Greta Gerwig Quotes

I love making fiction films as well as nonfiction ones, and hope to keep challenging myself to make better and better work.

For me, a film is a film, and I just want to be part of good stories to grow as an actor.

I have to do films for myself, films that make me learn. I also have to be an entertainer.

And so I look back on not just the last ten years but everything that I've done as being sort of an ongoing growing continual film school. I mean I don't think I've got to a point where I've achieved anything that feels like, a particular milestone, but there's still a lot more to learn and hopefully a lot more films to make.

I never intended to have a career as a journalist, writing about people who make movies. I did it as something that was really rewarding to do, given the opportunity to express myself about something I cared about, and also to learn a lot by watching filmmakers I admired. In a sense, it was my film school. After doing it for a few years, I decided that the time had come to get it together and do some work of my own. Even for a cheap movie, you need film stock and equipment and actors. Whereas to write, all you need is paper and an idea, so I felt that writing might be my stepping stone.

Shooting movies has changed, and me too - I have changed. And then, every film I do, something in my mind, my soul, changes. My natural change, I change at the same time as the films, I think.

I'd love to go to school and have a normal life, but I don't see any professor at Yale being able to teach me more than Steven Spielberg.

I really took filmmaking very seriously... It was an honor and then a crutch also, because at a young age, I was like, I guess I'm a serious filmmaker. I never set out to be a serious filmmaker. I just set out to make movies.

I know that my mind is so A.D.D., and I want instant gratification - and photography can provide me with that - but at some point, I want to make an independent feature.

The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or a bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.

I believe that independent film making is the last frontier of creative expression available. So I'm always willing to lend a helping hand to a young film maker who's just getting into the business.

When I made my first film, I didn't think of it as directing, so it wasn't like I set out to become a director.

It's taken me 15 years to step behind a camera and make something everyone agrees looks like a movie.

When I made my first film, it was just an adventure. But after my first movie, I guess I got more of a feeling of what was happening around me.

I am discovering myself as a director all the time.

I used to make short films even as a kid. I used to have a camera and play around with it. So, I was always interested in the process and telling stories. I've always wanted to direct.

The kind of work I do and the films I believe in, I had to take charge of making that kind of cinema.

Filmmaking is so much about catharsis anyway. It's therapeutic.

I'm always very keen to learn a skill or a language for my films.

I don't know much about the music business, but for just general advice for someone trying to create things, as simple as this sounds, I think the best thing you can do is constantly try to improve upon your work. Always focus on that first and foremost, and leave everything else (marketing, image) completely secondary. Obviously, easier said than done when you're trying to make a living, but if you can move along those lines and earnestly try to make things that you really enjoy it can only benefit you in the long run.

I actually had another motivation for letting Steven [Sebring] film us. After I'd been out of the public eye for 16 years, lost my friends and lost my husband, some of my confidence had been undermined. Steven made the process of filming fun; I could pretend that we were in something like Don't Look Back.

I went to graduate film school at NYU, and at first I didn't get a degree, because I took a scholarship that was supposed to pay my tuition, and I used it to make a film. For the longest time, I never actually graduated. And about 70 percent of the things I learned there I had to unlearn, but 30 percent was really valuable. It's like Mark Twain said, "Don't let school get in the way of your education."

Every film is a challenge. I always say that making a movie is like film school - you're always learning. But unlike most schools, you never get done with it. You never learn everything.

All the craft skills that I have, I feel like I developed and honed in drama school. It's the most important thing for me.

Learn from your experience shooting your film, and then move on to the next.