Greta Gerwig on the Twin Adventures of Filmmaking and Motherhood

GRETA GERWIG is standing in the ground-floor apartment of a town house in the West Village, and her attention is split. The house belongs to the mother of her partner, the filmmaker Noah Baumbach, and is a space she and Baumbach use as an editing studio (a plush fox mask Baumbach used in The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) surveils from a corner). On one of the desktop monitors is a freeze-frame from Little Women, Gerwig’s new film, due on Christmas Day, in which Saoirse Ronan, who plays Louisa May Alcott’s revered heroine Jo March, is mid-conversation with her sisters Amy (Florence Pugh) and Meg (Emma Watson). Gerwig is concerned about a metallic patch of sky above the tree line. “That silver—can we get rid of it?” she asks Nick Ramirez, who also helped edit Gerwig’s 2017 film, Lady Bird. He nods, hand on mouse, as a gurgle and a very small dancing foot draw Gerwig’s gaze back to the stroller at her side. Harold, Gerwig and Baumbach’s six-month-old son, is supposed to be asleep, but he is not, and he would like some attention.

Gerwig has just come from the nearby apartment she and Baumbach share. “I brought all the creatures,” she says, unclipping Wizard, the family’s mini Bernedoodle, from the stroller and watching her bound toward the brick-and-ivy-covered back garden. “She’s an edit dog. She’s used to it here.” So is Harold, whom Gerwig strollered over to this town house nearly every day, nursing him, letting him nap as her film took shape.

The scene on the monitor takes place near the end of Little Women, soon after Beth, the dearest of the four March sisters, has died. I would warn spoiler alert, but is there anyone not familiar with the basic outline of Little Women—an instant best seller in 1868, perpetually in print since, and adapted for the screen no fewer than eight times? Alcott’s Civil War–era tale remains one of the most beloved coming-of-age stories about young women ever written, and here Jo, the rebellious writer and Alcott’s alter ego, is telling her sisters that she has been working on new stories that are “just” about her and her sisters and therefore seem too quotidian to be compelling. “Writing doesn’t confer importance, it reflects it,” Jo frets. “No,” challenges Amy, “I think writing about it will make it more important.”

Some 80% of the film’s dialogue is Alcott’s—but these lines were written by Gerwig, and they can’t help but feel like articles of faith. After all, Gerwig has been giving voice to the quotidian dramas that plague her and her kind, first as an actress, then as a writer, and finally as a director, for her entire career. And in the same way generations of women, from Simone de Beauvoir to Patti Smith to Elena Ferrante, have identified themselves in Jo March, the steely heroine who refused to sacrifice her values for the cultural restrictions of her time, a generation of wide-eyed, post-collegiate women found in Gerwig a similarly powerful avatar.

This started in the late aughts, in low-budget, lo-fi mumble-core films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends, and then in a trio of Baumbach’s movies—Greenberg, Frances Ha, and Mistress America (the latter two cowritten by Gerwig)—in which she played heroines recognizable to a segment of first-wave millennials, earnest and sentimental and unafraid of their self-doubt and neediness. “We were eating Chinese food from paper boxes at the time, sitting on my sofa and half-watching a Greta Gerwig film,” writes Sally Rooney in her 2017 novel Conversation With Friends (itself embodying the mores of a successive micro-generation). As readers, we know exactly what this means, so clearly has Gerwig been anointed patron saint of certain kind of ambling early adulthood.

But the real Gerwig lay somewhere behind this caricature: a filmmaker of uncanny ambition and artistic intent. This became clear with her solo directorial debut, Lady Bird, released in 2017 to rapturous critical acclaim. Intimate, nostalgic, and tender, Lady Bird was devoted to the strains and joys of a young woman’s most important relationships—her parents, best friends, and first loves—and it earned Gerwig an Oscar nomination for best director (only the fifth time a woman had been nominated in the category). Lady Bird attracted tremendous goodwill but also a case of great expectations: What would Gerwig do next? What happens when a downtown New York indie antihero, a star beloved for her haplessness and ambivalence, becomes a filmmaker with all the agency and assurance to sign on to whatever she pleases?

