Greta Gerwig Quotes Page 2

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm always interested in how people use language to not say what they mean.”

“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.”

“I'm interested in characters that have just a touch of madness.”

“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'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.”

“I'm so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn't belong.”

“I've never had a plan, I've always done things from instinct.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema.”

“Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.”

“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.”

“The more particular you make something, the more universal it becomes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When I read 'Greenberg,' I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I'd be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.”

“When I was a kid, I used to do my homework in the living room, where there was a picture window. I was hoping that someone would walk by and see me looking very studious in my living room.”

“When you write something you know, you're making a story that will work, whether or not there's bits taken. It's always funny to me when people say, 'Well, it's clearly autobiographical,' and I say, 'Well, how do you know my autobiography?' Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it's a very interesting assumption.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Writing on my own versus co-writing kind of is the exact same thing because we don't sit in the same room when we write. We're always writing alone anyway.”

“You only get one life, so you might as well feel all the feelings.”