Greta Gerwig Wants to Make Two More Movies About Sacramento

At the SFFILM Awards Night on Monday, Barbie director Greta Gerwig said she has two more movies about her hometown of Sacramento that she’d like to make.

“All filmmakers have a fantasy baseball team of movies they hope to make. And there’s actually two other movies I’d like to make in Sacramento, in the future,” she told KQED. Gerwig’s acclaimed 2017 film Lady Bird was set and filmed in Sacramento.

As for any details on the films, “I have little inklings. But I have to keep them to myself. If I expose them to air, they’ll run away from me,” Gerwig said.

Introduced later by Barbie star Ryan Gosling, Gerwig joined American Fiction director Cord Jefferson and Roger Ross Williams as the three directors were honored at the SFFILM Awards Night, held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Monday. SFFILM also honored Nicolas Cage with a lifetime achievement award for acting during the annual ceremony.

Greta Gerwig’s Bay Area Nostalgia

Amidst a steady flow of booze and a crowd with hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations at the ready, Ryan Gosling described Gerwig to the crowd in a sentence as imaginative as it was befuddling.

“Working with Greta Gerwig is like getting a private tour of the Louvre, but you have total access to the Cheesecake Factory menu,” he said.

And yet the description holds up, in a way. Gerwig is known for striking a balance between high art and salt-of-the-Earth, Sacramento realness — where there is in fact a Cheesecake Factory a few miles from where she grew up.

Gerwig, who accepted the Irving M. Levin award for film direction, reminisced about seeing plays at Berkeley Repertory Theatre with her parents and thinking San Francisco was “the coolest place ever.”

“San Francisco and the East Bay — it was like the place you’d go if you’d cut class senior year and got on Amtrak to Richmond, and then you got on BART, and then you’d go to City Lights bookstore,” she said.

Nicolas Cage on Broadway?

Nicolas Cage, who owned a house on Russian Hill up until the early 2000s, also shared some Bay Area stories on the carpet. He remembered Charlie Sheen’s request when he visited to eat “square tube pasta” at Cafe Tiramisu in downtown San Francisco, and was introduced at the ceremony by the normally reclusive songwriter and singer Tom Waits, who lives in Sonoma County.

Cage has played roles ranging from rogue treasure hunter to a satirical version of himself, and currently stars as a biology professor in the surreal Dream Scenario. But there’s another role he’d want to tackle in the future.

“I think it would be interesting to try one of these reverse-time things where you’re a child in an adult body, like Big,” he told KQED. “I remember I loved Martin Short in Clifford — something like that.”

Cage added that he wants to pivot away from movies.

“I’ve pretty much said what I’ve wanted to say with screen acting,” he said. “I’m about ready to try my hand at television or Broadway — we’ll see what happens.”

A Gate-Kept Industry for Black Directors

Cassandro director and storytelling award recipient Roger Ross Williams contributed his own Bay Area memories to the mix, including the premiere of his film at the Castro Theatre and the “incomparable San Francisco audience” in attendance.

“The response was so tremendous that it really made us feel that we had something special with this film,” he said. “And I have an incredible relationship with the San Francisco community.”

Williams was also Celebrity Grand Marshal for the 2013 San Francisco Pride parade, which he remembers as a deeply powerful moment. Since then, he’s directed nine films, including God Loves Uganda, Life, Animated and Love to Love You, Donna Summer.

“I never thought [as] a gay Black man from a small town in Pennsylvania this would ever be possible for someone like me,” Williams said.

Williams also reflected on being the first-ever Black director to win an Oscar, in 2010 for the documentary short Music By Prudence, and explained why he feels it’s a shame.

“This to me is a sin considering all the incredible Black directors that came before me should’ve won an Oscar,” he said. “The fact of the matter is the gatekeepers in this business didn’t really see someone like me — my phone didn’t ring after I got that Oscar, no agents called, no managers called.”

American Fiction director and Award for Virtuosity recipient Cord Jefferson echoed Williams’ sentiment when he described the process for pitching the movie, due to be released Dec. 15, that stars Jeffrey Wright.

“I had several people tell me that this was one of the best scripts they’d read in years,” Jefferson said. “When I asked those same people to give me money to make the film, the vast majority of them — all but one, in fact — said no.”

Jefferson was told “it was just too risky,” underscoring a disparity in the speeches of the award recipients. Both Black directors dedicated time to explain how difficult it was to get their movies made, telling stories of structural inequity and discrimination that were not at all present in the speeches of their white counterparts.

Filmmakers of the Future

The awards ceremony generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for the nonprofit, including $20,000 each from Gerwig and Gosling. Throughout the night, award recipients and SFFILM staff underscored the need to fund the filmmakers of the future.

The night concluded with an earnest and tearful message from Gerwig.

“It’s such a gift to make movies,” she said. “It’s the gift of my life, and it’s such a gift to be a part of this community.”