Telegraph's Greta Gerwig Profile

Aspiring Director?:

Both on screen and in person, Gerwig has a slow, deliberate way with words, as if you’d just stopped her on the street to ask for directions to a place she loves but whose location she can only hazily remember. The effect is to make her sound at once both certain and vague, and to lend an undertow of irony to her sunny, straightforward Californian demeanour.

“When people ask me what I do, I still feel strange saying, 'I am an actress’, but I do say that now.” She pauses and smiles wryly. “And people say, 'But what is your day job?’”

...She liked growing up among the farmsteads and municipal offices of Sacramento in northern California, she says, but never felt she quite belonged there. In the New York films of Woody Allen she glimpsed an alternative vision of a more exciting, grimier, cleverer, more complicated life, and as soon as she could she left home for the Big Apple. “It sounds silly to say out loud, but those films have so much to do with how I have defined the narrative of my own life,” she says. “Annie Hall is like what I thought love was when I was young.”

...She is also planning to direct one last low-budget film of her own, based on a screenplay she has recently completed.

To be a director, she thinks, “you have to be a bit desirous of being the king of your own little kingdom. You have to want to be godlike.” Does she? “I am not sure.” Again there is a pause, a bashful smile. “I think I might.”