef Galoup as he recalls his fascination with Commandant Bruno Forestier while they were both serving in the French Foreign Legion, and it’s a stunning look at desire and repression.
Gerwig was impressed by the immediacy of the film, and she came to realise that cinema didn’t have to be some far-removed art form that only Hollywood superstars were involved in the process of making. “I love French New Wave movies, but they seemed like they had happened. And that movie, it was older, but it felt like ‘These are still people making movies.’ I don’t know why that’s part of it, but for me, the fact that she existed somewhere and was devising another one was kind of amazing to me.”
