Here at Movieline we're big on Gerwig, obviously, so meeting for tea with the 27-year-old ingénue was a no brainer. In a frank and far-reaching conversation, Gerwig pondered her mainstream break-out, girl-crushed on No Strings Attached writer Liz Meriwether and co-star Natalie Portman ("A real girls' girl -- a dinner party-having, wine-drinking, laughing-too-loud kind of girl"), explained her idea for a YouTube sex scene montage, outed Whit Stillman's love for Caribbean dance-hall music, and revealed the personal hometown-set script she's hoping to film in the next few years.
How funny is it to you to have been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for your work in Greenberg, which was touted as your big mainstream breakout role?
I know! I suppose it's true, ostensibly it looks like I've gone mainstream. Actually No Strings Attached in a funny way is very mainstream, but the reason I was excited about it was -- I mean, I love Ivan Reitman, comedy god. Stripes was my favorite movie when I was a kid. But Elizabeth Meriwether, who wrote the script, was a weird downtown theater kid and she was making really cool plays when I was in New York when I was in college. And I was obsessed with her plays. She wrote a play called Heddatron, which was Hedda Gabler with robots, and she did a play called Nicky Goes Goth and another one called Mistakes Madeline Made. She was really funny and smart and awesome and I would have done a movie with her if they had said they're making it for $5 and you're not getting paid. So even though on the surface it looks mainstream, I would have done it anyway.
I have such a girl crush on her.
She's sick. She's awesome. She is, like, the most charming, funny lady that I know, and so self-deprecating and full of really charming self-doubt. I just love her. We hit it off and I auditioned for Ivan, and I got a role! I would have done anything for her, so it's odd. It still feels like it came about in the same kind of organic way that everything else has come about, it's just that I think that the people that I started out making work with are now more successful. Like the Duplass brothers; now they're making movies with movie stars and studios and stuff. One of my very good friends, Lena Dunham, is now blowing up all over the place. We all were doing this, we were all hanging out and making stuff together before and I think it was sort of happenstance that we came up all together.
OK. Greenberg is still indie enough to warrant Spirit Award nominations and No Strings Attached hooked you because of Liz Meriwether's plays, but your next film has got to be your true blue mainstream debut.
Arthur is super mainstream. But Russell Brand and Helen Mirren -- that's about as great as you can get. I had the best time. And then I did a Whit Stillman movie after that, so it has been a mix but I don't feel I've strayed from the path of inaccessibility.
That reminds me; Roger Ebert wrote something really sweet about you to that end. He said, "I have a weakness for actresses like Greta Gerwig. She seems reasonable and approachable."
[Laughs] That's really sweet! That's very nice. I hope that I'm reasonable and approachable, I want to be. I always joke about my dad, you know when they say a person has a certain je ne sais quoi? I have a jens sais quoi. You know what it is. I don't have a whole lot of mystery, which I think I'm happy for. I mean, I can't change it.
So you probably hadn't heard that quote. Do you read reviews?
I try not to. I think two things are true; it's bad to read things about you if they're good or bad, because if they're good you'll start kind of aping yourself, but if they're good or if they're bad you know anyway. You get the gist from people and how they interact with you, so you can usually tell. When it comes out, my friends will be like, "It'll be OK," and I know we got trashed, Variety hated us. Or they'll say, "Wow, so awesome!", and I know we did well.
How did you react to your Spirit Award nomination for Greenberg?
I was so surprised. You know what's great is that really, the critics came through with the year-end lists. Ben's performance is so great in it. I think it's just hard when a movie comes out in March because it's not the awards frenzy and it's easy to get lost in the shuffle. So I'm really glad that the movie has gotten so much year-end love, because I think it totally deserves it.
Was Ben the first mainstream movie star that you had worked with?
Yeah, Ben's my first. Ben Stiller is my first!
What kind of new experiences did you have on Greenberg as opposed to the smaller films you'd worked on before?
That movie was the first of many things for me. It was the biggest film I'd worked on and he was the biggest star I'd worked with, so a lot of things felt bigger and different. But he was just as up for everything and game and in there and ego-less as anyone. Completely ego-less. And also, he was playing a character that's a hard person to spend time with and like, and he never sold him out, he never said well, I'm worried that he's not likable enough, I'm worried that he has to be this way or that. He had enough respect for the character that was written to not pander to anyone's idea of what they could stomach in a character. Which I thought was really admirable. It sounds simple to say that's just what acting is, but so much of the time it's not that. So much of the time I think people are worried about, they're not going to like me, they're not going to think I'm pretty, they're not going to think I'm handsome and mean... and it's so nice to just let it all hang out.
Speaking of laying it all bare, you share one of the more bizarre movie trends of 2011, if you can call it that, with your No Strings Attached co-star Natalie Portman. In short, you both star in different films that made 2010 the year that cunnilingus came to the movies.
Yeah -- Blue Valentine, Black Swan... ladies getting it on! They're all different movies and it's done differently; I think Greenberg's use of it is the most comedic, because there's something so funny about people hooking up for the first time and he immediately goes down on her. [Laughs] I think, I hope, it's part of a larger trend of sex being portrayed frankly. But women having sex has been a problem for a really long time, especially on film. It's something people do. I've always said I never want to do a shot in a movie where -- you know like when a man and a woman have sex for the first time, usually in a movie where there's no nudity and the sex is fake?
She keeps her bra on, and they're both covered by an L sheet...
Yes! But if they show sex, in that shot it's usually a two-shot from the side and you know the moment his penis goes into her because she kind of arches back, and it looks so weird and fake. Like, now they're having sex! And it's in so many movies I want to make a YouTube video of all these girls going "Uhh" and arching back. Sometimes they'll cut to an above shot of just her head moving on a pillow... I think it's just so funny the way it's portrayed because it's like I don't know who's having sex! At some point I'm sure you've had sex like that, but just in general I think it's so strange. I think it's always good when either men or women are multi-dimensional, they're people. And I don't need to see sex in every movie, but I think it's nice that it's sort of become part of what we see -- we see sex scenes. In some movies.
