Greta Gerwig: Whit Stillman's new star Gerwig's career began with a series of low-to-no-budget films made with friends, playing emotionally ambivalent, chronically torpid twenty-somethings whose inarticulacy earned the genre the term 'mumblecore. Her first significant review was in Variety magazine for Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007). One line stuck: '"The grating Greta Gerwig,"" she recalls mournfully. Happily, the critical assessment that has come to define her is altogether more flattering. The New York Times" chief film critic, AO Scott, pronounced Gerwig 'the definitive screen actress of her generation." In 2010, after the release of Greenberg, in which she played a loveable and frustrating woman who falls for Ben Stiller's misanthropic character, Scott was so enamoured with her naturalistic, seemingly artless performance that he wrote, She seems to be embarked on a project of redefining just what it is we talk about when we talk about acting. Last year she completed the transition from art house to big budget with Arthur, the remake of the 1981 classic, in which she played the Liza Minnelli role to Russell Brand's hapless billionaire, played by Dudley Moore in the original. There was also a part in No Strings Attached (her co-star, Natalie Portman, is now one of her best friends). More recently she's been able to tick off two directors 'on my list of people I would have killed to work with": Woody Allen, in whose forthcoming To Rome with Love she stars, and Whit Stillman, the cult director of Metropolitan, Barcelona and Last Days of Disco, in whose new film, Damsels in Distress, she stars. Gerwig, who is 28, talks slowly, in a way that makes her seem puzzled by everything that comes out of her mouth. And few things seem more puzzling to her than Hollywood and her ascent within it. She mentions 'sweating everywhere" at a recent fitting, and when I ask what it was for she looks a bit abashed. Oh, um, it was for, er, I was at Prada doing a fitting for a première in Los Angeles next week. It was very fancy - I sweated all over Prada. When I say, "I was at a fitting at Prada," it sounds ridiculous." And then she's off about how much she envies Prada's employees their uniform. It would be like going to really fancy Catholic school!" she enthuses, showing me pictures on her phone of their dark skirts and white blouses. The glossy magazine shoots that are now part of Gerwig's job may mean she's 'better versed in fashion," but, as she points out, 'Knowing what it is doesn't give you style. 'I think the truth is that there are people who just have style, and I'm comfortable with not necessarily being that person. 'I do feel like I have a style that's mine, just based on the practicalities of the city. I tend to carry backpacks because I like to have my hands free. I tend to wear flats because I like to walk everywhere. As for walking the red carpet, 'The pictures can be kind of traumatising," she says. 'It's how I learned I shouldn't smile really big because my smile gets really gummy. It makes me look like a dragon. And then she bursts into a massive laugh, gumminess be damned. Her new film, Damsels in Distress, marks the end of a 13-year film-making hiatus for Stillman. It's a triumphant return. Set on a college campus where, as one character says darkly, 'an atmosphere of male barbarism prevails," it follows three eccentric young women whose efforts to edify themselves and the college's 'doofi" (plural of 'doofus") make them by turns charming and unwittingly hilarious. 'Isn't it mad? I mean, no one else could have made it," she says. The girls are so weird. They think they're really great but nobody [in the film] thinks they're cool or fun or anything, which I like. Gerwig plays the leader of the group, Violet, who believes in show tunes and the 'incalculable salutary effects of soap" as a cure for depression. 'Violet's opinionated and kind of a liar but she's also great," Gerwig says. 'And she's nuts. Gerwig was desperate for the part. I tap-danced!" she exclaims, when she describes her audition. 'He didn't ask me to, I just showed up and said I had tap shoes and I'd like to tap and then I'd like to sing a song. I just really went for it. Ha! Her own college experience was shorter on the 'doofi. She studied English and philosophy at the all-women Barnard College in New York, graduating in 2006. We had different priorities. They certainly weren't elegant dressing and perfume and helping others. They were more like being really competitive with each other and with everyone else to get good grades. I remember getting into fights with my boyfriend about whose GPA [grade point average] was higher. It was this big thing of who's going to get magna cum laude [a distinction]. It was so silly. I was so mad when I screwed up a class. 'I'm totally competitive. It's not always the most attractive trait... Despite the competitiveness, she identifies as a girls" girl. I feel like instantly on a movie set I find the three girls I can really, like, get down with. I just love girls and girl talk. Seconds later her gaze is caught by something out of the window, and she loses her train of thought. Without breaking her gaze she leans across the table conspiratorially and says, 'I'm sorry, I'm very involved with these teenage girls - I don't know what's going on, but it's very intense. Four skinny-jeaned girls are engaged in a contretemps on the steps of a townhouse. 'Don't they all look so fashionable? I'm intimidated by them, I say. 'I know, I swear, if you grew up in Manhattan then by the time you're 13 you're like 40. You could run a company. Gerwig herself grew up in Sacramento, California, the daughter of a nurse and a financial consultant, and describes herself as a child 'almost autistically fixated on activities. Foremost among them was acting, but she was enthusiastic about fencing, ballet ('By the time I was eight I was spending like four hours in the studio, I was like maniacally committed to it") and tap, too. 'My older brother and sister say, "You were such a pain in the ass growing up and such a show-off and so competitive, and we can't believe that you've actually inflicted it on the world."" They probably never imagined that she'd end up making a rom-com with Woody Allen. To Rome with Love is told in four vignettes. In one of them Gerwig appears alongside Jesse Eisenberg of The Social Network and Ellen Page (the star of Juno). Jesse and I ate so much gelato [while filming in Rome]. We'd walk and get chocolate gelato for breakfast. And, of course, she sighs, 'Woody is the whole thing. I just started getting over my intimidation and then it was over. But then there were more idols to meet. She's just filmed a pilot for The Corrections, the HBO adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's novel. 'At the table read I got to sit between Ewan McGregor and Rhys Ifans and I was like" - she squeezes her shoulders in bliss - 'I'm in the middle of a Welsh-Scottish sandwich! It's the best thing in the world! 'And they're both kind of rakish and - well, not bad boys, well Rhys is - anyway, they're so wonderful. Top of the roster of rakish Brits is, of course, Russell Brand, on whom, I venture, she had a crush? Oh my god," she says, half collapsing into her chair. I had such a crush. So embarrassing. He's kind of a magnet. I challenge anyone to be in a room with him and not want him to talk to you and look at you. During the filming of Arthur, Brand gave her a bike that his now ex-wife Katy Perry had rejected. I feel really... I came out best of that situation," she says, looking pained. I got the bike. No, I was so sad for him and her. The bike has been in hiding all winter so it's just... Last week I brought it out and it does have this sort of sadness hovering around it now! It's a great bike, though. But when it comes to treating herself, she is touchingly modest - flights home to Sacramento that don't involve long stop-overs and 'really just feeling less bad, not worrying that I'm about to be thrown out on the street. She has to run - she's late for a friend - but there is just time to talk about a film she's written. She describes it as 'a love story about girls. It's a girl who's in love with her best friend, but not sexually. It's sort of that moment when you realise, "Oh, so we won't all move in together," and you're going to move on with your life. 'I wrote it... I didn't direct it, but I'm in it... She nods and then says firmly, 'I'm really proud of it. I think it's really good. She may not have a hold on her fork, but happily, has a much firmer grasp of her talents.