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A few weeks back, I caught a screening of “Maggie’s Plan” at the ArcLight Hollywood. A few months after its Sundance premiere, the film made its way to Los Angeles and delighted the audience with its offbeat edgy humor about love and relationships. Following the screening, Pete Hammond of Deadline conducted a Q&A with director Rebecca Miller and Greta Gerwig, who, after enduring a red carpet photo shoot earlier in the evening, promptly took off her heels as she sat down in front of the large crowd. Gotta love Gerwig.
From my knowledge of your work, this is your first real “comedy,” is that something you were looking to do at this point?
Rebecca Miller: Yeah, I like to hear people laugh in my movies and so I thought I would flip around the ratio of sadness to happiness.
It says it’s based on a story by Karen Rinaldi, from an unfinished book. How did you stumble upon an unfinished book?
RM: Karen is one of my best friends and she sent it to me, the Maggie chapters, in an email. Her book, The End of Men, will be published in a year. She sent me four chapters that had Maggie, Odette, and John with the basic premise of a love triangle with the switch. I thought it was such a great idea, so I tried to make it into a screenplay.
What was your inspiration?
RM: Definitely comedies of the 1940s, the genre of “comedies and marriage” specifically.
Greta, this is another great role for you, and you were involved very early on, correct?
Greta Gerwig: Yeah, Rebecca and I had over a year to talk about it and prepare and dream up what it is, which was a real luxury. I knew I wanted to be in the movie because I loved Rebecca’s other work and really admired her. I also loved the story and how it kept surprising me, it felt like I was forever reassessing my position of where I thought this narrative was going to go. I found it incredibly romantic but also very truthful about the complexities of love and life. I thought it answered a lot of what I feel.
Maggie is very truthful, there is a line you walk with this character.
GG: I know that Maggie does some things in the movie that, on the face of them, could be hard to take in as an audience member, but I just felt like, on the page, it rendered so beautifully. She had a shining inner truth and a compass of where she was going in the language and the way she chose to live her life that I felt like, that’s going to win the day. You just play the honesty of that and it will all fall into place.
Julianne Moore is such a hoot in this movie, that Danish accent is perfect.
RM: She was originally French in the story but I thought she should be from the further North because I thought that somebody who would write the book Bring Back the Geisha and be tolerant of affairs is, to me, more Northern European. I also thought nobody hears Danish accents so much. My mother had an accent that nobody could ever imitate, it was from many European countries, so [Julianne] developed an accent that’s very specific to the character. We talked about everything, even the fact that she should have a really tight topknot on the top of her head. It was a nice collaboration with her.
Did it help to have a female power behind the scenes?
GG: Oh yeah, I think Rebecca is a special director because of who she is as a person more than her gender, much more than her gender. I think directors are…directors. They’re all control freaks. Haha, in a good way! You want them to be that way. They’re amazing, they’re world builders. So in that sense, it’s no different than working with a male director.
One of your co-stars Ethan Hawke actually said, astoundingly to him, he had never worked with a female director before “Maggie’s Plan” in his entire 30-year career.
RM: Yeah and he’s done 40 something films. It is surprising, it’s kind of a bad statistic.
Greta, you’re actually turning to directing now too with your first film “Ladybird.”
GG: That’s right, I’m working to change those statistics. I’m very excited about it. I’ve written it, haven’t done it yet, so hopefully we’re recreating this moment when I’m done with it.
