Gerwig wary of being anyone’s muse, dreams big with ‘Frances Ha’

TORONTO – Greta Gerwig is wary of being described as anyone’s muse.

After reuniting with her “Greenberg” director Noah Baumbach for the quirky comedy “Frances Ha” she’s reluctant to be too closely associated with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker, also her boyfriend.

“The traditional idea of being someone’s muse (has) nowhere to go with it — you can’t do anything after a while,” Gerwig says during a recent stop in Toronto with Baumbach.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s endlessly interesting to do that…. I feel like it’s the most exciting when I’m collaborating (with Baumbach) as a writer first and an actor second.”

The 29-year-old firmly establishes her name as a screenwriter with “Frances Ha,” which she co-wrote with Baumbach. She drew inspiration from her own growing pains in the movie business.

Gerwig stars as the titular Frances, a 27-year-old wannabe dancer who is spinning her wheels as a dancer’s apprentice in New York City.

Things are made worse when her best friend and roommate Sophie, played by Sting and Trudie Styler’s daughter Mickey Sumner, drifts away by moving out of their modest apartment into a cooler neighbourhood and falls deeper into a relationship with her Wall Street boyfriend.

Nevertheless, the bubbly Frances remains sunny and resilient, even as she’s forced to couch surf and scrounge for cash while her peers only seem to move onwards and upwards.

“She is, I suppose, at that point where she either has to continue to fight (reality) or she has to kind of accept that and maybe embrace it. And I think that struggle doesn’t go away necessarily as you get older,” says the 43-year-old Baumbach.

“It changes, it matures, but I think we all kind of are, to some degree, dealing with our ideas of ourselves and our ideas of how we would like things to be versus how they really are.”

Baumbach says age 27 was “a big time of change” in his psychological and emotional life. By then he’d made two films, but he still “felt like an impostor in a way.”

“When I looked back a few years later I realized, ‘Boy, I was in crisis then and I didn’t even know it,’” says Baumbach, who broke onto the scene with 1995’s “Kicking and Screaming” and 1997’s “Mr. Jealousy.”

“I was insanely young and I should have given myself a break but it all felt very (big), it was a big deal. And of course what I learned, which is always the right lesson, is I had to figure stuff out for myself and then I could actually go back and kind of discover myself as a filmmaker.”

Baumbach was 35 by the time he made waves with “The Squid and the Whale,” the breakout divorce drama that earned him an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.

“I had kind of gone through this transition in many ways so I was much more ready for it and knew not to pay too much attention to what people said, I knew to stop reading things,” he says.

Although Gerwig admits it was easier for her to get a foothold in her chosen profession, she says she could fully relate to relate to the struggling, dream-filled Frances.

“I’ve always wanted to make a movie about a dancer because I love dancers and I love watching dance but I also think there was an analogous situation being a dancer and being an actor — you need to be picked and you’re also performing someone else’s movements or words and finding your own authorship,” says Gerwig, whose other credits include Woody Allen’s “To Rome With Love” and Whit Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress.”

“Being an actor, it’s a really hard life. It’s super-competitive, it’s heartbreaking and … I don’t judge it but there’s an element of it of being an object which I find, if you’re a woman, it’s distasteful. It’s a distasteful part of it for me,” she continues.

“And I understand that part of cinema is celebrating beauty and celebrating masculine and feminine beauty and I don’t think it’s a cross solely that you bear as a woman but it seems like there’s more room for interesting-looking men than interesting-looking women.”

Gerwig says she’ll collaborate with Baumbach again, both as a writer and an actress, but that she’s determined to be known as more than just the latest pretty blond to capture the attention of an influential director.

“What I’d like to do is write things and direct things that I’m not in and then write other things that I am in and act in things that I didn’t write but sort of keep … all these different burners going,” she says.

“I’ve always felt like I exist much more in a multiplicity of roles and I find that theysupport each other.”

“Frances Ha” opens Friday in Toronto and Vancouver before heading to other cities.