Getting Ready For That Fifteen Minutes

Greta Gerwig is almost there!:

Between June and December of 2006, Gerwig quickly made “Hannah Takes the Stairs” (by Swanberg), “Baghead” (by Jay and Mark Duplass) and “Nights and Weekends,” which she directed with Swanberg. Taken together, these on-the-fly essays in impressionistic filmmaking form a huge chunk of the mumblecore canon, and they’re sometimes laughably amateurish. “I’m kind of horrified by how many people have seen these movies,” Gerwig says. “I had no idea that people would have so many things to say about them. Had I known, I don’t think I would have been able to do all the weird things that I did.”

Last year, after she got the nod from Baumbach, Gerwig’s fortunes seemed to reverse. “It was like falling in love and getting broken up with by movies,” she says. “After ‘Greenberg,’ I came back to New York and I had gained 15 pounds for that part, so I was fat. I couldn’t get any new parts. And all of a sudden I was totally broke, overweight and massively depressed. The shift in my reality was quite stark,” she says. “There was a lot of emotion.”

With the “Greenberg” premiere set for March, things are looking up, and Gerwig has been spending time with her family in her hometown of Sacramento, where her thoughts naturally turn to the idea of becoming, with this next film, something of a celebrity. “At least my mom’s at peace with it,” Gerwig says. “We didn’t have cable for a long time, but now she says she needs it so she can watch E!”