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Greta Gerwigs career is set to soar a little higher with Lady Bird

LADY BIRD written and directed by Greta Gerwig with Saoirse Ronan, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges and Laurie Metcalf. An Elevation Pictures release. 94 minutes. Opens Friday (November 10). See listing.

Greta Gerwig has been promoting Lady Bird more or less constantly since it broke out at Telluride and TIFF back in early September, and I get the sense that shes running on fumes.

This is not a knock on Gerwig, mind you. Flying from one festival to the next, with an intensive promotional tour thats brought her back to Toronto for just a few hours, can wear anybody down. But its a good film, and Gerwig clearly believes in it, so shes pushing through.

The film is Gerwigs first solo outing as a writer/director, but its not her first directorial credit she shared those duties, and the screen, with Joe Swanberg on Nights And Weekends a decade ago.

I loved that movie, in which Gerwig and Swanberg played a couple whose relationship collapses after a long separation, and was happy to see its intimacy and sensitivity carried forward in Gerwigs subsequent projects like Frances Ha and Mistress America (both of which she co-wrote with director and romantic partner Noah Baumbach).

Gerwig loved it too, though she describes her early years as a collaborator on micro-budget films like LOL, Hannah Takes The Stairs, Nights And Weekends and Baghead as radically different from making Lady Bird.

In so many ways those movies are documents of everyone who was making them, she says. You know, Hannah Takes The Stairs is Joe Swanberg, but also Mark Duplass and Andrew Bujalski and Ry Russo-Young and Kent Osborne. We were all making it, and it was a tremendous way to go about learning how to construct a film, finding this community that was supportive and risk-taking and took each others art seriously.

Everyone was doing everything because the films were so small it was such an all-hands-on-deck moment. We had a real point of view about what we were trying to accomplish, and we werent making films that were calling cards for other films, which I think a lot of young filmmakers do. Theyre trying to get hired on something. We were just making the movies, we werent saying The real movies are coming later! she laughs.

The improvisational nature of those early films gave way to more structured screenplays I like things that are quite written, and I like giving scripts to actors and having actors find their life through the lines, she says and acting in other peoples projects, like Whit Stillmans Damsels In Distress, Woody Allens To Rome With Love and Mia Hansen-Lves Eden, gave her the chance to observe their sets.

I continued to gather information, she says with a smile, and by the time I finished the script for this film it had been exactly 10 years since I had started working on movies. And I was like, Okay, now its time. Its time again, for the first time.

The result is Lady Bird, a precise, charming look at a Sacramento teenager who is determined to be interesting. Over the course of her last year of high school, Christine (Saoirse Ronan) who is sort of, but not totally, based on Gerwig herself will experiment with a number of personalities and boyfriends while her mother (Laurie Metcalf) and father (Tracy Letts) try to figure out which parts of her they can tolerate.

This is a silly comparison, she says, but once I was on set and I was directing, it felt a bit like the moment in The Karate Kid when he realizes he knows karate because hed been waxing cars, right? I felt like, Oh: you know karate. You know how to do this. And it all clicked in. Somebody I think it was Brian De Palma said that the process of making a movie is how you learn to make a movie. By the time youre done with it, then you know how to make it. Which is inevitably a Sisyphean task, she laughs.

And then theres the other weird thing, which is that the movie youve been working on for years is launched into whatever cultural moment is happening when it opens. Lady Bird, a movie about a young woman consumed with her own agency, arrives just as society is realizing that women have power, and cinema is paying more attention to women filmmakers. Small wonder festival audiences have been embracing it.

Well, you can just never know those things, Gerwig says. You really cant. I think you just do the work. You do the work, and you make the best films you can at every moment and sometimes they catch a ripple and sometimes they dont. But I truly believe that if you make something thats good thats true, that has integrity people will find it. They might not find it at the moment it comes out, but they will find it.

Im just thrilled that Lady Bird has caught some ripple, and that people are responding to it so much, she says, but I also know Im also in it for the long haul, and Im going to keep making films and exploring different stories and ways of storytelling. The only thing is just to keep that channel open and make the next one.

So whats the next one?

It takes me so long to write, she says, with a hint of that weariness creeping back in. I dont have something in place right now… but Ill figure it out, sooner rather than later.

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