Fight Club
In Lady Bird and Clouds of Sils Maria, the actors make their characters perfectly clear
I’ve been thinking about how people fight in movies. Not with fists, but with words. How they sustain combat across an entire film without the audience getting bored. It’s harder than it sounds.
“Nobody would ever say, ‘Just take these swords and see what happens, just duel a little and see where the spirit takes you.’ That’s insane.”
Greta Gerwig said this in an interview about intimacy coordinators, but she might as well have been describing every choice she made directing Lady Bird.
The Trip
The film opens mid-fight. Mother and daughter, Christine and Marion, have just traveled through “21 hours and 5 minutes” of taped Steinbeck, both wiping tears from their eyes. The audiobook wasn’t a bond; it was a buffer, the last civil thing between them and what’s coming. Christine turns on the radio. Marion snaps it off. These seemingly innocent actions are fighting words.
Now they’re arguing—about what? Everything and nothing. Who invented whom? Can Christine make up someone named Lady Bird and be that person, or can Marion make up someone who wants the colleges Marion has chosen and make Christine be that person? When Marion threatens to prevail, Christine opens the passenger door and exits the moving car.
One hundred fifty seconds. Before the opening credits. That’s action-film pacing.
The Sword
I’ve watched that scene a dozen times trying to understand why it works when so many on-screen arguments feel false. The answer lies in what happened before cameras rolled. Gerwig shot all the Ronan–Metcalf scenes together, creating a separate shoot within the shoot—emotional continuity the actors could weaponize. Metcalf, a founding member of Steppenwolf Theatre, prepared “table work” for each fight, what Ronan later extolled as “the structure of the argument, the trigger points for both characters, what new information the audience would learn.” Theater discipline in service of film chaos.
And the chemistry was earned. Ronan describes her real-life mother as her “soulmate.” Journalist Sloane Crosley notes they “finish each other’s sentences and make each other howl with laughter.” That intimacy, filtered through Metcalf’s technique, becomes choreography. They speak over, through, and past one another with the timing of people who actually love each other. This is what Gerwig meant about swords—you need to know exactly where the blade is going or someone gets hurt.
Gerwig compresses everything: budget cars. Overfilled rooms. Convenience-store aisles. She traps the fight so it has nowhere to go but deeper.
The Wilderness
Now consider Olivier Assayas, who does the opposite in nearly everything.
Clouds of Sils Maria also begins in transit with Maria Enders and her assistant Valentine on a train. But where Gerwig compresses, Assayas scatters. The train moves; the women move inside the train. Valentine heading back from the cafe car juggles phones, calls, water bottles, searching for signal. Maria paces the corridors, negotiating her divorce while drafting a tribute. Motion inside motion inside motion. I can feel the challenge to balance just describing it.
They arrive in the Alps, and the mountains offer what looks like relief: space, air, beauty. But Assayas knows something about space—too much becomes its own kind of trap. In Sils Maria, sky and mountains maintain a bracing isolation without boundary. Even the windows and doors—the rooms themselves—are thrown open to an uneasy indoor–outdoor living. Night brings no reprieve. There’s no shelter from the currents between them—innuendo, aggression, failed communication, Maria’s mounting crisis.
This spatial philosophy extends to how Assayas directs. “The more space you give actors, the more control you give them,” he says. “I don’t want to hear the lines from my screenplay. I want the actors to appropriate it and make it their own.”
If Gerwig’s sword metaphor insists on precision, here is its opposite: surrender. “They can reinvent the film, and I can be the first spectator of it.”
In the film, Maria prepares to play the older role in the same play that launched her career twenty years earlier. She runs lines with Valentine reading the part of the younger actress, all the while also discussing the difficulty for Maria of accepting that reversal, of accepting that she’s older. Their rehearsals blur constantly. Are they acting or living? Discussing the play or themselves?
Like the unbounded landscape, the two bleed together until you can’t tell which is which. The actors play with the intentionality of this, at times subverting the other’s reading, increasing the richness of the psychological layering.
Kristen Stewart recalls that Assayas first approached her about playing Jo-Ann, the younger star who takes on Helena’s former career-making role in the play at the center of the film. She campaigned instead for Valentine. “There was something between these two women that I wanted to get to the bottom of… this weird duality that can occur between two women, this competitive nature and yet this innate love and care. That kind of all came to me at the end, whereas initially I just thought it was interesting to watch two women work.”
Having secured the role, Stewart refused to rehearse with Juliette Binoche. “Rehearsals can strip something of why I’m curious about the role—everything, my first instincts—not that I think they’re so fantastic, they’re just the only ones I trust. If you give me any time to think about it, I feel we’ve missed something. So I never wanted to run lines with her, I was like, get away, no, get away.”
The urgency in that last phrase says everything: Stewart wanted the live-wire of uncertainty. She preserved it by withholding preparation, keeping the possibility of surprise alive between them—an interior form of exposure that mirrors the film’s landscape.
Binoche answered in kind. She brought her real-life assistant to the project and ran lines with her. An actress playing an actress with an assistant rehearsing with her own assistant—meta multiplying meta. The tension between Assayas and Binoche —she’d told him their previous collaboration felt “too secure” and dared him to make something more vulnerable—infused the work itself. He obliged, writing Clouds around Binoche’s 1985 breakthrough Rendez-vous, which he had co-written. Binoche later deflected: “I never saw my life in the film... that’s really Olivier’s imagination.” The actress, it seems, found the vulnerability she was after.
The Fight
Where Gerwig’s script and directing method invited choreography, Assayas’s method was to capture the actors creating the characters while the characters themselves were working out the very same questions for the play. He built long tracking shots that gave actors time to surprise him, then filmed counter-shots later to layer emotional registers. Wilderness became staging: conflict with no retreat, no witnesses, no de-escalation. The untamed landscape mirrored the untamed exchanges between the women.
Two dialogue-driven films, then—two pairs of women fighting in nearly every exchange. They fight about everything but rarely about the same thing at the same time. What they fight about borders on tedious; how they fight becomes the story. Each depends on actors trained for unrelenting rivalry.
Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? if you removed years of Taylor and Burton’s off-screen conflict. Gerwig and Assayas both wrote their films to pose the same question: How would you do it? How would you sustain this?
What actors do to embody characters under stress varies from precision timing to solving puzzles in real time while the camera rolls. You could call them opposites, but they meet in the same clearing. Both require risk. Both create conditions where authenticity can surface. The method differs; the necessity doesn’t.
At each film’s moment of greatest tension, the women seem to flee—Christine leaps from the moving car, Valentine disappears into mist. But these aren’t surrenders; they’re innovations, the electrifying escapes of underestimated heroines under pressure, women who can and do rewrite the rules.
What interests me most is how both films trust conflict itself as worthy of this much craft, this much care. The fights become the substance of the films, not decoration around some other narrative. Just two women, arguing about everything and nothing, with all the technique cinema can muster brought to bear on making us believe it—making us unable to look away.
I suppose I keep returning to these films because they suggest something I want to believe: that two people fighting well is its own kind of intimacy. Not the fighting—God knows we all fight badly enough in real life—but the craft of it. The attention required. Maybe that’s what Gerwig and Assayas understood: you can’t make a fight matter without first understanding it’s a challenge of authenticity. When Christine jumps from that car, when Valentine vanishes into the clouds, they’re still saying, maybe I’m not making myself clear. Can you hear this?
Or maybe I just like watching brilliant craft. With films like these I don’t have to decide.