That's a good segue back into No Strings Attached, which is about a purely sexual relationship.
It is. I think it's still being worked out, but what you can get away with in comedy is pushing that boundary because if it's funny people will accept it more easily than if it's not. That's what's good about Liz's script; it's quite funny and people don't immediately recognize what they're watching until after it's over and if it had been played straight it would have never gotten through the door.
In the film you play Natalie Portman's best friend, a pretty level-headed friend who almost leads by example where sex and relationships are concerned.
She's great. I like her so much. It's kind of hard to talk about her removed from how much I just really like her. I think she's so amazing as an actress, I just loved her in Black Swan. I saw it three times. I think she should win all awards, for everything.
Even the one you're up against her for at the Spirit Awards?
Yeah. I told her she'd better bring it! No, she should win everything. She's tremendous. I always loved her when I was growing up watching movies. She's a couple of years older than me but I felt like I grew up with her, in a way. She was so smart, I thought it was so cool that she went to Harvard and got an education. I've had conversations with other girls about this -- I went to regular college, but girls whose parents were very insistent upon an education, when you'd tell your parents you wanted to be an actor and they'd say, you could do so many other things, you're so smart, Natalie Portman was a talking point. Well, Natalie Portman did it! And they couldn't deny it.
How much of a departure from your past roles was No Strings Attached for you?
It was a different kind of a part in a different kind of a tone and project, so it was different from anything I'd done. But I had a great time doing it. It's so strange and I'm sure other people feel like this, but I always knew I kind of had that side of myself - the best friend type role -- because I played it all through high school. I was the sidekick. I think I was too tall. I'm 5' 9" but in high school that seemed gigantic and boys seemed really short because they wouldn't get their growth spurt til later. So I was always the sidekick in musicals -- or the older evil woman.
Speaking of musicals, tell us about the new Whit Stillman movie you filmed, Damsels in Distress, which has a musical component.
It's a '30s song and dance. I tap and sing, and I actually did tap dance growing up, so I tap danced for my audition for Whit. I was so excited to audition for him, I said, "I know you didn't ask for it, but I brought my tap shoes." I just really wanted to be in it because I love his movies. I think what's amazing about his films is that he's so genuinely eccentric and unique, and he really does see things differently than anyone else.
How have you come to work with so many auteurs?
I like filmmakers. I think in some ways it's more exciting as an actor for me because filmmakers who are often writer-directors or auteurs are world-builders more than anyone else. If you look at people like Whit Stillman or Todd Solondz or Wes Anderson or Noah Baumbach or Sofia Coppola, they have something specific that they're doing. You get to live in this made-up world that they built, so you're not only playing a character, you're playing a character that only exists in this alternate universe that exists only in their head and on the screen. And to me that's completely intoxicating.
And how does that affect how you work with them?
When you're working with a world-builder, you've got music you think they'd like and books you think would influence them. With Whit, he's so influenced by St. Augustine's Confessions and I was reading those the whole time. He really, truly has a lot of moral strife. And he loves Caribbean dance hall music so I listened to that. You get to now only see through the characters' lives but have the filmmakers world live through you, and that's really rewarding.
You've been more and more involved in your smaller films, with producing and writing credits on a number of projects. Are you going to continue pursuing non-acting roles in films?
Yeah, on Nights and Weekends and Hannah Takes the Stairs and this movie I shot, I think it'll be at SXSW this year, called The Dish & the Spoon, which I just went to Delaware to make with my friends. I think it benefited a lot from being involved like that, and it also makes you grateful for when you have resources. Because you use them and you never had them before and you're excited that you can get the right car for a character and you're not just constrained by what kind of car your friend has.
You've got a busy 2011 ahead of you with No Strings Attached, Arthur, and Damsels in Distress. Do you envision yourself continuing to go back and forth between studio films and micro-indies in the near future?
I don't think I'm as interested in sort of meandering storytelling as I once was, or things that are not scripted.
What changed?
I started thinking that while you can get a lot of interesting things out of entirely improvised movies or movies that have a loose structure but are almost all improvised, sometimes I felt like they could have been better had they been honed, Mike Leigh-style. Taking the improvisations and shaping them and turning them into something. And second to that is, I identify as much as a writer as I do as an actress. I like the process of writing and I like getting a script as an actor. Maybe it's just self-entertainment, but having something to write is good, it keeps me sane. I'm interested in making things as perfect as they can be on the page before making them into a film, because I enjoy words and writing.
How long and how much have you been writing?
I've been writing scripts along the way but kind of so they would be turned into things really quickly. Just quickly saying, let's put it on its feet and see how it goes. Now I've transitioned; we wrapped Damsels by Dec. 1, so I've had a month and a half, and it's been great to wake up and write every day. I forgot how much I liked it. I love acting but I think I'm a better actor when I'm writing and I'm a better writer when I'm acting.
What kinds of stories are you yearning to put out there?
Movies about girls of different ages. Movies about Sacramento. I want to shoot a movie in Sacramento, and I believe I'll be able to do that. But I feel that I have the distinct advantage of being really from a place; I was raised there my whole life and I feel like I know it. I spent a lot of my life feeling that maybe where I come from was not good enough because I didn't grow up in New York surrounded by culture all the time. My mom's a nurse and my dad works at a credit union. And all of a sudden I thought, No, this is good! Now you have the opportunity to make something about this world! So that's looking forward to the next three years, I hope that's a big component of what I do because I love it.