Earlier that year she happened to attend a student film festival where she saw a short co-directed by two film students, Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij. "It was so beautiful, so thoughtful and beautifully made," recalls Marling. "They shook me up." Once the film was over, Cahill remembers Marling leading the standing ovation. "This blonde, skinny girl popped up from the crowd leading the charge. Saul and I were like: 'Who is that girl?' She was the brightest girl at Georgetown, she was valedictorian 4.0 [graduating top of her class], and she wanted to be involved in film, eager to help in any way she could. We ended up casting her."
She first gained recognition in 2004 for the documentary "Boxers and Ballerinas" which she co-wrote with Mike Cahill and Nicholas Shumaker and co-directed with Mike Cahill.
Over the course of the next few years, the three friends made a number of short films together – "totally illegal, running-and-gunning-it filmmaking, where we'd go into the national gallery, shoot a scene incognito, guerrilla-style," says Marling. During this time, she and Cahill started dating. The couple were in Cuba, shooting a documentary together, when Goldman Sachs finally made her a job offer. "We were in this internet café in Havana," remembers Cahill. "She goes, 'Mike, look at this e-mail', and I read it. Everything was laid out on the table: 'We want to offer you this job, we want you when you graduate, you're going to make a ton of money, and all this other stuff'. She goes, 'They want an answer right now...'.
"She wrote back: 'Thank you but I'm going to be an artist. Best regards, it was wonderful, take care, Brit'. The guy wrote back, and his e-mail was one word: 'Wow'. The bravery with which she approaches life is amazing. The idea of a meaningless life is much more terrifying to her than a failed attempt at a meaningful life."
"What sets her apart from so many actresses is she is unafraid of the unknown," says Mike Cahill, her co-writer and director on "Another Earth" (2011), in which Marling plays Rhoda, a brilliant young woman, recently accepted on to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's astrophysics course, who kills someone's family in a drunk-driving accident.