Womenof the year

GretaGerwig DIRECTING HERSELF By Sam Lansky/London

THE FILMMAKER GRETA GERWIG WAS IN WEST London the other day when she walked past a movie set—not her own, but something that just happened to be filming on the street—and stopped for a moment to watch. A light was positioned in front of the house; a car pulled up and an actor got out, shaking the gates and yelling. There was an intensity to the scene, and a vulnerability to his performance. Then, abruptly, the spell was broken. Someone yelled: “Cut! Going again.” A groomer ran out to fix the actor’s hair, a mundane but crucial bit of business.

“Movies!” Gerwig says, almost in the manner of an old-timey studio executive, recalling the moment. “Love ’em!” We’re having lunch in Soho; she’s in London while her husband, the writer-director Noah Baumbach, preps production on his next film, and while she works on a new adaptation of the first book in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series. It’s one of the biggest pieces of intellectual property of all time, but that’s a fitting thing to tackle after what’s been, for Gerwig, a remarkable year. Her dazzling, subversive Barbie, which she co-wrote and directed, grossed more than $1.4 billion at the box office, making it the biggest movie of the year, and the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman. Barbie has since become a pop-culture phenomenon, from I AM KENOUGH hoodies to discourse over a third-act monologue delivered by America Ferrera about the impossible pressures women face. Alongside Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Barbie was credited with keeping the theatrical model afloat last year; in January, the film received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture as well as Best Supporting Actress for Ferrera. “I remember thinking, If this works, everyone is going to think later that it was inevitable,” Gerwig says. “They’ll say, ‘Well, but it was Barbie.’ But this was not guaranteed.”

The success of Barbie means that Gerwig, 40, now has the rare latitude to write her own ticket in an increasingly risk-averse industry—a freedom that could have been immobilizing. But Narnia, Gerwig says, had been gestating for a long time; she’d written a draft before ever setting foot on the set of Barbie. “Knowing that I’d laid the groundwork for Narnia and wanted to return to it—that’s probably something I set up for myself psychologically,” she says. “Because I know the right thing, for me anyway, is to keep makin