Greta Gerwig

“For me, the French new wave is Truffaut and Rohmer. Godard I sometimes have trouble with because he's very much of a director's director. I feel Truffaut is such a humanist, and I always go in that direction.”

“I feel so part of the filmmaking community. It's amazing how much people support each other.”

“I was a massive Whit Stillman fan. Groupie. I would have done anything for him.”

“For Mike Mills, I learned that having dance parties and crying with your cast does not make you a weak director, it makes you a strong director.”

“I loved 'Moonlight.' I thought it was really beautiful. Really great.”

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

“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.”

“I think I've always wanted to direct, but I didn't go to film school. I was lucky enough to work in movies, and I think those became my film school in terms of acting and watching directors work and also writing and co-writing and producing.”

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

“I don't really decide what the core of the story is before I write. I write to figure out what the story is. And I think the characters end up talking to you and telling you what they want to be doing and what is important to them. So in some ways, your job is to listen as much as it is to write.”

“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.”

“Whenever you work with someone who you idolize, you realize... he's just a person trying to make a movie as best he knows how. And that doesn't look so different from other people trying to do the same thing.”

“I feel like a good pair of diamond studs goes a long way. They make everything look dressy, and you just seem more put together.”

“There's something very satisfying about old cameras because they're ingenious. I mean when you take them apart and actually see, 'Oh, this is how we make photographs,' it's an ingenious thing, but it feels like it's in a way a layman can appreciate, whereas a digital camera, I don't even begin to know what goes into making a digital camera.”

“Greta Gerwig always seemed like a name that was mine. My mother did a good job.”

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

“I sometimes have to turn off the fan part of my brain when I'm acting; otherwise, it would be terrible.”

“Everybody is always in the middle of their own opera.”

“I'm interested in long careers where you take detours.”

“I wrote the script to 'Lady Bird,' and it really came out of a desire to make a project about home - like, what the meaning of home is, and place. I knew Sacramento very well, obviously, growing up there, and I felt like the right way to tell a story of a place was through a person who's about to leave it.”