The rejection that shaped Greta Gerwig’s career: “I really thought highly of myself”
Despite entering a strange creative space in recent years after her eight-picture deal with Netflix, Greta Gerwig has always had exceptional taste in all things related to the arts. Her films contain countless easter eggs that range from niche musical references to the work of renowned philosophers, adding a personal layer to her work by embedding her own interests within each film.
After beginning her career in the industry as an actor, Gerwig later became one of the most powerful directorial forces in Hollywood, capturing global audiences through the unprecedented success of Barbie that led to pink paint shortages and an endless slew of catchphrases that dominated our vocabularies for several months. But before Barbie, the enduring legacy of Ladybird and Little Women became calling cards of her individualistic and deeply authentic style, creating stories that resonated through their specificity and warmth.
While Gerwig is now widely considered a genius, there was a time when she was the living embodiment of the struggling artist trope. The filmmaker failed to convince people of her talent and was met with an overwhelming number of rejections.
After making a name for herself in the mumblecore movement, Gerwig became one of the key figures within an era of low-budget filmmaking and misfit storytellers, scrambling together and filming with cheap digital cameras to bring their visions to life. While Gerwig later wrote some of these projects herself, including the mesmerising tale of Frances Ha in the newly created adult coming-of-age film, exploring the quandaries of being in your mid-twenties and the permanent stress of not having the life you once imagined for yourself.
However, before the mumblecore movement, the filmmaker considered other avenues of creative expression before finding her way as an actor, applying to some of the top Ivy League schools in the United States to study as a playwright.
But this gave the blossoming director a unique lesson in rejection, saying, “I got rejected from every graduate school I applied to. I really thought highly of myself. I applied as a playwright to Yale, Juilliard and NYU and just got like a universal, ‘No thanks.’ I recently went back and read the play that I had submitted and I thought I was going to have that thing where you look back at something you wrote and you think, ‘Oh this was terrible. I understand.’ And I still thought it was pretty good. It was funny! It was a play about Kant and Newton as 13-year-old boys trying to date girls and debating the nature of space, and it’s really funny. I don’t know, I think they made a mistake.”
While this play has not yet seen the light of day, those professors are undoubtedly still kicking themselves over the lasting mistake of rejecting someone who later became one of the most influential directors of all time. It just goes to show that greatness is not always obvious to others from the beginning, and despite the sting of this rejection, her resilience and continued belief in her work led her to carve out an irreplaceable position in Hollywood.
