Greta Gerwig Quotes

We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that's where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.

I didn't know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.

I like movies about women behaving badly, because women behave badly just like men, and we're not always adorable and cute about it.

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.

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

I like things that look like mistakes.

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.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to be celibate, but you don’t need a romance to complete a story about a woman

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.

I had dreams, but I didn't have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched.

You feel sadness for time passing. New York is a city that keeps reinventing itself, and I love it so much.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

In relationships, you learn a million things. I'm sure a therapist can tell you about it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not really capable of memorizing stuff without moving around, that's how I do it.

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.

I think as an actress, I prefer having a character on the page. It allows you to be more invested in actually creating a whole person. It's easier when you're not trying to come up with your next line on the spot.

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.

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.

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.

You don't need love and sex in films

When I felt like I was looking down the barrel of nothing on the horizon it was hard for me.

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.

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.

Getting bad reviews or doing something thats not great is also really good for you as an actor. It also makes me feel as an actor that Ive earned my stripes a bit.

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.

The economy is rough. I think that affects everyone from big filmmakers to tiny filmmakers.

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.

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.

I'm far too middle-class to morally object to a paying job.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In college, it's very easy to maintain your female friendships because you're in such close proximity all the time.

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.

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.

There's an economy in sports that I always think is a useful metaphor for acting. You have an objective. You're trying to win, and of course, you want to do well. You want to use good techniques so you enforce it, but also you don't do things you don't have to do. It's very economical, and I think that in acting the most economical way through a scene is always the best. It's active. There is the sense of the fight and you want to win.

Sometime female characters, especially in the genre of something that people consider rom-com, make mistakes in a cute way or they're a mess in a way that's palatable. I like that.

I can say I'm a relationship person, and I like relationships. I think I also like relationships because then you don't have to date because dating is horrible.

It feels like when I write, it's intuitive. This is true of Frances, and it's true of this [The Funniest Movie Of The Summer].

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.

I don't do well when I don't work.