The New York Times may have identified her as “the definitive actress of her generation” but, until very recently, if you didn’t know where to look for Greta Gerwig, it’s unlikely you would have found her.
The languid, pretty, deadpan, 27-year-old Californian made 10 films within three years of graduating from college in 2006, but the chances are you saw none of them. Spontaneous and unapologetically ramshackle, with young casts, improvised dialogue, blasé nudity and obscure titles such as LOL, Baghead or Hannah Takes the Stairs, all were made on an almost non-existent budget for an almost non-existent audience. Unsure quite what to make of them, one critic lumped them together in a new, somewhat dismissive sub-genre, “mumblecore”, and the name stuck.
“If no one had ever seen Hannah Takes the Stairs, in some ways, it wouldn’t have totally mattered,” says Gerwig, perched on a sofa in the Dorchester Hotel, in a short black dress. “It would have been a bit of a bummer, but it didn’t cost that much to make, so our only obligation was to our weird movie that we wanted to make.”
This weekend, Gerwig can be seen in another weird movie – albeit one conceived on a rather grander scale. Arthur is a big-budget remake of the 1981 Dudley Moore comedy about an alcoholic, infantile English millionaire who falls in love with a working-class New Yorker (Liza Minnelli). This time round, Russell Brand plays the titular twerp, Gerwig takes the Minnelli role, Helen Mirren and Nick Nolte turn up in supporting roles, and the script, by Borat writer Peter Baynham, ties itself into all kind of knots trying to fathom how on earth, in 2011, to make a stinking rich narcissistic addict come across as a lovable clown.
If there is a reason to watch Arthur, Gerwig is it. Even when delivering lines that smack of the typewriter, her charm is so easy, her acting style so unobtrusive that it’s easy to believe she isn’t acting at all. Indeed, she has perhaps the most effortlessly captivating presence of any young American actress since Scarlett Johansson mooched her way through Lost in Translation.
Both on screen and in person, Gerwig has a slow, deliberate way with words, as if you’d just stopped her on the street to ask for directions to a place she loves but whose location she can only hazily remember. The effect is to make her sound at once both certain and vague, and to lend an undertow of irony to her sunny, straightforward Californian demeanour.
“When people ask me what I do, I still feel strange saying, ‘I am an actress’, but I do say that now.” She pauses and smiles wryly. “And people say, ‘But what is your day job?’”
She can still recall the nervous moment when, aged 14, she announced to her mother, a nurse, that she was going to become an actress: “My mum said sternly, ‘Do you think you are as good as Meryl Streep?’ And I said to her, ‘I only have to be as good as me’.”
She liked growing up among the farmsteads and municipal offices of Sacramento in northern California, she says, but never felt she quite belonged there. In the New York films of Woody Allen she glimpsed an alternative vision of a more exciting, grimier, cleverer, more complicated life, and as soon as she could she left home for the Big Apple. “It sounds silly to say out loud, but those films have so much to do with how I have defined the narrative of my own life,” she says. “Annie Hall is like what I thought love was when I was young.”
Throughout college in New York Gerwig acted in student drama – “in the sidekick roles,” she says, “I was kind of like a secondary character in life always” – before moving into film. Her ticket out of mumblecore obscurity came last year when New York director Noah Baumbach, himself a fan of Hannah Takes the Stairs (which Gerwig co‑wrote), cast her opposite Ben Stiller in his angsty comedy Greenberg. As in Arthur, Gerwig plays the ordinary girl pursued by a peculiar older man – in this case Stiller’s egocentric former musician recovering from a mental breakdown. Her bewitching performance gave the film its heartbeat and earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Female Lead, pitting her against the year’s Best Actress Oscar nominees, including Annette Bening, Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman.
Gerwig hasn’t looked back. She could recently be found in multiplexes in Ivan Reitman romcom No Strings Attached with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, and this summer will star in the long-awaited new film from revered Metropolitan filmmaker Whit Stillman, his first since The Last Days of Disco in 1998. She is also planning to direct one last low-budget film of her own, based on a screenplay she has recently completed.
To be a director, she thinks, “you have to be a bit desirous of being the king of your own little kingdom. You have to want to be godlike.” Does she? “I am not sure.” Again there is a pause, a bashful smile. “I think I might.”
Her favourite filmmakers, she says, are writer-directors such as Stillman, Mike Leigh or Todd Solondz, “filmmakers who with each new film build another little piece of their own very specific world”. Is there a very specific Greta Gerwig world? “If there is, I hope that it has a sweetness to it,” she says. “I see the world as a good place, which is strange because I think a lot of times people make art out of complaint, they have bones to pick, and I don’t have that. But maybe that is because I have grown up in America with a tremendous amount of privilege, so of course I think the world is a good place.” Or maybe it is because, as one of the brightest prospects in American cinema, everything is going her way.
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