Greta Gerwig

You only get one life so you might as well feel all the feelings.

Greta Celeste Gerwig (born August 4, 1983) is an American actress, writer, and director. Her Oscar nominations include one for Best Director for Lady Bird, one of only five women in Oscar history at the time to have been nominated in that category. In 2023, Barbie (the highest grossing film ever from a female director) earned Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 96th Academy Awards.

Quotes

• 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...Nobody in the world cares if it doesn’t exist. You have to either believe in this fiction hard enough for it to become real, or you don’t, and it won’t.
  • "Greta Gerwig gets real" Dazed (August 27, 2015)

• When you’re 16, there are qualities you wish you didn’t have, and then when you’re 30 you’re like, ‘Thank god I have that otherwise I’d be living less vividly’. You only get one life so you might as well feel all the feelings.
  • "Greta Gerwig gets real" Dazed (August 27, 2015)

• “The process of making it was just joy,” said Gerwig. “I don’t know if it was the pink or the music but it was just infectious.” Yet the most gratifying aspect, she said, was seeing strangers watch the film and realising that “the song that’s in my heart is in other people’s hearts”.
  • "'Just joy’: Greta Gerwig discusses reaction to Barbie at London film festival" The Guardian (October 8, 2023)

"‘It had to be totally bananas’: Greta Gerwig on bringing Barbie to life" (2023)

"‘It had to be totally bananas’: Greta Gerwig on bringing Barbie to life" The Guardian (July 9, 2023)

• The kind of amazing thing is that Barbie went to the moon before women had the ability to get credit cards.
• I always think that 8, 9, 10 years old is peak kid. I was brash and unafraid and loud and big.
• [Puberty is] a shrinking. Wanting to make yourself smaller, less noticeable, take in all that spikiness and bury it. And you’re profoundly uncomfortable, because you’re going through metamorphosis, literally.
• As a director, you have the job of dreaming up the movie, and then you have to get everyone else in the movie – hundreds of people – to have that same dream, too.