Greta Gerwig Wants To Make ‘Lady Bird’-Verse With 3 More Movies About Sacramento

The idea of a cinematic universe is no longer just for blockbuster movies, but Oscar contenders too. Luca Guadagnino has shared during this year’s awards season run that’d he be up for making as many as five “Call Me By Your Name” movies, but he’s not the only one with a grand vision. “The A24 Podcast” launched today and the inaugural guests were “Lady Bird” director and Oscar nominee Greta Gerwig, and “Moonlight” director and Oscar winner Barry Jenkins. 

During the conversation, Gerwig revealed she’s not done telling Sacramento stories, and would like to make a quartet of movies set in her beloved home town.

“I’d like to make a total of four films that take place [in Sacramento]. I would like to do a quartet of Sacramento films. It’s inspired by the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan quartet — she wrote these four books that took place mainly in Naples. They’re so great. I thought, Oh I’d like to do that,” she said (via Vulture). “Because [‘Lady Bird’] was one part of Sacramento. There’s a lot of different parts of Sacramento that I’d like to explore, too. I feel like I have the privilege of being from a place. I’m really from that place — my family didn’t move, my family’s still there, my friend’s are still there — I feel like I can actually speak to it with some feeling.”

If it sounds ambitious, it should be noted that Gerwig has plenty of material to work with. Speaking with Buzzfeed, the filmmaker revealed her original draft of the script for “Lady Bird” was massive.

“I had a really big 350-page draft called ‘Mothers and Daughters‘ and I whittled it down to be about 120 pages, which is what we shot. But I like having too much material. In everything I’ve written, if I don’t end up cutting at least half of it, it’s not dense enough. There’s something to me about overwriting. It’s like a diamond: You’re compressing it to its most tiny, brilliant form,” Gerwig said. “There’s a lot of stuff I cut that I loved. I had characters of neighbours, people who lived in the neighbourhood – I loved them, but it was just too long. There was backstory with different characters, and extensions of the story. In a way, it allowed me to talk to my actors and explain more in-depth about these people, because I imagined their lives fully.”

It seems like there’s a lot more to come from Gerwig about Sacramento, and certainly, lots of material to pull from.