The answer would be an adaptation of the novel she’d adored since she was a girl, and for which she’d already written a 400-page screenplay. After the 2018 Oscars Gerwig retreated to a cabin in Big Sur to revise Little Women: “I needed to spend some alone time with Louisa,” she says. Gerwig felt such a kinship with Alcott (at 36, she is the same age as the author when the novel was published) that she had an astrologer compare their charts. “Because so much of making art requires some amount of mysticism,” she says.

TODAY, in the courtyard of the Greenwich Hotel, Gerwig is dressed not unlike Alcott, or Jo March, in a high-necked, long-sleeved indigo APC blouse with small blue buttons down the front. She can be deliberate and considered—speaking with measured ellipses, holding her chin in her hand, Winnie-the-Pooh-style when thinking—but then erupt with the energy of a 1940s screwball-comedy heroine. “I mean, goodness, you’re getting completely unfiltered just me sifting through what we did,” she exclaims at one point. Like the characters in her early films, Gerwig seems to be letting you in on the way her mind works in real time. She will later admit that speaking about Little Women with unbridled ardor for two hours left her exhausted. Gerwig appears to do everything this way: with full thrust, with her entire gravitational force behind her. This was certainly true of making Little Women.

“It’s epic personal filmmaking,” says Meryl Streep, who plays “the old battle-ax” Aunt March. “It’s very much the author’s tale, and as a result it’s hers,” she says. The film, which begins with the sisters as adults, unfolds in two time lines, mirrored in the two halves of the book, which were originally published by Alcott as separate volumes. The first takes place when the girls are teenagers; the second, seven years later. And the ending, an invention of Gerwig’s, introduces a meta--narrative comparing the paths of Jo and Alcott. “I had the idea that if I could make Jo publishing a book at the end the thing you didn’t know you needed to see,” she says, “it would be the way you want people to end up together in a movie.” She places her hand over her heart and leans across the table. “You want her to get that book, and you don’t realize it until you see it and she’s holding it in her hands. You’re like, That’s the thing. That book.”

“When I watched the first cut of Little Women,” says Baumbach, “I felt like you know exactly why this movie’s being made, because it’s so personal. It both serves the story and honors the book, and then is really something that only she could do.” Painstakingly detailed, the film is traditional in look, but not staid. Gerwig kept her camera in constant, restless motion and quickened the pace of Alcott’s dialogue: “I wanted to hear all the lines traditionally, but said at the speed of life,” she says. “Great things said with irreverence.” For the waltz scenes, Gerwig brought in choreographer Monica Bill Barnes, who had the actors dance to The Cure and David Bowie. And Watson, a trained yoga instructor, led the group in yoga and meditation. “Having so many girls leading the way on set definitely changed the tone,” says Ronan. “We were all completely hyper with each other, and Greta is such a girl’s girl herself, she really captured that energy.”

When they wrapped, Gerwig was six months pregnant, but thanks to a wardrobe of A-line dresses and cocoon coats, the cast say, they had no idea. “I just figured that was her style at the moment,” says Timothée Chalamet, who plays Jo’s neighbor Laurie. They’d shot in Concord, Massachusetts—Alcott’s home—with Gerwig going so far as to build an exact replica of Orchard House, where Alcott wrote (and set) Little Women. “It’s a special place, all of these people living in proximity to each other and reimagining the world,” Gerwig says of Concord. “It gets inside of you.” She is referring to the cluster of American thinkers who congregated there more than a century ago, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson lived across the street from the Alcotts and was the family’s longtime benefactor. Thoreau is thought by some biographers to have been Alcott’s inspiration for Laurie and would take the young Alcott sisters on nature walks around neighboring Walden Pond. During filming, Gerwig spent weekends doing the same. She also visited nearby Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, home to all of the authors’ graves, where admirers leave pens at the headstones. At Alcott’s, Gerwig left a yellow Lamy fountain pen.

