How Greta Gerwig Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels

Each filmmaking choice is based on its artistic merits, but it can also be determined by budget. This leads to some movies being more loose, improvisational, realist and character focused, while others can create their own worlds, be larger than life and precisely manicured. To show this let's look at three films made by director Greta Gerwig, at three wildly different budgets. The no budget Nights and Weekends, the mid-range budget Ladybird and the Hollywood blockbuster Barbie, to see how her approach to filmmaking shifted along with her filmmaking resources. This video is sponsored by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform you can use to build a beautiful website for your business. Gerwig's first interaction with director Joe Swanberg came when she had a minor role in his movie called LOL. This began a creative partnership that resulted in her writing and starring in another of his low budget films. These micro-budget independent movies of the early and mid-2000s were dubbed Mumblecore and were grouped together as part of this new filmmaking movement. They are distinguished by their heavy focus on naturalism, characters, dialogue, improvisation and lack of a traditional cinematic style or look. Swanberg and Gerwig's next collaboration, which they co-wrote, directed and starred in, called Nights and Weekends, fell into this Mumblecore category. It's about a long-distance couple who have some problems and it's kind of tracked over a year of their relationship and it was shot over 18 months. Most mainstream movies are heavily reliant on a structured plot, with characters that bring that story to life. Mumblecore films flip that convention by focusing on characters and their dialogue as the core of the film, with the plot being quite minimal and a by-product of the actions of the characters. Although this focus on the relationship of characters over plot had been done before in films such as Before Sunrise, normally it was accompanied by a more traditional filmmaking aesthetic. Because Nights and Weekends had almost no budget, they disposed of these conventions and worked extremely loosely, almost like a documentary, and brought on Matthias Grünski, a documentary and indie cinematographer, to shoot the first half of the movie. We didn't have a script, we had like an outline of certain scenes that we need to shoot to tell the story and roughly maybe had an idea what's gonna happen in them. Greta and Joe would basically go for a coffee, before they left I would talk with them about roughly where they will be in let's say the apartment and so I would light that apartment by myself not really exactly knowing what's gonna happen and then they would come back and we would start rolling. Very improvised because nobody really knew what's gonna happen. In filmmaking some of your major expenses are normally actors, crew, locations, production design, gear rental and post-production. Shooting in the super improvised, naturalistic and loose style meant that they could limit the crew to only a cinematographer and their producer who recorded sound, the cast to basically two actors, the locations to borrowed apartments or public spaces and the gear to a single handheld HD video camera. This low budget filmmaking methodology imposed the naturalistic documentary feel of the film and vice versa, this super character focused realistic style was suited to this filmmaking methodology. This meant that the audiences for these films were usually very niche, which made it more difficult to sell or make money from these movies. As a result Nights and Weekends was crafted for a film festival run to try and garner critical and festival acclaim rather than a more commercially focused widespread cinema release. Following this experience Gerwig shifted her focus to acting for a number of years before she returned to write and direct her first solo feature Lady Bird. The working title for the movie was Mothers and Daughters. To me it was the core of it and I felt like with every scene I wanted to keep going back to that theme even if it wasn't literally between a mother and a daughter. I wanted to keep exploring that because I think your relationship with your parents is how you first understand love. Lady Bird was written in a far more structured way that conformed to more of a genre, coming of age drama, than that of a much looser, more improvised first film. The screenplay had much more mainstream appeal, could be better marketed to a cinema going audience and therefore was able to raise a mid-level indie budget of $10 million from IAC Films. This budget meant that the movie could be shot and produced with a much stronger visual style than her more haphazard looking first no budget film. 