Greta Gerwig teased a new project she is working on during her Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival (LFF), saying “it is hard and I’m having recurring nightmares.”
Gerwig gave the latest LFF Screen Talk, hosted by Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong, to an audience of fans at the BFI Southbank, many of them dressed in the pink that fills Gerwig’s 2023 hit Barbie.
Answering a question about whether her upcoming projects would depict different female identities as Lady Bird, Little Women and Barbie have, Gerwig said, “I didn’t intend for those to be that way. But I’m extremely interested in the lives of girls and women.”
She did not provide details on what her new project is, saying only, “I’m working on something right now. It’s hard and I’m having recurring nightmares.”
Gerwig is a co-writer on Disney’s upcoming Snow White, directed by Marc Webb and currently in post-production ahead of a release on March 24, 2024.
During the 75-minute talk, the audience were shown clips from several Gerwig films, including Frances Ha, which she co-wrote with her “partner in life and art” Noah Baumbach, who directed it; and Lady Bird, Little Women and Barbie, each of which Gerwig directed.
Barbie is the highest-grossing film of 2023 with $1.43bn as of Friday, October 8. It is inching up on the $1.45bn total of Disney’s Frozen II from 2019; should it reach that mark, Gerwig would overtake co-director Jennifer Lee as the highest-grossing woman director on a single film.
The talk was held at the BFI Southbank, with the Royal Festival Hall in use for the UK premiere of Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers. Attendees present to hear from Gerwig included Barbie producers David Heyman and Tom Ackerley, actress Emily Mortimer, and UK filmmaker Sally Potter.
Gerwig gave the latter of that group a special shout-out, saying of Potter, “She was someone who looked at me and saw that I wanted to direct.”
The filmmaker also revealed that she snuck into screenings of Barbie on the film’s opening weekend in late July, joking that she asked projectionists to adjust the sound.
The Screen Talk programme continues with Haigh tomorrow afternoon at 16.00 BST, at the Curzon Soho.
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