Mistress America is a zippy, quotable, old-fashioned comedy. BuzzFeed News talked to Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig about making it.
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Mistress America is both a madcap portrait of two women — one young at 30, and the other younger at 18 — and a screwball comedy with a pointed, almost mercenary edge. If the characters in Desperately Seeking Susan talked like the ones in It Happened One Night, the resulting film would approach the plot and tone of Mistress America, which Noah Baumbach directed and co-wrote with Greta Gerwig.
The film, which is currently in limited release, begins with Tracy (Lola Kirke), a freshman at Barnard and a serious person, finding that she somehow has no friends and no social life — until, that is, her mother (Kathryn Erbe) suggests Tracy seek out her soon-to-be-stepsister, Brooke (Gerwig). After only one night of careening around New York City with Brooke and having the time of her life, Tracy is so transported that she, as an aspiring writer, thinks she has found a friend, a sister, and the best subject for fiction she's ever met. She sees Brooke's delusions for what they are — and they are pretty fun, as far as delusions go: Brooke wants to open a restaurant/hair salon/art gallery in Williamsburg, but in the meantime, she is a tutor, spin instructor, party girl, and social media spaz. The rise of Tracy and the fall of Brooke is of slight interest to Mistress America, but this isn't All About Eve. No one is a terrible person. (Though no one is a great one, either.)
Baumbach and Gerwig are partners in life and sometimes in work; this is their second written collaboration to be released (the first was 2013's Frances Ha), and Gerwig starred in Baumbach's Greenberg in 2010. When BuzzFeed News interviewed them together recently, Baumbach and Gerwig frequently asked each other questions during the conversation, and also tended to compare Mistress America to Frances Ha, suggesting that the two movies — both about young women struggling in New York and the transactions that take place within friendships — are of a piece to them.
In the interview below, Gerwig and Baumbach discussed how they write together, their near misses in television, casting Kirke as the laconic and brilliant Tracy, the complexities of Brooke, and the current state of New York City.
What's your writing process when you're writing together?
GG: We never come up with a good answer. It's so hard to reconstruct later.
Well, are you sitting in the same room talking, writing on separate computers?
NB: On this one we were more in the same room because we were living together. We'd talk it through, we'd take notes. We'd also go and write separate scenes, give ourselves assignments. And then put them together, and rewrite them together. Depending on what's going on, one of us might take it over for a little while and then give it back.
GG: We'd print out the whole script, everything we had, and we'd read it out loud with a pen and make notes as we'd read through. We'd switch off who takes that stack to their computer and enters all the notes. Then we'd print it out again, make the notes again, and switch.
When a man and a woman are writing partners and have a personal relationship and one of you, the woman, is also a performer, do people make assumptions about your role, Greta, that are annoying? Yes, this is a leading question!
GG: On the one hand, I feel a very strong sense of co-authorship of these, and I also feel like I've been duly acknowledged for that. But I would say if it gets into the question of "Are you his muse?" I feel like I want to put my hand on my hip and be like, "Well, I'm the noisiest muse that's ever lived! I don't know that they tend to write them together!" That always feels a little reductive of what I do in them. In some ways, really, there's always something that can annoy you.
That's my philosophy as well. When Greenberg came out, Greta, Tony Scott in the New York Times wrote that you "may well be the definitive screen actress" of your generation. Obviously, I'm sure that was very flattering. I bet it also carried a weight to it.
GG: Yes! I didn't know that piece was being written. And to be acknowledged and considered in that way by a prominent film writer in the New York Times — I thought about it less in terms of Am I going to live up to this? and more just like I was in a dialogue with the world that I had always wanted to be a part of. But yeah, it's stressful to hear it even now. But yeah, it was lovely.
Kirke and Gerwig at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
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