Since Get Out exploded into theaters, Peele and his wife, comedian Chelsea Peretti, have had a son, and the filmmaker has turned his attention toward building his company, Monkeypaw. His producing projects rely primarily on black talent using genre forms to dig into America’s racist past and present. He’s producing the Spike Lee thriller Black Klansman; a TV drama about Nazi-hunters in America in the 1970s called The Hunt; an adaptation of a novel for HBO that interweaves the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft with racism in the U.S. during the era of Jim Crow called Lovecraft Country; and a Tracy Morgan comedy show for TBS called The Last O.G., about an ex-con who returns to a now gentrified Brooklyn. He’s also at work on his follow-up to Get Out, which Universal has set for 2019, another film that Peele said will use genre as a technique to raise provocative ideas. “Genre to me is about fun; it’s about entertainment,” he said. “Starting in comedy, I’m just linked to the audience and wanting the audience to react audibly. Genre disarms an audience. They kind of surrender and you can get at deeper points.”

DIRECT APPROACH

Gerwig doesn’t totally identify with her protagonist. “I was much more of a rule follower,” she says. Photograph by Art Streiber. Photograph by Art Streiber.

Gerwig grew up in Sacramento, California, an intense and artistic kid attending an all-girls Catholic high school and dreaming of a more cosmopolitan life in New York. There are obvious biographical parallels between Gerwig and the title character in Lady Bird. Like Gerwig, Lady Bird lives in Sacramento, attends Catholic school, and is the daughter of a nurse and a computer programmer, played in the film by Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts. But it’s where Lady Bird and Gerwig diverge that interests her. While Lady Bird rebels, at one point dramatically flinging herself out of a moving car, “I was much more of a rule follower and a people pleaser,” Gerwig said. “I was very intent on getting the gold star and keeping straight lines. I think, in a way, writing this character was an exploration of what I wasn’t able to do.” After seeing the film, Gerwig’s mother noticed another key difference, between herself and Metcalf’s character, who responds to her daughter’s boldest act of rebellion by cutting her off. “Oh, Greta, you wish I’d give you the silent treatment,” Gerwig’s mom told her after seeing the film.

“I respected the art form so much, I didn’t want to mess it up,” Peele said.

Gerwig eventually made it to New York, by way of Barnard College, where she studied English and philosophy, and was cast in a small role in Joe Swanberg’s 2006 film LOL, an early entry in the low-budget, naturalistic style of filmmaking known as mumblecore. Gerwig would soon become the movement’s leading lady, working on more films with Swanberg, including 2008’s Nights and Weekends, which she co-directed, as well as movies by the Duplass brothers and Ti West.

Like Peele—and unlike many cocky young filmmakers—Gerwig found inventive ways to put in her proverbial 10,000 hours before actually calling “Action!” She reached a wider audience after she starred in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, in 2010, and the two began dating and collaborating, co-writing the films Frances Ha and Mistress America for her to star in. “I had always wanted to direct, but because I didn’t go to film school I had a belief that I needed to get some kind of training,” Gerwig said. “I needed to learn my craft. I was lucky because the first films I made were so small and so D.I.Y. that everyone did everything, so if I wasn’t acting in a scene, or writing the next scene we were shooting, I was holding a boom or a camera, and sitting and working on the editing at night. I realized when I was in production for [Lady Bird] that I had been working in films for 10 years.”