From NPR’s Fresh Air:
GROSS: You said that you’re interested in how women fight. Do you think women fight differently than men when it comes to an argument?
GERWIG: I do. I - well, you know, I never really thought about it as being different until I had the script for the film and I was going around and I was talking to different financiers about putting money into the film and making it. And most of those people are men. And if they were raised with sisters or if they had daughters, they knew what it was.
They said, oh, yes, that’s my mother and my sister, or that’s my wife and my daughter. But if they didn’t, they had no idea that that was how women fought and how they loved, too. I think it was kind of like they were getting to look into a world that they didn’t know existed.
GROSS: Her real name - her birth name is Christine, but she wants to be called Lady Bird. She wants her school to call her Lady Bird. She wants her mother to call her Lady Bird. And it seems like there’s something so passive-aggressive of insisting that your mother, who named you Christine, should now have to call you by a totally different name, Lady Bird (laughter).
GERWIG: Yeah, it’s a rejection of everything her mother gave her, including her hair color. It was just totally, like, I’m not yours.
GROSS: So in this mother-and-daughter story that you’ve written, the daughter rejects the name her mother gave her. Her mother gave her the name Christine. And she says, no, you have to call me Lady Bird now. That’s my name.
[Gerwig]: And I’m always interested in how people use language to not say what they mean. And I think in so many of the fights with Lady Bird and her mother, what her mother wants to say is, I’m terrified. And she can’t say it because it feels too vulnerable or, you know, for the myriad reasons that you can’t say you’re scared. But she just can’t do it. And I talked with Saoirse and Laurie about this a lot, that I wanted the audience to feel like I know exactly where that mother is and I know exactly where that daughter is and that you don’t feel that either one of them is a villain but you do think - oh, man, it’s so hard to love people and to be in a family.
Icarus - I hear you, and am open to leaving it at that. But I do feel that Gerwig is speaking in a broad generalization about mother-daughter relationships in general, or believes she is. She may be doing it by focusing on one specific relationship and all of its fragility and foibles, but it is meant to speak to a rich, complex relationship that she feels isn’t featured enough. So it is not how every M-D relationship goes, but by showing this one, shows how complex and tough they can be.
Ah - check this out: https://screenwritingumagazine.com/2017/11/16/greta-gerwig-powerful-mother-daughter-love-story-lady-bird/
Gerwig: “Lady Bird has a difficult time accepting her mother’s love. It’s so much easier to fight. When she gets those letters [from her mother] at the end, she can’t take it in. She does everything to not take it in. She gets rip-roaring drunk, she makes out with someone, she winds up in the hospital, she wanders around and then she goes into the church because in some ways that’s home. When she’s listening to the choir, it all hits her. She can’t run away from it anymore. So she’s able to take it in and say thank you. To me, that is the transformation. To be able to accept that love and know that it’s unconditional. That’s a mother’s love.”
That is interesting. I hadn’t connected all of that. ETA: however, I would say Gerwig is wrong about something: The mom’s love was NOT unconditional. It was fervent and deep, but it was VERY conditional on Lady Bird conforming to the mom’s desires for her. Christine/LB ends up appreciating the depth of her mom’s love, but that doesn’t mean the mom has let go of her expectations for LB.
