Greta Gerwig Discusses "Frances Ha"

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach were on "Fresh Air" today:

"There's a grace period where being a mess is charming and interesting," Gerwig tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "and then I think when you hit around 27 it stops being charming and interesting, and it starts being kind of pathological, and you have to find a new way of life. Otherwise, you're going to be in a place where the rest of your peers have been moving on, and you're stuck."

Gerwig, who's also starred in films such as Damsels In Distress and Woody Allen's To Rome with Love, co-wrote the film with director Noah Baumbach. She's only 29 years old herself, and she says she was far from immune to post-college malaise and the bumpy transition to adulthood.

The tipping point for her, she says, came amid seemingly small indications that she was being taken seriously professionally.

"It sounds like I'm making a joke, but I'm not," she says. "Having health insurance made me feel like a real person. Up until then it felt like I was getting away with something, and if three things went wrong it would all fall apart. And so when I got health insurance a few years ago, I felt like a real person, but before then I felt like I was pretending.