Greta Gerwig
Courage doesn't grow overnight. It can be a long process.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Movies
I don't know any woman who has a simple relationship with their mother or with their daughter.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Wedding
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.Collection: Amazing
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.Collection: Movies
I think I've always wanted to direct, but I didn't go to film school. I was lucky enough to work in movies, and I think those became my film school in terms of acting and watching directors work and also writing and co-writing and producing.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Relationship
I have very intense feelings of joy or sadness. I used to not like that so much because I was worried it was girly, and I wanted to be more stoic. I think this happens a lot. 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.'Collection: God
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.Collection: Moving
I had dreams, but I didn't have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Home
There are a lot of love stories in 'Maggie's Plan,' but the deepest, truly romantic one is between Maggie and her daughter.Collection: Romantic
I'm really interested in trying to tell stories about women that don't involve romantic components. That's so much a part of the way we feel about female characters and their needs that it feels like it's built in - but I'd like to find a way that it's not. There are so many more stories than that.Collection: Women
Having health insurance made me feel like a real person. Up until then, it felt like I was getting away with something, and if three things went wrong, it would all fall apart.Collection: Health
You only get one life, so you might as well feel all the feelings.
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.
Everybody is always in the middle of their own opera.
I loved 'Moonlight.' I thought it was really beautiful. Really great.
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.
I'd applied to graduate school for playwriting, and I got rejected by every school. I felt that theatre was closed but that, when it came to film, the door was very slightly ajar. If I have any virtues, it's that I'm good at walking through doors that are slightly ajar.
The more particular you make something, the more universal it becomes.
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 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.
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.
Making movies is a hard thing, and it's slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.
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.
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.
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.
There's something that happens around 27 and 28, when people start coupling off more aggressively or changing their lives according to what their economic prospects are, and not keeping themselves on par with the group - you realise suddenly that they're not your family. And I think that's very painful.
I love big, sprawling movies where there are too many characters, and people get introduced halfway through, and you're like, 'Wait, who are these people?'
I think something about high school students being snobby about how much they have or don't have is particularly absurd because it's not theirs. It's their parents'. So to feel quite good about yourself because you've got the fancy house and car doesn't make any sense - you didn't earn any of that.
There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.
I have a fundamentally hopeful view about people, and that might merely be a reflection of the fact that I've lived an incredibly privileged life in a very wealthy nation without a lot of the struggles that most of the world has to face.
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 think it's true of a lot of teenagers that you're convinced that life is happening somewhere else.
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 think that people in their 20s actually aren't given enough credit for their ambition.
I'm always interested in how people use language to not say what they mean.
I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It's really what I love and what I care about.
Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema.
From Noah Baumbach, I learned to have a strict no cell phone policy on set. There is nothing that bums you out more than looking over and seeing somebody on their smartphone, and that goes for actors and everyone else.
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.
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.
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.
I'm interested in long careers where you take detours.
I always have a soft spot in my heart for New York designers and independent designers, people who are doing the fashion equivalent of what I'm trying to do in film.
One of my favorite things about Telluride is because it's so small, the directors are really there for each other. You look at another director, and they feel the same thing you feel.
I've never had a plan, I've always done things from instinct.
I didn't know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.