Greta Gerwig
One of the great advantages of my time spent in movies and in basically every role possible, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, that I've gotten to see all these different ways that people work and the way movies are constructed from the inside out, from beginning to end.
Specifically with directors I'd worked with, and even some that I haven't, they were all incredibly generous with me, having really long conversations about what they felt was useful as tips.
I'm interested in characters that have just a touch of madness.
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.
Mike Leigh is my all-time favourite writer/director/creator.
I love musicals. I grew up on musicals.
I have very strong feelings about dance and how it's shot.
I'm far too middle-class to morally object to a paying job.
As an actor, I just go off the director. I never ask how big the part is. I don't look at it from the perspective of, 'Is this going to be good for my career?' I just look for directors, and I think part of that is I knew I always wanted to be a director.
I feel so part of the filmmaking community. It's amazing how much people support each other.
I lived for two years with six girls in an apartment that was built for three people, and it had no heat. We would sleep in our coats and in sleeping bags. And it was great.
I like movies about women behaving badly, because women behave badly just like men, and we're not always adorable and cute about it.Collection: Cute
You keep learning how to let go and to live the life that you actually have, as opposed to the life you thought you were going to have.Collection: Letting Go
Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.Collection: Character
I think when you're a teenager, you always feel as if life is happening somewhere else - it certainly isn't happening to you. And then you get to the place where you think your life is supposed to be, and you look around and realize it doesn't exist.Collection: Teenager
I’m not saying that everyone needs to be celibate, but you don’t need a romance to complete a story about a womanCollection: Romance
I like things that look like mistakes.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Growing Up
I like people who love books and movies and art and want to talk about it all the time, because that's basically what I want to talk about. Intellectuals that are funny.Collection: Art
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 like a lot of structure and a lot of lines, but then within that I make room for things to happen that you couldn't have predicted.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Writing
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."Collection: Running
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.'Collection: Cheating
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.Collection: Falling In Love
You feel sadness for time passing. New York is a city that keeps reinventing itself, and I love it so much.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Mom
In relationships, you learn a million things. I'm sure a therapist can tell you about it.Collection: Therapists
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Thinking
You don't need love and sex in filmsCollection: Sex
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.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Bad Friend
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Zero
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Differences
In college, it's very easy to maintain your female friendships because you're in such close proximity all the time.Collection: College
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: People
When I felt like I was looking down the barrel of nothing on the horizon it was hard for me.Collection: Horizon
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.Collection: Cutting
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.Collection: Great Love
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.Collection: Long
I think in theater the playwright is king. Those words are unchangeable. They are the reason that everything else flows from.Collection: Kings
I don't do well when I don't work.Collection: Wells