When Greta Gerwig was growing up in Sacramento, California, she was a very “intense” child, by her own admission. She was obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio and carried a binder of pictures of him around with her wherever she went. The binder, labelled “pics of Leo” for organisational purposes, annoyed the rest of her family greatly, because it meant she kept draining the printer of all its ink and toner. Nevertheless, she continued her collection and made sure to kiss a picture of Leo every night before she went to sleep. Her obsession came to an abrupt halt, though, when she read in an interview that DiCaprio liked going out to clubs in LA with Tobey Maguire. “I remember thinking, ‘What will we have to talk about?’” she said in a 2016 Late Night interview.
Gerwig may have been typical in her desire to smooch the most adored actor on the planet during the 2000s, but she was also an erudite child: she grew up reading Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, the latter of who she blames now for “[making] me think that every guy who was a jerk was actually a super nice guy who wanted to marry me,” à la Mr Darcy. She went to a Catholic school - we’ll get on to the Lady Bird parallels, don’t you worry - and grew up wanting to be in musical theatre. That part didn’t work out, but this weekend she did manage to break the box office record for the highest earning opening weekend for a female director ever, which isn’t bad for a backup career. In fact, it wasn’t even her first backup... it was her third.
There’s a lot to get through between Sacramento and Barbieland, so here’s how Greta Gerwig went from intense child, to indie darling starring in small-time “mumblecore” short films, to one of the most important female directors in the history of film.
Her Ladybird-like upbringing
If you’ve ever seen Greta Gerwig’s 2017 hit coming-of-age film Lady Bird, the following is likely to sound familiar to you: Greta Gerwig was raised in Sacramento, California, by her loving father and mother, who worked for a credit union and as an OBGYN nurse respectively.
She went to an all-girls Catholic school, St Francis High School, didn’t have a lot of money, but did have what she described as “epic” fights with her mother on the regular.
Despite all that, Gerwig insists that Lady Bird is not at all autobiographical.
“Lady Bird is the opposite of how I was in Catholic school. I was a real rule-follower and a people-pleaser and a gold star-getter,” Gerwig told The Hollywood Reporter at the time of the film’s release.
“Lady Bird is a flawed heroine that I invented [...] Even though I start with things that are close to me, they so quickly spin out and become their own characters,” adding that Lady Bird is “the girl I wished I could've been, in a way”.
Unlike Lady Bird’s dislike for the nuns at her school, Gerwig refers to the nuns who taught her as “really groovy” and says the fights with her mother were never out of a “lack of love”.
“I always felt like [my parents] were both artists without being artists,” Gerwig told The New York Times in 2017, explaining in another interview that being artistic “can be a deep part of your existence, whether or not somebody gives you money for it.”
How she got into filmmaking
Like Lady Bird, Gerwig was aiming for a degree on the East Coast in summer 2002 - but she wanted to major in musical theatre, something her mum did not approve of. “This was another of my mum's great moments, where she said, 'I'm not spending $40,000 a year for you to learn how to tap dance,’” Gerwig told The Guardian.
Instead, she went to Barnard College, a women's liberal arts college in association with Columbia University, in New York, and studied English with Philosophy, with vague ambitions of becoming a lawyer.
In the meantime, Gerwig kept her musical theatre muscles flexed by performing in extra curricular plays with her dormmate, Kate McKinnon (of Saturday Night Live, and now Barbie, fame) and worked as a stage manager.
After university, Gerwig went on to star in a series of small “mumblecore” productions headed by director Joe Swanberg: LOL (not the one with Miley Cyrus), Hannah Takes The Stairs and Nights and Weekends. In working with Swanberg, Gerwig grew confident in her co-writing and co-directing abilities, but also became known as an It Girl of the indie movie scene.
Then, in 2010, she met another up-and-coming director: Noah Baumbach. Baumbach, who was then married to his ex-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, cast Gerwig in his new project Greenberg, alongside Ben Stiller and Rhys Ifans, which Gerwig expected to be a big hit. It wasn’t - and though Gerwig’s performance did garner praise, it wasn’t enough.
“I was really depressed,” she said of this period. “I cried a lot. It was a hard year. I was 25 and thinking, ‘This is supposed to be the best time and I'm miserable.’ Looking back, I wish I had taken that time and written more, but it felt like acting was happening for me, and I went back to acting classes. The blessing and curse of my life is that I think I thrive when I have a singular purpose and a calling. But actually I'm happiest when I'm doing lots of things. And I have to reconcile that.”
Frances Ha onwards
While 2010 may have been a dark time, 2011 was when Gerwig achieved her teenage dream of starring in a Woody Allen movie (she wrote it in her yearbook and everything).
Her small role in To Rome With Love was enough to get the right recognition, and by 2012 she was the lead in Baumbach’s next film, Frances Ha, which she also co-wrote.
