Today's Female Filmmaker spotlight is on the modern directing maven Greta Gerwig. Greta Gerwig who is the rare director that not only began her career as an actress but also did a lot of nudity herself.
Before she turned to the entertainment industry, she was born and raised in Sacramento. She described herself as a "very intense child" which is honestly a good recipe for a future artist. She originally wanted to be a playwright, but she did not get accepted into any MFA programs, so she turned her sights to indie filmmaking. Aren't we all glad that she did?
Greta Gerwig began as an actress who worked in the indie mumblecore movement. In her early career, she collaborated heavily with Chicago-based indie director Joe Swanberg (who would later give us Easy) to make some of his earliest work like Young American Bodies. She even had a sex scene with the director in one of their other films!
She co-wrote and co-directed several films with Swanberg including Hannah Takes the Stairs in 2007. She plays a manic pixie dream girl in this film that takes place and is shot in Chicago. She does a lot of quirky things as she and Mark Duplass play a couple whose relationship is winding down. Hannah Takes the Stairs...and she takes off her clothes. A lot!
In 2008, Greta co-directed Nights and Weekends with Swanberg. She also starred in the film and, as the title might suggest, she went nude in it. Well, what else is someone supposed to do with their nights and weekends?
Her career really changed after she got together with director Noah Baumbach. She acted in his films Greenberg and the award-winning Frances Ha. The two are much more than collaborators - they are full-on partners! This relationship likely encouraged Gerwig to take her own films more seriously which leads us to her pivot in 2017.
She decided to focus harder on directing in 2017 when she made Lady Bird, a revelatory coming-of-age film starring Saoirse Ronan as a Catholic school girl in Sacramento trying to find herself and make her way through the difficult relationship that she has with her mother.
This film made Greta one of only four women to ever been nominated for the Best Director (at the time! Now six women have been nominated and two have won). She also received a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination. She followed up all of that success with Little Women and is said to be collaborating with her partner Baumbach on a film called Barbie starring Margot Robbie.
She has cited her influences to be Woody Allen, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Patti Smith, Carole Lombard, and fellow female directors Chantal Akerman and Anges Varda. Knowing all of that, it is easy to see where all of those intersect in her work. As both an actress and a director, she mixes whimsy and realism in everything she does. That is what makes her such an interesting artist. Her work is vulnerable, sweet, and thought-provoking all at once. It helps that her work is so sexy, too.
Check out one of Greta's nude scenes in Nights and Weekends here:
