Lady Bird has been sweeping the nation in recent months. For it being Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, she isn’t doing too bad for herself. The film has racked up five Oscar nominations for the upcoming Academy Awards and came away with two wins out of four nominations at the last Golden Globes.
Amidst the success, Gerwig has yet to announce any upcoming projects, most likely caught up in the hoopla of press events and awards promotion. However, she has hinted at her intentions on what she aims to do with her second directorial effort (and her third and fourth).
On the inaugural episode of the A24 podcast, she was joined by Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-nominated director and Oscar-winning writer of Moonlight (2016), where he asked about her inspirations for Lady Bird.
“The first thing [I thought about when writing ‘Lady Bird’] was that I wanted to make a movie set in Sacramento,” she declared in the podcast. It being a place she holds near and dear to her heart, she also shared that she’d like to do three more films based around life in her hometown. She continued, saying “I tend to make proclamations out loud cause then I’ll feel the pressure to deliver on them, it’s a very silly way of going about it, but I’d like to make a total of four films that take place there. I’d like to do a quartet of Sacramento films.”
“It’s inspired by Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet,” Gerwig noted, setting the basis for her own potential project following the same concept. “She wrote these four books that take place mainly in Naples and they’re so great, and I thought, ‘Oh, I’d like to do that.’ [Lady Bird] is one part of Sacramento, but there’s a lot of different parts I’d like to explore, too. I have the privilege of being from a place and I’m really from that place. My family didn’t move. My family is still there. My friends are still there. I can actually speak to it with some feeling.”
She also talks briefly about Sacramento being a character in itself. She relates the feeling to Jenkins’ film saying she felt like she “got a passport to a world” when seeing Moonlight, and that it was a world that “we think we know.” It seems like Gerwig wants to show everyone that they don’t know Sacramento like she knows it; the results should be exhilarating.
Look for Gerwig and the Lady Bird crew this Sunday, March 4th at the Oscar’s. If she wins big, there should be no shortage of suitors looking to fund her Sacramento series. Listen to the full A24 Podcast inaugural episode here.
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