Greta Gerwig Quotes

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Greta Gerwig

Profession : Actress

Birth : August 4, 1983

I wrote the script to 'Lady Bird,' and it really came out of a desire to make a project about home - like, what the meaning of home is, and place. I knew Sacramento very well, obviously, growing up there, and I felt like the right way to tell a story of a place was through a person who's about to leave it.

Greta Gerwig

I thought Mia Hansen-Love was a true auteur, and I always wanted to work with her. Mia's empathy for her characters and her ability to use the language of cinema to communicate real human depth is extraordinary. She's a humanist.

Greta Gerwig

I'm interested in long careers where you take detours.

Greta Gerwig

I always feel like a vague failure in L.A. - it always makes me feel like I should somehow be different than I am. And I don't know why.

Greta Gerwig

I think being attracted to mistakes is one of the things that film can capture in a way that theater can't. Film can capture a moment of spontaneous life that will never be captured again.

Greta Gerwig

I think it's true of a lot of teenagers that you're convinced that life is happening somewhere else.

Greta Gerwig

There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.

Greta Gerwig

There's a grace period where being a mess is charming and interesting, and then I think when you hit around 27, it stops being charming and interesting, and it starts being kind of pathological, and you have to find a new way of life. Otherwise, you're going to be in a place where the rest of your peers have been moving on, and you're stuck.

Greta Gerwig

I don't really decide what the core of the story is before I write. I write to figure out what the story is. And I think the characters end up talking to you and telling you what they want to be doing and what is important to them. So in some ways, your job is to listen as much as it is to write.

Greta Gerwig

When you're writing a screenplay, it's like you're dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it.

Greta Gerwig

I'm all for the banalities of life and humiliation and everyday tragedies, but I also think people have big moments, and they have bigness in them.

Greta Gerwig

Writing on my own versus co-writing kind of is the exact same thing because we don't sit in the same room when we write. We're always writing alone anyway.

Greta Gerwig

I think something about high school students being snobby about how much they have or don't have is particularly absurd because it's not theirs. It's their parents'. So to feel quite good about yourself because you've got the fancy house and car doesn't make any sense - you didn't earn any of that.

Greta Gerwig

I was very serious about ballet until the age of 12, at which point my body changed, and it wasn't quite right.

Greta Gerwig

From Noah Baumbach, I learned to have a strict no cell phone policy on set. There is nothing that bums you out more than looking over and seeing somebody on their smartphone, and that goes for actors and everyone else.

Greta Gerwig

Making movies is a hard thing, and it's slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.

Greta Gerwig

Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema.

Greta Gerwig

There's something very satisfying about old cameras because they're ingenious. I mean when you take them apart and actually see, 'Oh, this is how we make photographs,' it's an ingenious thing, but it feels like it's in a way a layman can appreciate, whereas a digital camera, I don't even begin to know what goes into making a digital camera.

Greta Gerwig

One of my favorite things about Telluride is because it's so small, the directors are really there for each other. You look at another director, and they feel the same thing you feel.

Greta Gerwig

When I did plays in high school and college, I never remember memorizing my lines, but once I had blocking, I had all my lines memorized. Once I had movement associated with words, it was fine. Before I had blocking, it was just text on a page. Once it became embodied, it was much easier.

Greta Gerwig