Greta Gerwig: "We live in a time that places Hitler and Elvis on the same level"

• LUIS MARTINEZ

  Venice

Updated Sunday, December 4, 2022-00:20

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There was a moment when

thought she would never be Greta Gerwig again.

She happened to him at about the same time as the rest of us.

You know, the pandemic, the confinement and the hazards of the imminent end of the world.

And then, to exorcise the idea of ​​not being her again, which kept him between worried and sleepless, she decided to go back to being what she had always been.

That is to say, the director of

and

considered very seriously resuming the acting career that saw her born in the cinema at just 20 years old from the distant times of the very independent and extremely cool

.

“I was convinced that the world was going to end.

So when they proposed it to me, I didn't hesitate for a moment.

I couldn't imagine a better farewell », he says without hiding that the fact that his partner, father of his son and also director of the film,

proposed to him, also had an influence.

"Not forgetting," she adds, "the passion I feel for the Don DeLillo book."

Indeed, Gerwig is once again the actress that she has never ceased to be in

the film that adapts the text of the New York author and that opens on Friday the 9th. She does so after her last job as an interpreter was in 2016 by the hand of Mike Mills in

.

She in between, she has established herself as a director to the point of daring with everything.

Her next project is none other than

, the film based on the famous and perfect doll that is both a symbol of submission and who knows if the flag of the revolution after the revolution (call it post-feminism).

The project has been going around like the hottest potato in

(and what comes after) since 2009. And so until, after an embarrassing number of turns, rewrites and casting changes, the story of the Mattel blonde fell into the hands of Gerwig and Baumbach, the former as director and co-writer and the second as second only (Ken is Ryan Gosling, not him).

"The only thing I can say about the movie," she warns to block further questions on the matter, "is that I accepted because

I only do what scares me."

Background noise

would also fall perfectly into the category of projects that are scary.

Not in vain, it seems difficult to imagine a more excessive project.

And therefore terrifying.

In its excess, the film works as

(rather than catastrophic), musical at one point, and simple and pure comedy throughout the delirium.

All that is and is without the slightest shame.

The director recounted at the time of the presentation in the Venetian Lido that DeLillo's book fell into his hands in a move that could be said to be fate.

«When I was going to see

, by Kurosawa, the novel came into my house with my father (Jonathan Baumbach, also a novelist)”, he comments, without making the relationship between one event entirely clear.

The fact is that since then it became an obsession (the novel, not samurai art).

Later, after the years, when oblivion and maturity had already done their thing, the director of Historia de un matrimonio came across the same pages again.

, He says.

And this time the initial obsession ended up transformed into a simple mania, a mania so ungovernable that there was no other choice but to make it into a movie.

No intimate and intimist stories as before, now another Baumbach was born determined to recover a good part of the excessive manners of youth cinema: from Spielberg to David Lynch through the Coen brothers (the names are provided by himself).

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Gerwig at his side agrees with him.

And he doubles the bet: "I read the book when I was around 19 years old and I thought it was incredible because of its ability to read my mind, to portray the world," he says.

And he continues: «I think I underlined all the pages and even wrote thousands of notes in the margins.

It was very funny.

I had just come to university and that was my first real experience with the academy.

I came to memorize entire passages.

To situate ourselves,

tells the story of a couple seconded by their offspring of four children (or was it 400?) who are played by Adam Driver with a belly and a Gerwig with tousled hair.

The tape recounts in its own way an ecological disaster caused by a terrible accident.

In reality, it does not narrate so much the catastrophe of the toxic cloud itself as the chaos that the possibility of its arrival produces in a community that lives happily in its things between perfectly stocked supermarkets and excellent universities in their excellence.

Although in truth, as soon as one is submerged in the joyful arbitrariness of the argument, more than counting the life of anyone, what is really counted is the nothingness of everyone's life.

Driver is a professor who knows everything about Hitler and is beginning to know something about Elvis (both myths, he tells us,

that are there to sublimate the legitimate fear of death) and Gerwig is a woman frightened to extremes that are difficult to measure due to the imminence of, precisely, death.

And just like the world we walk on.

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach at the Venice Festival.AP

"DeLillo's universe is ours," says Gerwig, not so much as an actress but as an interpreter of almost everything: the director's ambition and our environment.

«If we look a little bit, the academy, the studies at the university, they equalize everything, they put everything at the same level.

And it does so in the same way as our way of consuming information.

Somehow, in our consciousness it is the same.

Everything is the same, one myth is worth the same as another.

We live in a time when Elvis and Hitler, for the academy and for us, are the same”, she reflects, takes a second and continues:

Like the characters in the film, I also find a walk through a supermarket very reassuring where you can find everything and all possible colors.

You can imagine all those different lives you would have if you got hold of all those products.

The truth is that if you stop to think about it it is very depressing, but, on the other hand, it is like taking a vacation from your own life ».

Feminism in its purest manifestation is humanism, since it does not exclude anyone

Babette, her character, fears death.

But not a little, but completely.

And for this she allows herself to be seduced by anyone who calms her down and scares away the ghost that she always goes with us.

"Life and death are not contradictory.

It is always there and we invent strategies, like the movies or any other entertainment, to stop thinking about it.

There are dances all over the world that celebrate death.

The fear of her is universal... what happens is that when you are a mother it gets out of control.

Children are so fragile », she comments.

And it is now when Gerwig, without fuss, talks about her husband, or better, about life together.

Not in vain, few such cool couples, with the permission of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, have ever given the cinema.

«We have written together up to three times.

And it is very stimulating.

like when a group makes a truck together.

Everything comes out of the same well.

Each of our works is neither of one nor of the other, but occupies a space in between.

For the rest, we are terribly possessive of what is ours each one », he says.

By the way, doesn't it create a contradiction for you to recognize yourself as a feminist and adapt a Barbie story?

"Not necessarily.

Nor do I want to become a dispenser of proclamations.

I understand feminism as an inclusive ideology that tries to eliminate a hierarchy.

It is for men as well as women because everyone wants a better, fairer, more equal life.

It is not clear that she answered the question, but there it is.

Greta Gerwig, be that as it may, seems more Greta Gerwig than ever before.

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