‘We had groovy nuns’: When Barbie director Greta Gerwig revealed her school used to do ‘skirt check’

Greta Gerwig made history in 2023 by becoming the most successful female director of all time. But there was a time when she was just a small-town girl with big dreams going through a conservative catholic school.

In an interview with Stephen Colbert in 2018, the Oscar-nominated director revealed some anecdotes about her school life and growing up in a conservative environment.

Greta Gerwig on her experience of going to an all-girls catholic school

Greta Gerwig is known for her highly regarded films that center around women and tell their stories in an empathetic fashion. Her debut film as a director Lady Bird was a portrait of a young woman growing up in a small town that is intensely conservative. 

For that film, the character of Lady Bird as portrayed by Saoirse Ronan was based on the director’s experiences herself. The conservative environment that the character deals with in the film is taken from Gerwig’s own experience of studying in an all-girls catholic school.

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“We had a skirt-check in our school, the nuns used to measure our skirt and made certain that it didn’t go below a certain length” the Barbie director had told Stephen Colbert in 2018.

The director revealed that this experience helped her in becoming more inclined towards arts in general as she found more freedom in those avenues and got to be away from the constrictions of her conservative upbringing. The influence of that time is also clearly seen in her work, where she portrays female characters with a lot more agency and freedom than they are usually afforded in Hollywood films.

Greta Gerwig created history with her film Barbie

Greta Gerwig created massive history this year with her third directorial venture, Barbie. The Margot Robbie-led film went on to become the biggest hit of the year earning more than USD 1 billion dollar at the box office and being half-responsible for the massive pop-culture phenomenon that is now called Barbenheimer. 

This became the highest-grossing film ever made by a female director and even beat out Christopher Nolan’s epic biographical film Oppenheimer to reach that milestone. With her previous ventures like Lady Bird and Little Women, both of which were nominated for several Academy Awards, the successful director is on a roll.

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