Top 158 Quotes & Sayings by Greta Gerwig - Page 3

I don't do well when I don't work.

I think the problem with growing up and idealizing self-destructive artists is that you only see the beauty they created rather than all the pain that went along with it.

If you're with one person, then you don't have to meet other people. It's like when you're acting in a movie, you don't have to audition for other movies. I prefer that.

Getting bad reviews or doing something thats not great is also really good for you as an actor. It also makes me feel as an actor that Ive earned my stripes a bit.

I love New York, but it's a rough city. It's not dangerous now the way it was in the 70's or the 80's, but it's still a rough city. It's hard to hack it there. Life is harder than it is on the West Coast. To be able to deal with that, you have to have a lot of aspirational feelings pinned on being there.

Using the energy in a scene can really cut the fat off of something and streamline it. It can make it work for you and activate it for you in a way.

There's an economy in sports that I always think is a useful metaphor for acting. You have an objective. You're trying to win, and of course, you want to do well. You want to use good techniques so you enforce it, but also you don't do things you don't have to do. It's very economical, and I think that in acting the most economical way through a scene is always the best. It's active. There is the sense of the fight and you want to win.

I think in theater the playwright is king. Those words are unchangeable. They are the reason that everything else flows from.

I like acting and things when I like the writing. If I don't like the writing, I don't like acting. I think in some ways everything starts for me from the place of writing.

A lot of my friends are struggling. A lot of my friends didn't make movies, which was really hard and sad. I'm good friends with this film collective, Red Bucket, which made Daddy Longlegs and The Pleasure Of Being Robbed. They're climbing the walls. They're all making cartoon booklets now, because they can't raise the funds to make another movie. But I think that when it returns, which it hopefully will, there will be another surge of energy.

I can say I'm a relationship person, and I like relationships. I think I also like relationships because then you don't have to date because dating is horrible.

I was a ballet dancer. I did other kinds of dance but ballet was my great love. But then it became clear, when I was 12, that my body wasn't going to be right. That's always a heartbreaking moment because there's nothing you can do about that. Your body is just not right. You don't have enough turnout. You're not built properly.

When I felt like I was looking down the barrel of nothing on the horizon it was hard for me.

As a kid, I was a big reader. 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. I would read all night. My mom would come into my room and tell me I had to go to sleep, so I would hide books under my bed. At first I had a tough time getting through novels, so I read plays, because a play is generally shorter and has all those tools for getting people hooked early on.

Movies are now more often watched on the small screen anyway. But at least for me, what got lost in that is the difference in the medium.

Sometime female characters, especially in the genre of something that people consider rom-com, make mistakes in a cute way or they're a mess in a way that's palatable. I like that.

I think any break-up from a long relationship has this accompanying feeling of who am I without this person. You feel like a half-person because you've integrated yourself into an idea of a couple for so long, and then teasing that out and finding out who you are without them, it just takes a while. It feels like an amputation.

Everybody's got a dud. You can't get out of it. That's the price of admission: you'll get some duds. You'll get some things where you missed a little. It's a crap feeling when you're going through it. But the main thing is as long as you're not doing anything for cynical reasons, then you'll be okay.

I think it's really hard to work in a city where you live too, because I get so absorbed with the movie that I become a bad friend and a bad participant in my own life.

Noah Baumbach does more takes than any director I've ever worked with. He runs a very quiet set and he runs a very hard working set. He has such an intense level of dedication to what's happening that he cultivates a group of people around him who have an equal level of dedication. Nobody asks, "When is lunch?" That's just not part of our sets. It's complete immersion. He has a 'no cell phone' rule. Nobody checks their cell phone. Nobody reads on set. It's like, "If you're there, you're there. If you're not on board with that, don't work on this movie."

It feels like when I write, it's intuitive. This is true of Frances, and it's true of this [The Funniest Movie Of The Summer].

I think I'm pretty committed to staying. I'm not committed to not doing big movies, but I am committed to continuing to make smaller movies, not for the sake of making smaller movies, but because I think it's really invigorating to just go work with people and know that it might be awful.

I feel like most people aren't either/or, they're both/and. You're both magnanimous and petty. You're both kind and cruel. You're never just one thing.

You don't need love and sex in films

I wanted to be a playwright in college. That's what I was interested in and that's what I was moving toward, and then I had the lucky accident of falling in love with film. I was 19 or 20 that I realized films are made by people. Shooting digitally became cheaper and better. You couldn't make something that looked like a Hollywood film, but you could make something through which you could work out ideas. I was acting, but I was also conceiving the plots and operating the camera when I wasn't onscreen. I got very unvain about film acting, and it became a sort of graduate school for me.

In relationships, you learn a million things. I'm sure a therapist can tell you about it.

I love just seeing shots of New York inside of a fictional movie that are not controlled. I do not like shots with extras, I have to say. I don't mind extras in other scenes, but I love New York City streets just as they look. I don't even care if someone looks at the camera. It doesn't bother me.

There are a million little things, but one of the best ways to get to know characters is to just put them in situations and see what they say.

In college, it's very easy to maintain your female friendships because you're in such close proximity all the time.

I think... I love Los Angeles. 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 not someone who's an immigrant who's struggling in that way, but between New York and L.A., I had someone tell me very early on, "If you're going to be broke anywhere, it's better to be broke in L.A. At least the weather is nice." I was like, "You're right." I didn't take them up on that.

There's no such thing as cheating when you're 18. That's just true. I'm very endeared by this notion of the way adolescents practice being grown ups and practice for adult morality. I remember when I was 15 and people were starting to date and someone cheated on someone. They'd say, 'He cheated on her. You know what they say, once a cheater always a cheater.'

I'm just a relationship girl. I fall in love and I usually have long relationships. I like getting to know people well and having substantive, long relationships.

I love shooting in New York because I love the city. Ultimately, I like doing it there and the city is important to the story, but it can be hard to shoot where you live too because it is so all-absorbing.

I think in general with micro-budget films right now, it's rough. The economy is rough. I think that affects everyone from big filmmakers to tiny filmmakers.

It's so hard for people to give up their cell phones or their ideas of being connected to everything all the time in order to get an immersive experience. That's the best way to make art. It's almost like you have to treat it like you're going into a submarine, and Noah Baumbach totally agrees with that. There's not a real other life that happens outside of the movie while it's being shot, which I like.

I'm interested in the feeling of getting to zero after a play, like you're never going to do it again. That's a really scary feeling.

You feel sadness for time passing. New York is a city that keeps reinventing itself, and I love it so much.