Greta Gerwig: Nothing prepares you for motherhood

Greta Gerwig says nothing can ”prepare” you for motherhood.

The 36-year-old filmmaker has 10-month-old son Harold with her partner and fellow director Noah Baumbach, and has said she doesn’t think she would have been able to juggle parenthood and her career if she didn’t rely on ”help” in the form of both her friends and family, as well as paid help.

She said: ”There’s no way I could do it without that help [paid help], as well as my mother and my friends. Whatever you were prepared for, none of it is how you think, as far as I can tell. There has to be a certain amount of denial that goes on.”

After giving birth to Harold in March, Greta has been busy filming her film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel ‘Little Women’, which she both directed and wrote the screenplay for.

But it isn’t just working on set that takes Greta away from her family life, as she also admits that writing new scripts causes her to ”go feral” and stop taking care of things around the house.

Speaking about her filmmaking process, she explained: ”Everyone who works with me can attest to this – I go into a zone where I don’t wash or return calls and I go feral. I can go into hyper focus as well as becoming more scattered. I like things that have a great deal of pressure and a lot of deadlines, because I need it.”

And her partner Noah, 50, is equally as invested in his writing work, as Greta says she and the ‘Marriage Story’ helmer like to work together but in ”separate rooms”.

In an interview with the February issue of ELLE magazine – which is on sale from Thursday (09.01.20) – she said: ”Writing with someone is more fun than writing alone, but we’re not in the same room. We’ll talk together a lot at first and we’ll try to make each other laugh, but when we write, we write separately and then we trade. We’ll have an idea for a scene and I’ll say, ‘Well, I’ll take a crack at that’, see how far I can get and then give it to him and he’ll edit it or have ideas. Or vice versa.”

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