Top 60 Greta Gerwig Quotes

I’m interested in characters that have just a touch of madness.

I feel like, when I play characters, I create a space in myself that feels like the character and that doesn’t go away. Somehow, you carry that with you. You let it go, but a little piece of it remains.

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 stopped being interested in improvisation, and I continue to not be that interested in it. Comedians can do it on a different level because they have a goal, but if you’re improvising something that’s dramatic, there’s not that much to be good at.

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 nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.

I feel like movies are presents, and credits and fonts are bows and wrapping paper. I like everything to feel like it was given a lot of time. I hate it when I watch movies, and it seems like they just went and picked a font and, like, called it a day.

I was part of a hip-hop group called Fly Style. I was one of two white girls, and I was part of the younger company, which was called Touch of Style. And it was amazing. It gave me a different perception of dance and beauty because the other girls were mostly African-American and Latina.

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

I think something about high school students being snobby about how much they have or don’t have is particularly absurd because it’s not theirs. It’s their parents’. So to feel quite good about yourself because you’ve got the fancy house and car doesn’t make any sense – you didn’t earn any of that.

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 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.

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 love musicals. I grew up on musicals.

I sound like an old man when I talk about the Internet, but I am actually worried about what it’s doing to our brains and our sense of connection.

I love big, sprawling movies where there are too many characters, and people get introduced halfway through, and you’re like, ‘Wait, who are these people?’

I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It’s really what I love and what I care about.

One of the things that happens when you write characters – and maybe this is my own sentimentality – is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

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

I love writing, and I think I’m kind of a workaholic. I’m happiest when I’m working.

I loved ‘Moonlight.’ I thought it was really beautiful. Really great.

I’m interested in long careers where you take detours.

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.

I’m, like, the only actor in New York who’s never, ever been on any ‘Law & Order.’ And I’ve auditioned for so many. The sad thing is I love ‘Law & Order.’ I’m really obsessed with it. And they always said to me, ‘You seem like you’re making fun of the material.’

I love movies, but sometimes I think it’s better for actresses not to be total cinephiles. You have to be able to do the work at some point; you can’t be totally starstruck. ‘I can’t believe it’s Woody Allen!’ You have to get past that.

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

From Rebecca Miller, I took the idea that the director needs to arrive every day an hour ahead of everyone else and walk through the entire day.

The Catholic theatrics are pretty high quality, but the Protestants have better hymns.

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

I’ve never worked on anything that I haven’t in some way enjoyed.

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.

Mike Leigh is my all-time favourite writer/director/creator.

Making movies is a hard thing, and it’s slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.

Having health insurance made me feel like a real person. Up until then, it felt like I was getting away with something, and if three things went wrong, it would all fall apart.

I loved dance.

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.

I think it’s true of a lot of teenagers that you’re convinced that life is happening somewhere else.

I get nerdy and nervous around not only great actors, but great directors and DPs I love.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s really hard for me to be around people I admire.

One of my favorite things about Telluride is because it’s so small, the directors are really there for each other. You look at another director, and they feel the same thing you feel.

I have a fundamentally hopeful view about people, and that might merely be a reflection of the fact that I’ve lived an incredibly privileged life in a very wealthy nation without a lot of the struggles that most of the world has to face.

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

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

I love movies, so getting to be in the conversation and meet some of my heroes has been so fun. It’s just the most fun thing ever.

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

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 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.

Acting was always the first love, but a lot of people want to be actors, and my goal was, ‘Come hell or high water, I will be a part of this world, however I can.’ So that just led me to throwing myself into every aspect of narrative storytelling I could.

I always have a soft spot in my heart for New York designers and independent designers, people who are doing the fashion equivalent of what I’m trying to do in film.

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

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

I’m all for the banalities of life and humiliation and everyday tragedies, but I also think people have big moments, and they have bigness in them.

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.

Young Harrison Ford, what a dreamboat.

Everybody is always in the middle of their own opera.