“Jo is the person I always wanted to be,” says Gerwig. The youngest of three, she wrote constantly as a teenager growing up in Sacramento, California, composing plays and forcing her family to act them out—her mother after long shifts as an ob-gyn nurse, her father at the end of a workday at a local credit union. There were also sketches for homecoming assemblies at school, and volumes of “hilarious and tragic” journals. Jo wears her “scribble suit” when she retreats to the attic to write; Gerwig wore her father’s Hawaiian shirts and wrote everywhere—on buses, in chemistry class, at the dentist’s office. She still does: “I enjoy feeling as if I’m stealing it from the world,” she says, “like I’m getting away with something. If it becomes too formal, I’m sunk. I need to be a bit clandestine.”

SITTING ON THE PARLOR FLOOR OF THE TOWN HOUSE, with Harold perched in her arms, Gerwig wears an oversize Hawaiian shirt—much like the ones she used to borrow from her father, except this one is from the store Otte down the street. (Her criteria for shopping post-Harold? “It has to be very close to me!” And buttons up the front for nursing.) Her embrace of a brimming life is accompanied by no small amount of doubt. “I was always scared about being a mother,” she admits, “in terms of what it would mean for what I was able to do.” During the shoot, she remembers, she went home at night to her rented house in Concord and discovered Cardi B’s Instagram (Gerwig has never had an account of her own). She watched the rapper’s pregnancy and birth reveals. “She’d do videos about how her hair looked better, but then she was mad because she had terrible heartburn. Everything. I would eat it up. I’ve just been very moved by women who’ve claimed all of it.”

Gerwig turned in her rough cut of Little Women in March. “I knew that as soon as I did that, some part of me would relax and then the baby would come,” she says. Harold Ralph Gerwig Baumbach arrived 24 hours later (“I gave him all the names,” Gerwig says). She planned a maternity leave, but then Streep came into town to record dialogue, and Gerwig brought Harold to the sound studio. “I felt like he was being christened by Meryl,” she says. In a few hours she’ll leave Harold and Wizard with Baumbach for the weekend and drive upstate in a rented minivan with her five best friends from Barnard. It’s a rare reunion—typically her weekends are spent close to home, “just hanging out with Noah and the baby, and writing, and making each other laugh.” They like to visit Baumbach’s brother Nico, a writer and academic, and his wife, the playwright, Annie Baker, in Brooklyn. (The two have a baby about the same age as Harold and will be his godparents.) They enjoy going to the theater, and Gerwig likes to cook but only when Baumbach agrees to act as sous-chef. They are both starting to experiment with making baby food, currently sweet potatoes mixed with breast milk and oatmeal.

In fact, Baumbach is mid-puree at the appointed time of our phone interview and apologizes for being late. When a cry issues from the background, he goes to retrieve Harold: “You’re getting a live version of how it works,” he says. With Harold happily situated in his lap, the filmmaker discusses Gerwig’s impact on his life. “Since we’ve been together, the work I’ve done, even that hasn’t technically involved her, is hugely influenced by her. I think I could get in my head too much in my earlier career. She’s helped me lose myself.”

He met Gerwig while casting his 2010 film Greenberg. The following year they cowrote the screenplay for Frances Ha and became a couple, the news of which inspired some critics to describe Gerwig as his muse rather than cowriter. “I remember being very frustrated by that and wanting to correct it,” Gerwig says. Journalists also asked whether Baumbach had opened doors for her. They do that less now. “But the answer is: Yes, of course, for so many reasons. But he’s also this incredibly important collaborator and influence on me. The most important.” She pauses. “But I think I was hell-bent on making my own films, so I would’ve done it anyway.”

