Lady Bird
Miss Bird: Fly high
Written by Pamela Hutchinson
Translation: Pendulum/Stacy/Luly
EDIT: Poison Cub
"Miss Bode" is a wonderful but bittersweet coming-of-age story. A California high school student who longs to leave sacramento, the town where she grew up, to the East Coast in search of a place to stay, travels far and high before gradually discovering that her entanglement in her hometown is far deeper than she imagined.
Greta Gerweger is taking a selfie. As I walked into the room to start our interview, she was smiling at her phone. The photo was taken for Sioirse Ronan, the star in her new novel Miss Bird. Gerwig told me she was sending this picture because she was so excited to see her heroine again. They will share the stage at the British Film Institute's London Film Festival, and Miss Bird will be screened here as a "surprise" film after film festivals in New York, Toronto and other places.
The interview was done well before the awards season, and also before Miss Bird received five Oscar nominations (including Best Picture, Best Director, Original Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor). Miss Bird wasn't Gerwig's debut — back in 2008, she directed the play "Nights and Weekends" with Joe Swanberg. But this was her first independent work, which also attracted the attention and discussion before it was released. If Gerwig was anxious about the situation with that night's screening, she clearly hid it well. Warm and talkative, she spoke warmly and insightfully with me from California to class issues, from student loans ("angryly") to Shakespeare and Joan Didian, and her mentors in the film world.
Poster for Greta Gerweger's debut novel Nights and Weekends
Miss Bird is a formative film set in early 2000 in Sacramento, California, where the director was born. "Miss Bird" is the name given to her by the heroine, who studied at a Catholic high school and was an ambitious and hormonal, manic seventeen-year-old girl. She "threw" herself out of the car she was driving; dyed her pink hair while auditioning for Stephen Sondheim's work Merrily We Roll Along, which attended school rehearsals; stole magazines in stores; and challenged teachers to speak in public at school rallies on the topic of abortion. As one viewer put it, she was very bold, very "anarchist, but she was also very fragile and out of place with her surroundings." Ronan ("A Little Meryl Staple") interprets every aspect of this eccentric character in a convincing, rather than ironic, way. "She's very emotionally ups and downs and is able to maintain humor in stressful situations because that humor isn't in words," Gerweger says. Most importantly, Miss Bird wanted to leave Sacramento and go to an East Coast university, a paradise with a mature culture in her imagination. Despite her mediocre grades, her parents could not afford her tuition.
"I've written a whole bunch of scenes, but I'm very obsessed with what the story I'm going to tell and what my protagonist should be," Mr. Gerwig said. "So I put everything aside and wrote at the top of the paper: 'Why don't you call me Miss Bird?' You promised you would. I don't know where the idea came from,' and I really wanted to know more about the person who had people call her by a different name. The name had different meanings in Britain and in the United States, but Gerweger recited it in the rhythm of a nursery rhyme, darkness ("Your house is on fire, your children are gone"), and loops ("Fly away from home"), and such imagery is probably not in her mind. What is important is to rename the matter, which, as Miss Bird said, is a given name, "I give myself." ”
"The people who do it are either rock stars or nuns," Gerwig explains, "and in a sense you're always trying to possess the broader name you've given." ”
Stills from Miss Bird
Miss Bird wants to redefine herself in college, but from the opening card with a Quote from Joan Didion to the montage at the end, it's not hard to see that the film is actually a tribute to her hometown: "I think the best way to write a love letter to somewhere is through a protagonist who doesn't love it and wants to leave it." How she found out how much she loved this place in the rearview mirror when she was on the parting train. The feeling is that you feel at this point that your life has to happen elsewhere. So when Gerwig won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy/Musical for Miss Bird, he said to "My mom and dad, Sacramento, the people who gave me the roots and wings to help me be who I am today." "Acknowledgments, not surprisingly. Gerweger said she had "countless materials, and I wanted to make myself a movie about Sacramento that I could watch while I was home." ”
From beginning to end, in Miss Bird's life, there have been two boys: a well-behaved and wealthy theater lover (Lucas Hedges), and a privileged, somewhat arrogant outsider (Timothy Chalmede) who plays in a band. But they're not the focus of life, and Miss Bird is on the front lines of other life battles: arguing with best friend Julie (Bini Feldstein), trying to get into college, and breaking the heart of her exhausted mother many times a day.
75th Golden Globe Awards , Miss Bird "
The heart-wrenching relationship between Miss Bird and her mother, Marion, played by Laurie Metcalf, is at the heart of the film, and it's about class and money. "This is not a broad discussion of poverty, it's just the razor-edge survival pressures that go through every day: to go to work or not to go," Gerweger said. Miss Bird and Marion went shopping at second-hand stores, but for fun, the real estate agent took them to see the luxury houses that could not be reached. In fact, their situation was precarious: the family was broken, the father was unemployed, and Miss Bird happily told her friend that she lived on the "wrong side of the rails." When Miss Bird rejected everything from her mother, from her name to her family to her expectations of her future, and instead quietly applied to an expensive university in New York, Marion doubled her job rotation as a nurse. The parties that are not malicious are full of unintentional cruelty. I told Gerwig that the thing that stung me the most about the film was that it made me realize how bad I was to my mother in my youth.