During the two years between production of Greenberg and Frances Ha, Baumbach had also left his wife so after a brief will-they-won’t-they-period of hesitation he and Gerwig finally got together one month into shooting their new film. Frances Ha was markedly more successful than Greenberg, helping to boost the careers of both parties, and give Gerwig confidence to start writing projects on her own.
There was a brief fork-in-the-road career moment in 2014 when Gerwig was cast as the lead role in “How I Met Your Dad”, a How I Met Your Mother sequel, but the pilot ultimately wasn’t picked up and never became a series.
Instead, she had the time to write alone, and it was then that she wrote Lady Bird. “Writing with a partner is better than writing alone because you can make eachother laugh,” Gerwig told Vogue, “but writing alone can give you a very deep sense of satisfaction and lonely victory.”
Victory indeed, Lady Bird was a commercial and critical success: It grossed $78 million worldwide, with just a $10 million budget, and was nominated for sixteen awards in the 2017 award circuit, including an Oscar for Best Director, which made Gerwig the first woman in eight years (and one of only five women in Oscar history) to be nominated in this category.
Then, two years later, while still riding the high of the Lady Bird hype, Gerwig released her adaptation of Little Women, starring Saorise Ronan, Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet, Emma Watson and Meryl Streep alongside a crop of fellow rising stars and esteemed actors. She has a special relationship with Ronan and Chalamet, who starred in both Little Women and Lady Bird, and even tried to get them to cameo in Barbie this year, but “both of them couldn’t do it and I was so annoyed,” Gerwig told CinemaBlend last month.
Little Women has a bombshell hit too, and Gerwig’s fame only grew.
The Barbie-ification of Greta Gerwig
Gerwig was brought onto the Barbie movie in early 2020, around the exact same time she got really into watching Love Island, which just so happens to be Margot Robbie’s favourite reality TV show. Gerwig co-wrote Barbie from scratch with Baumbach, and Margot Robbie remembered enjoying the pair’s wacky, irreverent script so much she thought it would never get made.
“The first time I read the ‘Barbie’ script, my reaction was, ‘Ah! This is so good. What a shame it will never see the light of day,'” Robbie told BAFTA, “‘because they are never going to let us make this movie.’ But they did.”
Gerwig herself felt the same. “[Barbie] felt complicated enough, sticky enough, strange enough, that maybe there could be something interesting there to be discovered,” she told The Guardian, “I kind of had two thoughts: I love this and I can’t bear it if anyone else makes it. And: they’ll never let us make this movie.”
But they did, indeed.
This weekend, Barbie opened at the box office to the tune of $293m worldwide, the biggest opening weekend for a female director in history. Gerwig’s impact upon Barbie is already being felt, and is paying itself back in dividends: she’s just been selected to direct the Chronicles of Narnia reboot for Netflix and has apparently leant a hand on the screenplay for Disney’s upcoming live action adaptation of Snow White.
Her agent, Jeremy Barber, recently shared how Gerwig’s ambitions have changed from the small scale projects of her past to the big blockbusters she is coming to be known for today. “Her ambition is not to be the biggest woman director, but [rather] a big studio director,” he told The New Yorker. If 2023 is anything to go by, it looks like Gerwig is well on track to smash that target too.
Her happy, messy personal life
Gerwig lives with Baumbach and their two sons in Manhattan, New York. Gerwig gave birth to their first child, Harold, in March 2019, just 24 hours after delivering the first rough cut of Little Women to the studio - her cast and crew didn’t even know she was pregnant. “I didn’t really intend for it to be that way,” Gerwig told W magazine. “It’s just that at the beginning, you don’t tell anyone. And then at some point, I realized, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just make it to the end, and no one will know.’ And then I did.”
She and Baumbach aren’t married, though she does wear a ring on her finger and they call each other partner because "'boyfriend' makes it sound like I just met him last week," Gerwig explained on The Late Late Show. Then, four months ago, the pair welcomed their second baby, who we don’t know the name of yet. “He's a little schmoo [...] that's very much his energy,” Gerwig said of her youngest son in an interview with Elle recently, “the little guy is sleeping through the night. But I’m still doing that thing where I wake up, every hour to 90 minutes, and just hover. You just keep wanting to look at that baby. So I’m slightly in a twilight state.”
Gerwig is a self-described “messy person”, a trait she says Baumbach often calls her up on. “Noah always comes home and he’s like, ‘I can tell exactly what you did [today] because there’s a trail of crap. You walked in, you kicked off your shoes, you ate some cheese, you decided you didn’t like the cheese, you left it there, you opened all the cabinets, you walked all the way to the back of the house and now you’ve left your winter coat on the bed’,” she joked in an interview with the Barbie cast.
She’s also as eclectic as she was as a child: her ringtone is Sail Away by Enya, her biggest fear is department stores (”Too much reflective surface,” she told Elle) and her go-to karaoke song is We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy Joel.
Greta Gerwig may be the biggest director on the planet right now, but ultimately she’s still the intense child she’s always been.
