Greta Gerwig (INSTAGRAM and IMDB)
Greta Gerwig made history in 2023 by becoming the most successful female director of all time. But there was a time when she was just a small-town girl with big dreams attending a conservative Catholic school.
In an interview with Stephen Colbert in 2018, the Oscar-nominated director shared several anecdotes about her high school life and growing up in a conservative environment.
Greta Gerwig on her experience attending an all-girls Catholic school
Greta Gerwig is known for her highly acclaimed films that focus on women and tell their stories in a compassionate manner. Her directorial debut, Lady Bird, was a portrait of a young woman growing up in an extremely conservative small town.
In this film, the character of Lady Bird, performed by Saoirse Ronan, was based on the experience of the director himself. The conservative environment that the character encounters in the film is drawn from Gerwig’s own experiences attending an all-girls Catholic school.
“Our school had skirt checks, the nuns measured our skirt and made sure it wasn’t below a certain length,” the Barbie director told Stephen Colbert in 2018.
The director said the experience helped her become more inclined towards the arts in general, as she found more freedom in those areas and was able to escape the restrictions of her conservative upbringing. The influence of that time is clearly visible in her work, where she portrays female characters with much more agency and freedom than is usually afforded in Hollywood films.
Greta Gerwig made history with her film “Barbie”
Greta Gerwig made huge history this year with her third directorial venture, Barbie. The Margot Robbie-led film became the biggest hit of the year, earning more than $1 billion at the box office and being half-responsible for the massive pop culture phenomenon now called Barbenheimer.
The film became the highest-grossing film ever made by a female director, even surpassing Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic Oppenheimer to reach that milestone. With her previous projects including Lady Bird and Little Women, both of which were nominated for multiple Oscars, the successful director is on the rise.