"I know, it's the worst." Gerweger said, "I think I realize this every day. We often joke that we should put a subtitle card at the end and write 'Call your mom'. The tension between the two women ("almost chemical") played a resonant tune for the audience. "There are a lot of mothers who come up to me and say, 'I'm that kind of mother — I totally understand,'" Gerweger said. You hear the words that come out of your mouth and think, 'That's not right,' but how to collect the water. Later, a younger girl came to me and said, 'I'm that kind of daughter.' Gerwig says Miss Bird begins with the story of an adolescent girl inducing sexual transformation, and then turns to her mother—"a person's growth begins with the letting go of some people." And I just happen to be particularly interested in those "letting go".
Initially, when Gerweger tried to find more investment in the film, he found that not everyone understood her film, "Most of the producers and investors are men (and don't understand the script very well), so when I give them the script, we always have to meet and discuss." If they grew up with their sisters or had daughters, they could feel the core of the script. Those people will feel like 'this is my mom and my sister/sister' or 'that's my wife and daughter, I totally understand.' If they hadn't had that experience, they would have said to me, 'Can a woman really be like that?' It was unbelievable. And then I thought, 'Oh, you don't understand, you have no idea about this.' ’”
Gerwig made it clear that his films could neither demonize nor enshrine women on the altar, "In fact, there are no perfect mothers and daughters in the world." Respect for imperfection leads to love. Anything will make you feel outstanding, or very bad, because you don't meet that standard. Being the perfect mother is an impossible task. ”
Gerweger's mission is not only to show the interaction between mothers and daughters equally, but also to challenge Hollywood's narrative model of women. She told me that in high school she protested against the test play for female students was "Romeo and Juliet" and the boys were "Hamlet." "I was like, 'Do you think we're supposed to have a love story when we're girls?'" I found this unacceptable, so I protested. "This practice is very Miss Bird.
Francis Ha poster
"I consider myself a feminist, so any film I make has an intrinsic impact. I made a positive decision in a film I co-authored with Noah Baumbach (Francis Ha 2012, American Lover 2015) in which the main line of love does not revolve around boys and girls. She said, "I love these movies. I may also make one in the future. But I wanted to put some limits on myself, just say, 'Tell a different story.' That's not all we think women can do."
"Usually, the story we tell women and deserve to do that is 'will she marry that he' or whether she thinks that secret friend she never noticed is the right person. But this often means that the meaning of a woman's role is achieved by choosing the right partner or being chosen by a partner. Assertions that tell women that their strength and meaning come from their partners are really dangerous. ”
For Gerwig, the film's love story is not between Miss Bird and her mismatched boyfriends, but rather between her and her best friend Julie. There is such an early scene where Miss Bird and Julie mumble and masturbate as they chew on the holy cake. The girls lay on the ground laughing beyond words. This is one of Gerweger's favorite scenes. "For me, it's weird to watch girls make each other laugh just because they're friends. In a way, that's the most intimate feeling for me... You'll feel like they're actually in love with each other. ”
Miss Bird also has a period of confusion during which she sets Julie aside and instead makes friends with a richer and more mean girl, but at the climax of the film, on the night of the prom, she realizes the mistake of her choice. Gerweger compares this moment to the moment in Cameron Crowe's Love to The Depths (1989) in which John Cusack raises his loudspeaker to Anon Skye's Serenade of Peter Gabriel, "In Your Eyes." I remember saying to Silsa, "This is the moment when you're holding the speaker above your head," "You're going to get back together with your friends," Gerweger says. "I wanted to make the moment a little more romantic, but it was for her friends."
It's only natural that we see Gerwig herself or our impression of Gerwig in her films, and in some parts of Miss Bird, the film is like a prequel to Frances Ha. But Gerwig thinks she's more like Kyle, Miss Bird's arrogant boyfriend played by Chalmed, who accuses Miss Bird of being too selfish. "I agree with many of Kyle's points," Gerweger explains, "I am not a cunning young man, but I have many similar ideas, and this is the way I can discuss things and put them out of the mouth of the boy with whom Miss Bird wants to make out." ”
Stills from "Francis Ha"
Kyle read some of Gerweger's favorite books on screen, and she gave Challemet what she had read when she was a student, with her scrawled notes at the edges of the page. Kyle's band, called Naked Childhood, is based on Maurice Piara's 1968 film of the same name. And the key point of this character's personality, according to Gerwig, is derived from Eric Houmai's film. "He said: 'Oh, is this guy an asshole?'" I said, 'No, he's just like many young people he's seen before, talking to a girl about his ideas without caring if other people are not interested.' And he asked, 'Who are these people?' And I replied, 'Look at the six Moral Stories.' I showed him "A Night at Mudder's House" because it was a perfect illustration of how a man can talk to a woman and I was thinking, 'Go kiss her, what are you doing?' ’”
Miss Bird had not read the books that Kyle had read, such as Howard Zinn's History of the American People, nor had Gerwig himself read them at that age. Miss Bird and Julie mockingly say they are "fed up with high school life," and Gerwig remembers not being exposed to many refreshing ideas in the classroom in high school. "A lot of high schools are trying to prepare students for college, and walking in the garden of ideas is not really what we're doing." In our discussion, Gerwig also talked about writing a historical essay in college based entirely on Ken Burns' documentary series American Civil War.
This self-directed learning continued throughout Gerweger's journey to become a film director ("I learned a lot from this job. ”）。 When she was making low-budget films during the MurmurIng Movement, she "had to do almost everything, whether it was carrying a radio stick or designing costumes or designing scenes, and most of the time everyone was improvising." Later, when working with directors in big-budget films, she spent most of her time "being a fly on a wall." When you're an actor in a movie, nobody's going to kick you off the set, which is a really good thing. So, as long as you don't bother others, you can observe others designing this shot and setting up these lights. ”
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