How Patti Smith inspired Greta Gerwig to become a director: “She had the thing”
With the release of Barbie in 2023, Greta Gerwig made history.
Not only did the movie spawn a cultural phenomenon rarely seen these days, from Barbenheimer to the incredible number of businesses that released merchandise in conjunction with the film, but it also allowed Gerwig to become the first female director to gross over $1billion.
Considering Gerwig got her start in low-budget flicks, often appearing in mumblecore movies that cemented her as an indie cinema icon, it’s pretty impressive that she was able to climb the ranks of Hollywood and become a blockbuster sensation. While some people think she betrayed her roots as an authentic actor-director, others believe it to be a huge win for female directors, who have so rarely been afforded opportunities as big as Barbie.
The first ever narrative feature in cinema history might have been made by a woman, Alice Guy-Blaché, but since then, female directors have been few and far between. It’s not because of a lack of talent –there’s hardly any innate biological difference that could make men better directors than women – but rather, the systematic oppression of women in leadership roles has long extended to the film industry, where many men can’t even fathom a woman being in charge of making a movie.
Many women have since proved this to be an absolutely ridiculous sentiment, from Agnes Varda to Sofia Coppola, but still, many aspiring female filmmakers can’t help but find themselves with the belief that directing simply ‘isn’t for them’. Even Gerwig, who has multiple Oscar nominations to her name, didn’t initially enter the industry thinking that she’d become a director.
Yet, there came a moment in her career when she realised that perhaps she did have the talent needed to direct a successful movie. This realisation was comparable to a moment described by punk poet icon Patti Smith, Gerwig once explained to Vanity Fair, citing her as a huge inspiration. Smith broke barriers as a female writer and musician in the 1970s, emerging at a time when the music scene was flooded with men with guitars and very few women.
With a love for poetry, Smith wrote down words that she would then turn into songs, and with an authentic attitude that captivated listeners, she helped to pioneer punk with her debut album Horses, using sparse instrumentation with a mixture of snarled or impassioned spoken word and singing. Smith has gone down in history as one of the most important artists of her generation, inspiring artists as wide-ranging as musicians like Viv Albertine and PJ Harvey to filmmakers such as Gerwig.
The director revealed that while she had this passion inside of her to become a director, “I didn’t say it out loud for a long time.”
She added, “It’s like that part in Just Kids, where Patti Smith is watching Jim Morrison onstage and has that clarity of ambition, knowing she had ‘the thing.’ But I think, particularly for female artists, there are very few admissions of knowing.”
So, inspired by Smith’s dismissal of societal rules and expectations, Gerwig knew she had to pursue her dream of being a director just as Smith pursued her dream of being an artist.