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The biggest thing I think a director can do is to create almost a bubble of magic safety for their department heads and hold a perimeter so that they feel safe to play and bring their whole selves and also with the actors that they feel that they own those roles. One of the department heads she brought on to shoot the film was cinematographer Sam Levy, who this time had a few more resources to work with than just improvised dialogue and an HD camera from 2006. The visual direction or perimeter that she gave Levy to work within was that the movie should feel like a memory. To try and evoke this visually, Levy chose to shoot on an Alexa Mini and instead of shooting in the sharper higher fidelity 3.4K ARRI RAW format, he decided to shoot in the lower resolution 2K format. On top of this, they wanted to use grain and texture to evoke more of an organic feeling of memory. But instead of just adding a film grain emulation in the colour grade as is normal, they added digital video noise that they pulled from the Alexa. They did this by recording a black signal on the Alexa, pulling the noise from that and overlaying it on top of their image. Levy and his colourist Joseph Bicknell could now amplify or decrease the noise, especially in the midtones, using the same idea of how you could bump up the gain on older ENG cameras to 12 or 16 decibels to create more noise and texture. Another feeling that Gerwig wanted was that the camera's perspective shouldn't be intensely subjective, super tight and handheld, nor should it be extremely wide, objective and detached. She wanted it to feel like the audience was an arm length away from the characters. They created this sense of distance and a proscenium in the frame by playing out most of the scenes in stable medium shots, close ups which weren't too tight or wide shots which weren't too far away. Using these techniques along with a more traditional filmmaking methodology, Lady Bird was presented with a much more cinematic look that elevated the story from realism, rather than the rough, purely naturalistic feeling of nights and weekends. After finishing the movie, A24 bought the worldwide rights to distribute it. It turned out to be a very successful acquisition, being both a critical success and making close to $80 million at the box office against its $10 million budget. I wanted it to be obviously dazzling and hilarious and this kind of imaginative cornucopia of crazy barbiness, but I also felt like actually in that state of being kind of on the sugar high is the place where you have an opportunity to be even more emotional because people aren't really expecting it. So in a way by design it allows you to get at things that are harder because you have the cover of a glitter parade. Gerwig paired up with the iconic global toy brand Barbie to write and direct her first studio feature at an enormous blockbuster level budget. Visually she drew on a lot of influence from Technicolor musicals with their vivid, colourful palettes and hand painted backdrops. They therefore made the decision to film the portions of the movie set in Barbieland in a soundstage where they built giant Barbie sets, erected enormous painted backdrops at such a large scale that they caused an international shortage of pink paint. The size of these practical set builds was a massive financial undertaking. Gerwig hired cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto to collaborate on lighting this artificial world and executing these sequences practically. I wanted to do practical builds for everything and I also wanted to use any time I could use whatever a film technique from like 1959 was so I needed to build the entire thing by miniature and then shoot the miniature and then composite that into the image. I spoke with Rodrigo Prieto, Sarah Greenwood and Jacqueline Duran who are DP, set designer, costume designer. I talked to them for a year before we were even in like prep prep. The first lighting decision they made was that Barbieland should always be sunny. To create a sense of separation between the characters and the flat painted backgrounds, he decided to create a beautiful backlit look. His team placed multiple enormous artificial sun sources, called soft suns, in each corner of the set and had one roaming sun that he could move around on a lift. This meant that whichever direction a character was facing, he could turn on one of his sun sources that was positioned behind them and give the scene a backlight. The spill from these lights was so strong that they would hit the set and bounce light back to fill in the actors. The problem with this was that, because almost the entire set was pink, this bounced fill light became very magenta, which turned the faces of the actors pink. So to kill some of this magenta but still maintain some bounce, he draped the rest of the set that wasn't being photographed in a grey material. This returned a natural bounced light without a tint. Other visual decisions to make Barbieland more exaggerated and theatrical included using frontal symmetrical framing that placed Barbie in the literal centre of each shot, using a LUT that emulated the rich saturated colours of Technicolor and using wide angle lenses and a large format Alexa 65 to exaggerate and expand the size of the sets in a cartoonish way. They contrasted this look with photography in the real world that used a more neutral colour palette, a more subdued and desaturated full negative LUT and longer focal length lenses that compressed the background. Barbie completed Greta Gerwig's evolutionary journey as a director from micro-budget realism to blockbuster cinematic fantasy, both in the subject matter of the characters and story, the size of her budget and audience, as well as in how she went about creating the visual world of each film. If you enjoyed this video, please consider liking, subscribing or leaving a comment down below. It really helps out the channel. Also, if you'd like to join the other amazing patrons who get these videos early and free of ads, I'll link it down in the description. Otherwise, until next time, thanks for watching and goodbye.