The label Greta Gerwig refused to acknowledge: “It feels like a slight every time I hear it”
Greta Gerwig has had a dynamic and illustrious career, stealing the hearts of film lovers through her endearingly awkward characters in the mumblecore movement, as well as working with indie darlings like Mike Mills, Noah Baumbach and Todd Solondz.
While she made her start in the industry as an actor, becoming associated with a particular calibre of whole-hearted and scrappy filmmaking, she later extended her talents as a writer, penning her own screenplays before eventually taking the plunge as a director with her 2017 film Lady Bird. The film marked her as one of the most exciting emerging directors working in Hollywood, continuing to showcase her brilliance through her fabled adaptation of Little Women and Barbie.
During many conversations about her work, Gerwig has emphasised the importance of her early work as an actor in honing her filmmaking skills, giving her a unique insight into all sides of the industry that has only strengthened her ability as a director.
However, her creative beginnings also left her with some challenges as she pursued other avenues in Hollywood, expressing her discomfort with one label that has become associated with her work.
One of the most notable qualities of Gerwig’s earlier work is its improvisational and organic feeling, with the characters talking in a way that is seemingly spur of the moment and completely unplanned. During the mumblecore movement, directors like Jay Duplass and Andrew Bujalski rose to prominence through this style of filmmaking, making films with extremely low budgets that often followed 20-something characters talking at length about their various dilemmas and romantic quandaries. Many of the films from this period were improvised, being described as ‘mumblecore’ because of the meandering dialogue style that would sometimes drift as aimlessly as the characters themselves.
However, while Gerwig is considered a key player within this movement, the director has some objections to the nickname that was given to this genre. When discussing this, Gerwig said, “I just hate it. It feels like a slight every time I hear it. Because of the improvisational quality of those movies, and the fact that everyone was nonprofessional, I have had a bit of an uphill battle just to say ‘I know how to act.’ I didn’t stumble into this. I wasn’t just a kid. We called them ‘devised films,’ because we’d know the characters and what was supposed to happen in the scenes but not the words. It was a way of writing while I was acting.”
It is understandable why Gerwig would recoil at the description of this genre, which could be seen as undermining the effort and talent that went into producing these films. As Gerwig says, while they might have had improvised dialogue, they were writing as they were performing and creating lines based on the characters they were playing.
There is sometimes an idea that improvisation means that the work is less planned or impressive or that people simply act as themselves. But the lasting impact of Gerwig’s work during this movement only proves her talent and indiscernible star quality, which have propelled her into new territories over the years and marked her as a once-in-a-generational talent who continues to mesmerise people with her unbounded creativity and spark.
