Introduction

Back when I attended Vancouver Film School, I had this assignment paper for Film Theory with the following theme: who is my favourite director and why?

It was 2022 and Barbie hasn’t even been released yet. But today, on International Women’s Awareness Day, I remembered to have written this article and thought It would be a good idea to share with other people. Not only because I got a good mark on that (though it certainly helped), but mainly because Greta’s backstory inspires me everyday as a filmmaker in pursuit of placement.

So, the question is: why her?

First of all, we don’t have that many female identifying directors winning awards. We don’t even have examples of women getting the director credit, in general. It’s really hard to “get there”, also because of so many reasons we all know about. Sexism, abuse, harassment, and few open opportunities in a world that seems to be built to not fit us there. The path Greta Gerwig chose to follow, however, maybe not even on purpose, helped her to prove herself in a different way than we are used to in this Industry.

She came from acting to screenwriting to directing, collecting over 68 credits, 93 awards and 290 nominations in total. Some of her successful credits as an actress come from Frances Ha (2012), Mistress America (2015), Isle of Dogs (2018) and White Noise (2022). Meanwhile, she gathered some recognition with her two directing features Lady Bird (2017) and the adapted to screen Little Women (2019), which she also wrote, leading herself to this point of career where she released the much expected live-action of Barbie (2023).

Personal life to become fiction

In my opinion, one of the best tools we can have as a content creator is using our personal experience to make something relatable and full of truth. That’s what Greta has in her favour. Ladybird was based on Greta’s personal memories and feelings as a teenager born and raised in Sacramento, California, which is a very small and traditional town, with the catholic church playing a huge part in people’s life. Greta explored all of that and translated this to the screen through semiotic, between the lines of script subtext, blocking subtext and production design subtext.

Maybe she hasn’t actually experienced everything in the screenplay, but she definitely knows more than anyone how Sacramento used to be in the 80s, and how friends and family used to act and treat each others. Greta had no intentions to be accurate about anything, she only wanted to describe and present her little world to the audience, being nostalgic and critical at the same time, as if an artistic catarse on her fist big production.

Acting director

Some directors choose to focus on blocking, others on storyboard, others on concept. Greta seems to care the most about acting. Which is perfectly expected from an actress, after all. She reveals in interviews her method of interventions and how she connects with the cast in a two-sided way of collaboration. As an actress, she knows the best approach to talk to the cast, what exactly to say, how to say it, and when to say it. She knows the boundaries between fiction & reality in which the actors incorporate the characters and how it can be of great value for directors to double check their dilemmas or topics still in consideration.

And as with everything in life, many directors diverge on their opinions, but I think the best film is the one with the best character development; as human beings, we are naturally interested in stories and gossip. We don’t need special effects or things like that to be focused on a good plot. The film can be made with one single location, one actor, one frame. If the character is relatable and intriguing, people will be easily caught on their attention, that’s all.

Cinematography and Production Design are elements to add value and help to the storytelling, not to just be pretty. It must have some kind of meaning to the choices from each department, and that’s what Greta is so great at.

Directing Tools

In fact, stage blocking is not the only tool Greta uses for managing scenes with multiple characters. She seems to dominate the skills of overlapping lines, creating an organised mess in the cacophony of words emerging from the excitement that each scene requires.

In Little Women, Greta wrote notes in the script breakdowns for the cast to say the words and phrases in a way teenage sisters would say. She carefully indicated the emotions and subtext of the lines according to what was happening in each scene and the age period it was set, as Little Women is a feature which flies from childhood to adulthood in about ten years. As long as Amy, the youngest one, starts getting older, her voice and way of speaking drastically change. The same happens to Meg, who is suddenly forcing herself to sound like a good respectable wife; Josephine loses a bit of her bad temper and gets more relaxed in her speaking; Beth and Laurie do not seem so different as the years pass by, but maybe there is a reason that I’m not able to tell yet.

In a video from Vanity Fair Youtube Channel, Greta says something that resumes her directing style: “it’s a trick of not just where are you putting the camera, it’s where are you putting your emotion with everyone”. And even by the single frames, Greta manages to block the camera to follow the characters’ path, letting the audience discover how those characters behave when they think nobody is watching.

She also mentions the meanings behind the costume and hair design and why she made those decisions. One example is that each “March Girl” has a main colour and Marmee has a combination of all of those, because she’s the mom, she is the four girls in one. In another interview, Greta explains her process of adaptation as she highlighted all the lines in the book, gathered background information about Louisa Alcott (the book author) and compared both of them.

Final thoughts

Deconstruction of the female world seems to be Greta’s major goal as filmmaker, which seems fair, considering all the things she has already mentioned in interviews, like how her male colleagues admitted to her they were surprised with the quarrell scenes in both Ladybird and Little Women, and even shocked with the realisation that girls do fight with each other but in a different way boys do.

With that being said, Greta’s success seems to be a light in the end of the tunnel for the female community, usually hopeless to have a future like hers. Of course, this is not an easy and quick journey, and even Greta still struggles to win awards in competitions like OSCAR’s, Golden Globes and BAFTA’s.

She only got directing awards in the smaller ones, but the fact she continuously receives nominations for the most prestigious awards indicates something. This is a result of all of her efforts to fight for women recognition, breaking the chain of discrimination and ignorance, also bringing the female universe to the surface of Industry, for no longer playing the supporting role, but reconquering the protagonism in a story that we’re all part of.

PS: A longer version of this article was posted on my substack for my film nerd besties!

And if you liked this article already, you’ll probably like the film list I made on letterboxd. Go check it out here!