Politeness is a part of learning English language as a foreign language. As such, it is important for English language learners to know politeness strategies in order to have better understanding about the use of politeness in social context. This study aims to identify and describe the four politeness strategies and the factors which are proposed by Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson as seen in an American movie entitled Freedom Writers. This study focuses on analysing the utterances of the main character based on the movie script, i.e. the kinds of politeness strategies used by Erin Gruwell in the Freedom Writers movie and the factors influencing the politeness strategies. The findings show that Erin Gruwell applied the four politeness strategies, which are bald-on record, off-record, negative and positive politeness. However, the dominant strategy used by Erin is positive politeness, where Erin wants to get close and satisfy the hearer’s face. Related to the factors influencing the politeness strategies, the finding shows that there are two factors that affect Erin in choosing the politeness strategies: the payoffs and the sociological variables. In addition, sociological variables has three sub things: social distance, relative power and rank of imposition.