To a certain kind of girl – the type who shops at A.P.C, wonders whether Girls is a reality show, and wouldn’t eat a cupcake if she was starving – Greta Gerwig is queen.
 
Having become an indie-film darling with, amongst other things, a lead role in Whit Stillman’s cult hit Damsels in Distress last year, and writing, directing, and starring credits on the most depressingly accurate break-up film ever, Nights and Weekends, as well as popping up on the red carpet at top fashion events wearing the likes of Saint Laurent and Band of Outsiders, you want to pick her brains as much as raid her wardrobe.

With her mixture of genuine intellect, humour and enviable style, she’s the perfect foil to the faux-cute ‘kooky’ actresses that Hollywood usually tries pass off as indie and alternative - the thinking girls’ Zooey Deschanel, if you will.

With her latest film, Frances Ha, co-written with partner Noah Baumbach, and in which she plays the eponymous starring role, Gerwig gives us even more reason to ink her onto our fantasy BFF lists. This artfully shot coming-of-age tale will no doubt ring true to anybody who has ever felt lost or unsure as they are catapulted through their tumultuous twenties, and a viewing can teach you a lot about the trickily evolving friendships you blindly navigate along the way.  
 
Ahead of the film’s long-awaited UK release this week, we spoke to Greta Gerwig about how Frances came to be, the most valuable lessons your twenties can teach you and what she’s obsessed with right now.

How much does Frances Ha mirror your own experience?
Noah and I put pieces of ourselves and our experience into the script, but it's really a totally fictional creation, the autobiographical elements just get folded into the movie. It's like, when you make a cake, you'll use eggs, but I can't show you where the eggs are when it's done. It feels like you use stuff from your life, but then it gets disguised or changed in significant ways and then the story just lives in its own world.
 
Then the actual acting is a whole other process. You're costuming this woman, and you're deciding how she walks and who she is. I felt like I found Frances in a kind of big comedic, physical performance, almost in the tradition of a silent film actor and I was thinking about performances by Buster Keaton and Peter Sellers who are kind of like these alter-ego comedians. It felt like she was larger than life. I'm really not that clumsy – I don't fall that much! So while there’s certainly a lot of me in the character of Frances, it's outside of myself too.
 
In what ways does your physical performance of Frances reveal her character?
She's running full speed emotionally and literally, and you fall harder when you're running full speed. She's supremely confident, even in her wrongness, like she's running towards totally the wrong thing, but she's doing it as fast as she possibly can and I think there's sincerity and purity of intention in that. But eventually you have to take a breath and assess, where are you going?

"There's a tremendous amount of dignity in accepting things on their realistic terms."

How did you and Noah write together – did you collaborate from the start or piece together your individual work?
We wrote separately, but we kind of developed ideas together. The film really grew out of this list of ideas that I sent him, and that acted like a springboard that his ideas were added to. They weren't plot ideas as much as they were little moments or little exchanges of dialogue, and some of them are actually in the film and some of them aren’t. The scene where Frances is deciding whether or not you pay an ATM fee was on the original list so Noah was like, let's write the scene around that. We thought aboout what surrounds that moment, so I wrote the dinner scene, and then Noah wrote in Frances falling, which led the scene to her date’s apartment, so, you each write something and it fits together later

To what extent do New York and Paris, where Frances Ha is set, become characters in the film?
I think New York is the main lover in the film. Sorry, that sounds incredibly douchey! But I think that when Frances struggles with her ambition to be a dancer, and to live with Sophie in a house, she feels like New York is rejecting her in the same way that everything else is rejecting her. Paris is the lovelorn trip - it's this emotional reaction to finding out Sophie is moving on. It's like she’s saying to New York, ‘why can't you love me back the way I love you? I'm just going to drag my heart to Paris’.
 
What do you think the film can teach us about changing friendships?
I think there was a feeling that with friendship and career ambitions that it can be just as triumphant to give something up if it's not going to happen. It can take so much courage to give up your fantasy of what you expected something to be in order to embrace what is actually in front of you, and that you're able to do. There are so many films that are like, 'never give up the dream!' that I felt like there needed to be a counter-balance to that, to say that it's OK to give up. There's a tremendous amount of dignity in accepting things on their realistic terms.

How did you use humour in the film?
Her roommate Benji’s nickname for Frances, ‘the undateable’, was sort of playing with this idea that when she starts saying it about herself, it's like it's this badge of honour. She’s saying she’s not going to conform to conventions, and won’t be put in this box of marriage, because who could possibly deal with all of that craziness?
 
What’s the best thing you can do in your twenties?
The best thing is to not think that your twenties is the end. I'm 29, and a lot of my are friends are feeling like it's too late to be changing paths, that the moment’s already happened. But the thing is, it's not too late – you can totally change what you're doing. If you take all of that energy from worrying about it and just put it into what you want to do then you can change things. Like Julia Child she didn't start cooking until she was forties. You should also not waste any time being envious of anyone else, because everyone's on their own path.

What are you obsessed with at the moment?
Kendrick Lemar. He's amazing. I like that he's honest and weird, and crazy and smart, I love him.
 
I also really love Sarah Polley’s new movie, Stories We Tell, I'm obsessed with her. She's a lady director who's like, the real deal. She writes and directs movies that really go for it, like go for a big cinematic feeling, and I find that totally thrilling. I feel that way also about the Kathryn Bigelows of the world, but I feel like Sarah Polley is more like a peer in a way. I mean, she's a little older but like me, but doing amazing things, and that's so inspiring for me.

Frances Ha is showing in UK cinemas from Friday 26th July.