(with occasional interjections by)

GRETA GERWIG

[ACTOR, WRITER]

The world premiere of Noah Baumbach’s latest film, Frances Ha, took place on September 1, 2012 at the Telluride Film Festival. The movie, which is in black and white, opened without sound. Was the film black and white and silent?, the audience wondered. Turned out there was some kind of technical hitch in the theater due to the lightning storms that had occurred earlier that week. The film stopped and started again. After a second false start without sound, Baumbach’s voice called out from somewhere in the back of the theater: “How is everyone else’s world premiere going?,” which prompted widespread laughter. The film started again, this time with sound, and everyone settled into their seats, and no one moved for the next ninety minutes. Frances Ha rivets.

Greta Gerwig, who cowrote the script with Baumbach, plays twenty-seven-year-old Frances—half Annie Hall, half French New Wave ingenue—who is trying, mostly in vain, to become a professional dancer. Frances’s character is charming, wistful, stunted, and honest. She has a best friend, Sophie, who’s slowly starting to pull away from her, and a dance teacher who’s breaking the news to her that she’s not really dancer material. Like all twenty-seven-year-olds, she’s figuring out who she is, and the film lets us watch her both stumble and leap—but mostly stumble.

Noah Baumbach is the writer and director of Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy, The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, and Greenberg, which also featured Greta Gerwig. He cowrote the scripts for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox. This conversation took place at the Telluride courthouse in front of an audience the day after the premiere. Greta Gerwig sat in the front row, and at some point the microphone was handed to her and she joined in the conversation. Frances Ha will be released this month.

—Vendela Vida

THE BELIEVER: Frances’s character is very different from some of the characters in your other films, like Greenberg, for example, and Margot at the Wedding. Frances Ha just feels more buoyant as a film—or maybe I should say that Frances feels more buoyant as a character—and I’m wondering if it was fun for you to make that change in terms of the main protagonist, and what the challenges were for you.

NOAH BAUMBACH: It wasn’t really very conscious. The movie felt like it wanted to be what it was going to be. And I really wanted to reward Frances for her struggles. So it was never...