Top 158 Quotes & Sayings by Greta Gerwig
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actress Greta Gerwig.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I feel so part of the filmmaking community. It's amazing how much people support each other.
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.
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.
I'm interested in characters that have just a touch of madness.
Woody Allen was the reason I wanted to move to New York City and one of the reasons I wanted to make films. I felt that I understood his films, and I love them so much. When you're starting out, certainly, you have this sense of wanting to talk back to people who have influenced you, and I always wanted to talk back to Woody Allen.
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.
I'm not really capable of memorizing stuff without moving around, that's how I do it.
I wouldn't call myself 'into the DJ scene.' I have friends who are DJs, like James Murphy. I was really into the DJ scene at his wedding. But generally, I'm not at the clubs. I've never been to a rave.
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.
I loved dance.
I didn't know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.
There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.
I think as an actress, I prefer having a character on the page. It allows you to be more invested in actually creating a whole person. It's easier when you're not trying to come up with your next line on the spot.
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.
I thought movies were handed down by God. I knew that theater was made by people because I saw the people in front of me, but movies seemed like they were delivered, wholly made, from Zeus's head or something.
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.
We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that's where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.
I was serious about ballet for a long time, but my mom got me into tap and jazz and modern and hip-hop, and I was one of those over-lessoned children.
I've never worked on anything that I haven't in some way enjoyed.
Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.
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.
When I graduated from college, I thought that I would probably never be an actor because it seemed like everyone was big by the time they were 20 or not at all.
I'm not goal-oriented so much as I'm constantly aware of what I'm passionate about, and I'm constantly updating the list. I envision many possible futures for myself where I could be happy, so I just try to keep my passions alive.
Courage doesn't grow overnight. It can be a long process.
When you're on set, and that clock is going, every second you spend doing something is a second you spend not doing something else. That's true of all of life, but it's very vivid on a film set because you're always managing that.
Nobody knows what you have in you until you've done it, so I just keep pushing those boundaries, and I figure it will all come out in the wash.
One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.
Everybody is always in the middle of their own opera.
I'm always interested in how people use language to not say what they mean.
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.
I just don't feel like I've seen very many movies about 17-year-old girls where the question is not, 'Will she find the right guy' or 'Will he find her?' The question should be, 'Is she going to occupy her personhood?' Because I think we're very unused to seeing female characters, particularly young female characters, as people.
When I was a kid, I used to do my homework in the living room, where there was a picture window. I was hoping that someone would walk by and see me looking very studious in my living room.
I live in New York, and I love New York as well, but I think Los Angeles is a place where if you have the right person with you, there are all these little worlds that you would never guess by just looking at the exterior of what the city is.
I'm scared of the Internet. That's not real, but it is. I'm worried about what it's doing to us.
The transition from tiny movies to less tiny movies to really big movies has been actually quite seamless in a lot of ways as far as my experience of acting in them.
I feel like every year there's a thing about 'not enough roles for ladies!' and, then, also an article, like 'The Year of The Woman.' I think that we all just know in our hearts they're underrepresented. But that doesn't mean that there aren't amazing moments.
There's a style in modern dance right now called Release Technique. It's based on a feeling of falling and catching yourself, and I thought it was such a good metaphor for the way life feels.
I've never had a plan, I've always done things from instinct.
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.
I had dreams, but I didn't have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched.
I think that people in their 20s actually aren't given enough credit for their ambition.
I'm, like, the only actor in New York who's never, ever been on any 'Law & Order.' And I've auditioned for so many. The sad thing is I love 'Law & Order.' I'm really obsessed with it. And they always said to me, 'You seem like you're making fun of the material.'
I stopped being interested in improvisation, and I continue to not be that interested in it. Comedians can do it on a different level because they have a goal, but if you're improvising something that's dramatic, there's not that much to be good at.
Books and theater were the way I understood the world and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life.
The more particular you make something, the more universal it becomes.
I was a massive Whit Stillman fan. Groupie. I would have done anything for him.
I think it's a great tragedy of childhood that you only really appreciate it once it's done: it's very hard to feel appreciative of the gifts you have until you're gone.
The economy is rough. I think that affects everyone from big filmmakers to tiny filmmakers.
Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema.
For me, the French new wave is Truffaut and Rohmer. Godard I sometimes have trouble with because he's very much of a director's director. I feel Truffaut is such a humanist, and I always go in that direction.
I'm so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn't belong.
Getting bad reviews or doing something that's not great is also really good for you as an actor. It also makes me feel as an actor that I've earned my stripes a bit.
I think it's true of a lot of teenagers that you're convinced that life is happening somewhere else.
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.
I think structure is so deep in us. We put it in stories we tell our friends or in emails we write. We want it. It's how we create meaning.
I'm always interested in relationships between women. I'm always interested in how women relate to each other, whether it's a family relationship or it's a friend relationship. That's such uncharted territory in cinema.
Working is not instantly rewarding. It's a long process, and it's much easier to just feed whatever dopamine cycles exist in your brain in instant gratification ways. I get it; I do it.
I loved 'Moonlight.' I thought it was really beautiful. Really great.
Acting was always the first love, but a lot of people want to be actors, and my goal was, 'Come hell or high water, I will be a part of this world, however I can.' So that just led me to throwing myself into every aspect of narrative storytelling I could.
In terms of sheer pleasure, Tom Stoppard was very big for me because he is so funny and so smart, and it felt delicious reading him.
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