Now she can open doors for him. Margot Robbie approached Gerwig about working on a Barbie film, which Robbie had just signed on to produce and star in. Gerwig agreed to take it on—with Baumbach as co-writer. (There are reports that Gerwig will direct, but for now she says they are just focused on the screenplay.) “I think the pleasure of writing for us is that it seeps into everything,” Gerwig says. When she and Baumbach have a script’s structure set, they will each take sections, work on them alone, and then swap them at the end of the day. “And then I get to hear him laugh at things I’ve written, and then I get to laugh at things he’s written.”

Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, a searing account of divorce, opened in November and garnered raves. If both Baumbach and Gerwig receive best-director nominations, it will be a first for a couple in Oscar history. “In general, it was an exciting year,” Baumbach says. “I’d show her a cut of my movie, and then a few months later, I’m watching her movie. I don’t want to sound sickeningly happy, but it’s a truly great thing to watch someone you love make something and love the thing they make. I don’t know how else to say it without saying great a lot.”

A few days before we meet at the editing studio, Gerwig and I take a window table at Café Cluny and she orders steak frites. She says she keeps a list of future project ideas on her iPhone and in the pages of brightly colored Smythson notebooks. There’s Barbie, and Little Women producer Amy Pascal says she and Gerwig have spoken about making a musical together. “I want to keep expanding the idea of what stories you can tell,” Gerwig says. But first: Chekhov. This spring she will play Masha in Sam Gold’s production of Three Sisters at the New York Theatre Workshop; it will be the first time she has acted in more than four years. “I got scared about doing it, and Sam said, ‘What better thing could you do as a writer and a director than memorize Chekhov?’

“I feel like there’s been lots of moments that I’ve done things that I think people aren’t sure how to fit into their notion of me,” she says, methodically folding her french fry in half and dipping it first in mayonnaise then ketchup. “A friend of mine texted me because actually Three Sisters was announced the same week as Barbie, and they said, ‘You have the weirdest résumé of anyone in the world.’ But it sort of feels exactly right. And I guess I enjoy not being completely categorizable in that way.”

“It’s all storytelling,” says the actor and playwright Tracy Letts, who played roles in both Lady Bird and Little Women, “so I don’t know if she has to choose.” But Gerwig says she feels most like a director. “It’s big and it’s scary, but it’s also the thing that comes most naturally to me. I think Francis Ford Coppola said to me that all the best directors had been actors. He said, ‘I acted. Marty acted and Steven acted. Orson acted.’ I was like, ‘Well, what a wonderful group!’ ”

When her steak arrives she exclaims, “Oh, my goodness, I’ve really done it!” She then proceeds to eat every bite, even as she places her fork and knife down to accent her answers with gestures, smacking her hand across her chest, for instance, when talking about the injustice of Henry James’s criticism of Alcott. Journalists have described Gerwig as earnest and intense, and she is both of these things, but those words, especially when applied to women, imply a lack of humor or playfulness. Gerwig clearly thinks and feels deeply, but she is not grave or lacking in self-awareness or joy. It could be that people are simply not used to someone who so fully embraces who they are and what they are feeling at a given moment.

It is this quality that is perhaps most responsible for her success. “Who she is, is exactly expressed onscreen,” says Streep. “She’s just letting us see the world as she sees it; it’s intuitive and it’s certain.”

Is there any similarity to bringing a film and a child into the world? “I don’t know. Maybe ask me in 18 years.” Gerwig smiles sheepishly and sighs. “Yes, I think that feeling of forever being underqualified and kind of awed by the thing.” She then checks the time and realizes she has to get home to feed the baby. On her wrist is a 1950s Tiffany men’s watch, a gift from Baumbach several years back, originally belonging to a judge and inscribed on the back to JUSTICE MORRIS EDER, a grand person and sincere friend. As we pay the bill she apologizes for her abrupt departure, “Everything happens in these 90-minute to two-hour increments between feedings.” About the length of a film.

Originally Appeared on Vogue