Frances (Greta Gerwig) lives in New York, but doesn’t really have an apartment. Frances has a best friend named Sophie (Mickey Sumner) but they aren’t really speaking. Frances throws herself into her dreams even as their possible reality dwindles. Frances wants so much more than she has, but lives her life with unaccountable joy and lightness. “Frances Ha” is a modern comic fable in which director and co-writer (with Gerwig) Noah Baumbach explores New York, friendship, class, ambition, failure, and redemption. Filmed in glorious black and white, “Frances Ha” evokes the best of Woody Allen with a little Lena Dunham thrown in for good measure. The film also stars Adam Driver, Charlotte d’Amboise, and Grace Gummer. I spoke with Greta Gerwig in Los Angeles.

MSN Movies: This is such a great character and the film seems like it is a very personal project for you.

Greta Gerwig: It is, and it’s very exciting to finally be able to show it to people. Usually when I’ve acted in things I’ve come to it much later in the process so it’s not as long as a wait until it gets out there. But writing it and casting it and getting it into production and acting in it and the whole editing process—I feel like I’ve lived with it for so long now. So when people like it, you think, “Thank God, because that was two years of my life!”

When you co-write a character like this and then play that character, are there times on set where you think, “Hold it, Frances wouldn’t do that!” Did you and Noah Baumbach have discussions about what was right for Frances while you were making the film or were you always on the same page?

Well, when we were writing it, I actually had to not think about playing the character at all. I just removed myself from that completely otherwise I would have felt very self-conscious and creatively blocked. But once we were on set, we both kind of knew when it was working and when it wasn’t. There were days when it took me a second to find exactly how I needed to do it and to feel Frances’s rhythms and the way she should look and sound but other times it was there very quickly.

It must feel different when you’re the writer and the actor. I’m sure there are times on other movies when you’re struggling a little bit and find yourself thinking, “Who wrote this thing?” But here the answer is, “Oh crap—I did!”

(Laughs.) Yes, there were definitely moments like that! Especially because Noah and I were very specific about words and word order. We didn't really do any improvisation in this movie or changing of lines. People on this movie didn’t “make the lines their own.” We worked really hard in the writing stage to make the script as specific as possible. We had very specific rhythms and sometimes I would get so frustrated because I would be tripping over something that I had written and I would be like, “What does it matter if she says it this way or that way?” And then the writer in me would say, “It does matter! You don’t want other people to mess it up, so now you have to treat it with the same respect.”

Bing: More on Greta Gerwing | More on 'Frances Ha'

I mean this as a total compliment, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if you said, “We had the basic idea for certain scenes but then we just let the actors go.” The dialogue just sounded that natural. But on the other hand, it makes sense to hear that you had a very tight script because some of those scenes could never have seemed as “real” and as uncomfortable if you were improvising that dialogue.

No, and it’s also much easier to disguise certain plot points if you have a solid script. I think that when you’re improvising, you’re not clever enough in the moment to finesse those moments but as writers, you can say, “Okay, this information needs to come out but it has to feel like they're not broadcasting it.” I like to improvise in my actual life, but I’ve gotten to a place with acting where I really enjoy sticking very close to a script. I find it’s more fun to work with actors that way. There are such great actors in this movie and they really get to show what they can do with text.

And obviously there are so many different ways you can approach a line, so I guess as actors you’re always improvising to some extent.

What can’t Sarah Polley do? She was a beloved child star in the TV series “Road to Avonlea,” graduated to adult roles in acclaimed indies such as “The Sweet Hereafter,” “Last Night,” and “My Life Without Me,” achieved cult status with her starring role in Zack Snyder’s remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” and got an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Away from Her,” her directorial debut that starred Julie Christie. Last year I spoke to Polley about her second film as writer/director, the poignant “Take This Waltz” starring Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen, and now she's back with “Stories We Tell,” a truly remarkable and very personal documentary about her quest to uncover a big family secret, namely, the identity of her biological father. While her four siblings often joked that Sarah didn’t look that much like them, it was only as an adult that Sarah learned the truth—that her vivacious actress mother, Diane Polley, who died when Sarah was 11, had conceived her during an extramarital affair when she was on the road with a play. But “Stories We Tell” is far more than a talking heads exposé—all of Polley’s family members participate in the film in a big way telling their understanding of the story along with other family friends who knew her mother. Polley weaves this material together with “home movie” footage and excerpts from an explosively honest memoir written and read by Michael Polley, the man she grew up thinking was her biological dad. In giving voice to the ephemeral nature of family truths, Sarah Polley has created an unusual and masterful new documentary. I talked with Polley in Los Angeles.

MSN Movies: I loved this film so much that I can’t stop talking about it. It’s come to the point where people I know are saying, “We get it and we'll go see it. Now shut up already!”

Sarah Polley: That’s awesome! I did that with “There Will Be Blood.” I never stopped talking about it and I kept running into Paul Thomas Anderson because it was the same year that “Away From Her” was nominated and there was a moment where he'd had enough and actually said to me, “Sarah! I get it--you like the film more than ANY-body else in the world!” It’s really great to know that someone’s doing that with my movie!

I think everyone will resonate with the themes of family secrets and the different ways we tell family stories. My sister and I are constantly fighting about “it didn’t happen that way, it happened this way.” Your siblings are all so great in the film. What would you have done if one of them had been like, “Ugh, you can’t make this film! I refuse to participate!”

I think that if any of them had had serious objections, I probably wouldn’t have made it. To be honest, I was amazed at how agreeable and open to it they all were. That was a really amazing advantage to have.

Bing: More on Sarah Polley | More on 'Stories We Tell'

You seem like a fairly private person—is doing press for this film difficult? I mean, how can we NOT ask questions that are really personal when we’re talking about this film?

I think that’s part of the deal. I think when you open up a film like this, anything that’s in the film is fair game to talk about. I’ve actually strangely enjoyed this process. Usually I kind of dread promoting a film because it feels like you’re selling something—it feels very separate from your job and you end up answering the same questions over and over. But with this one the questions are never the same. It feels like an ongoing part of the process of the film—it’s about storytelling, it’s about different versions of the same event, it’s about interpretation and misinterpretation. I think it’s very interesting to see the different perspectives that people take away from the film and how they project their own family lives onto it. I love that I’m hearing as much about other people’s families, like what you just told me [Sarah and I had just had a long discussion about the personal connections I felt to the film based on my own family story] than I'm talking about my own. To me, those exchanges are such a gift!

Well, speaking of very personal questions, when you found out about your biological dad, did you have any resentment toward your mother for not telling you about it when she knew she was dying?

I’m not sure she did know that she was dying. She probably did, but I was only eleven at the time and I’m not sure how you’d talk to an eleven-year-old about this stuff.

Do you think she mostly kept it a secret to protect your dad?

Yes. To be honest, I really think it was the right decision to not tell me. I think it’s great when people know from the beginning of their lives who their biological parents are, obviously, but I also think it’s fine to not know. I don’t know what it would have added to my life as a child except confusion. I think as an adult it was really interesting information to discover. Maybe she would have told me as an adult, I do wonder about that. But I think to put that on a child at the age of ten or eleven would be kind of an odd decision. 

Was she ever part of the joking about your parentage that your family members did? Or did that all happen after she died?

That was after she died. I don’t know if any of this information would have ever come out if she had lived.

Have you thought about what her reaction would be to the film?