Some actors save a prop, others a script smeared with notes or doodles and still others a favourite item of clothing from a project.
Actress Greta Gerwig usually keeps a costume piece or entire outfit from a movie as a memento, carefully tucking “something that feels like the person” into a garment bag but never donning it again. For Mistress America, she held onto her character Brooke’s white coat, white shirt and high-heeled boots.
“I’m very careful about never wearing my own clothes in films because then I could never wear them again. If I like something, I tend to tell the costume designer that they need to find something that is equivalent but not exactly that, because it can’t happen.”
In Mistress America, she plays a Times Square resident and adventurous gal who befriends a lonely college freshman, Tracy (Lola Kirke), who is about to become her stepsister.
In addition to starring as Brooke, Gerwig co-wrote the screenplay with director Noah Baumbach and also served as one of the producers. Some of the wittiest or most insightful lines sound as though they were ad-libbed or mined from sensational scribbles in a notebook, but they were carefully plotted.
“The movie is very precisely scripted. We don’t allow for any improvisation or deviation from the script,” she said in a phone call from Philadelphia during a publicity stop.
Gerwig, a magna cum laude graduate of Barnard College who has worked with Woody Allen (To Rome With Love), Whit Stillman (Damsels in Distress) and Baumbach twice before (Frances Ha and Greenberg), calls herself a “fairly to extremely compulsive notebook keeper”.
She explains, “Just the act of writing it down makes me remember it. I’ll often have the strange experience of writing a whole script and not being entirely sure where all the lines are coming from in my brain.
“And then, as I do every so often if I’m moving or trying to clean — which happens sometimes — I’ll read old notebooks and I’ll find things I’d written down that I’d forgotten I’d written down, but that I’d actually quoted verbatim in a movie. So, some part of my brain is recording this, even though I’m not consciously aware of it.”
Gerwig has played New Yorkers before, but she sees Brooke as existing in her own universe and part of a mythic New York. “In some ways she doesn’t even feel like she belongs to today, even though technically the movie does take place now. She feels like an older New York or something. She feels more of the ‘80s.”
The filmmakers talked about movies from that decade such as After Hours, Desperately Seeking Susan, Something Wild and Broadway Danny Rose, along with screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby, Twentieth Century, Holiday and “things that felt more theatrical, especially for the second half of the movie when they wind up in the house in Connecticut”.
If women are not telling those stories, you’re losing half of what it means to be human.
Gerwig has acted opposite Al Pacino, Helen Mirren and Debra Winger but says, “Most artists in general really let their work speak louder than anything else, so they’re not really in the business of dispensing advice or proclamations about how to go about doing it.” Except for the late Mike Nichols, whom she knew only “a little bit” through Baumbach.
“Mike Nichols was one of the greatest talkers I’ve ever encountered. He said so many things that I can’t even begin to recall all of them right now, but I remember he said something to the effect of, ‘If you’re a beautiful woman and you want to do something else with your life besides just be a beautiful woman, you’ve got to get a plan. Because the world already has an idea of what they think you should do and it doesn’t look so bad, but if you’ve got another thing you want to achieve, you’ve got to get a strategy.’"
He was talking about his wife, newswoman Diane Sawyer, but the notion stuck with her. “I only met him a handful of times, but I don’t think anybody was as smart as he was when talking about film and theatre and life, really.”
Which naturally leads to the inflammatory topic of sexism in Hollywood (at 32, the curse of ageism has yet to descend).
I’m very careful about never wearing my own clothes in films because then I could never wear them again.
Gerwig is certainly flying the flag for women with her next movie, director Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan, set to make its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. She is part of 20th Century Women, also starring Annette Bening and Elle Fanning, and she could be making her solo directing debut with Lady Bird, a script she wrote about a young woman in Sacramento.
Does she bump up against sexism in the business?
“It’s the water we’re swimming in right now, but I also think that there are so many amazing female creators, and obviously there are amazing female actors and there always have been, and there always have been amazing female writers. But I think right now, the women who are writing and directing and telling stories — their own stories and stories that resonate with them — they’re becoming undeniable.
“That being said, the numbers are still dreadful. The numbers are not good; they’re not telling a very good story about what’s going on. But I’m hopeful. In some ways, I think all people who make any kind of art, there is a moment where you have this crisis of ‘What is it that I do with my life, and does it matter?’ I make films, what does that mean for people? There are so many problems in the world that need to be addressed.”
She adds, though, that storytelling — whether through a film or novel or piece of music — helps to “express the human experience. … it’s the way that people create meaning in their lives and figure out what the structure of morality is and value is and relationships are. And if women are not telling those stories, you’re losing half of what it means to be human.”
Mistress America opens in Australia on October 29.
