A Quote by Greta Gerwig

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.
It's hard making a movie because it's like... you lose your life. I mean, really, I like being alive; I like having friends, going out, watching other people's movies, and all these things I can't do for a year while I make a movie.
There's a real tension between it being a collaborative art process, which is almost like performance art of yourself, and, as we talk about the movie, it's kind of a mix between melodrama and cinéma vérité. This involves ideas about playing the role of yourself and the movie of your life and all these other things.
I think people find it so easy to write off teenagers and millennials as just being like these shallow, self-centered people who don't have anything real going on and who are always just on their cell phones. But being a teenager is really hard.
I know Noah Baumbach from a long time ago. We were hanging out one night, and he asked if I wanted to be in his movie. If somebody whose stuff you really like says, 'Hey, you want to do it with me?,' you got to do it. I would like to say that I get these offers all the time, but I don't.
I never sleep in. By the way, when we're like, "We alternate waking up for the kids," the other person's waking up at 7 a.m. It's not like you're waking up at 10. It's like, "I'm really going to give you a treat and you're gonna get your ass up at 7 instead of 5:59." Which is when our son wakes up.
I really hate being sick. It seems inevitable that at one point, one of these predicted epidemics is going to be real. So often they come up, and there's people like me that are freaked out, and the majority of people are just like, "You're being idiots, this happens every other year."
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 really has been a blessing because you can go and look at our other movies we've done in a studio system. We didn't get to make the movie that we wanted to make. We made the movie that someone else wanted us to make. That can be a little disheartening, a lot disheartening. While there have been struggles, it doesn't matter which table you're at because you're going to have obstacles, but I kind of like being able to make the movie that you want to make.
It's almost like being trapped in some other form. The real me is so different from the way I look on the outside.
I like collaboration, I like to incorporate other people's ideas [and] that's what happens when you do a big movie. Unless you're called Stanley Kubrick and you do an independent movie for like $200 million.
The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.
You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'
A lot of people will think I changed the book: ‘so you’re the tiger instead, you’re the tiger who ate the cook.’ That’d be totally expository, like in the book, ‘you’re the tiger’ and then it stops there. That seems to have the magic touch. I bring everything together. That’s why he made up the story, the whole thing becomes internalized. That might be the magic, but all I did is not so much interpreted, but try my best to keep everybody still staying in the movie. And I was like, ‘God, it’s so hard to do.’ I make movies for a long time. It doesn't get easier.
Doing Prometheus was what you imagine being an actor is like when you're five. In a spacesuit, on another planet, getting killed by an alien. It was a real treat, it felt like being a part of movie history.
Doing 'Prometheus' was what you imagine being an actor is like when you're five. In a spacesuit, on another planet, getting killed by an alien. It was a real treat; it felt like being a part of movie history.
It's just hard to look at yourself and guess how you're going to be perceived by other people sometimes. I do my best to let people know that I'm approachable, but I'm a human being just like anybody else. Sometimes people forget that. They forget that you're a person and they treat you like this celebrity thing. But I have to be patient with that, and I try to be.
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