“I think that’s why this book – whether it was Patti Smith or Simone de Beauvoir or Elena Ferrante or J.K. Rowling or Anna Quindlen – all of these different women saying I loved Jo and Jo was my character and I loved this book – it’s because they knew the truth that was bigger than what the book said it was…” – Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is a lavish, energetic, beautiful and moving work that feels wonderfully alive. It breathes. It moves. As Gerwig said, she didn’t want the adaptation to feel “all nailed to the floor.”
With a wonderful cast (Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Florence Pugh as Amy, Emma Watson as Meg, Eliza Scanlen as Beth, Laura Dern as Marmee, as well as Timothée Chalamet as Laurie and Meryl Streep as Aunt March – also standouts from Louis Garrel as Friedrich Bhaer and Chris Cooper as Mr. Laurence), Gerwig crafts a Little Women some of us feel like we had, perhaps, been waiting for (even for those of us who love both the 1933 George Cukor version with a fantastic Katharine Hepburn, and the 1994 Gillian Armstrong version starring Winona Ryder). This is a movie that’s not only an exuberant ode, of sorts, to the March sisters (and their mother – Marmee), but to the writer, Louisa May Alcott, as well. Particularly by the film’s inventive dual ending, one that, many of us wished for when reading the original two-part book.
As Gerwig said, “I do tend to trust my own gut and my own curiosity and my own passion and when I re-read [Little Women] I thought, I have to make a film because I have to tell people what’s in here. This book that I’ve loved… I actually feel like it’s so much different than what we’ve thought, and I felt like I wanted to have a discussion with the world…”
I have a discussion with Gerwig, and we talk the book, adapting it, the challenges of making the movie, how fascinating Alcott was, Gerwig’s influences and inspirations crafting Little Women, and more.
Kim Morgan: Little Women is such a beloved book – I read that you, of course, loved it at a young age, but that you returned to the book at around age 30… and that the book revealed more layers to you, that it seemed more complex. Can you discuss that?
Greta Gerwig: There’s something about the book… there’s an interesting tension in the book, I think, that I never noticed before because I wasn’t really thinking [as much] about authorship as a child because, why would you? You’re taking fiction to be as real as anything else, so I was always thinking of the characters and what was in front of me. And…when I read it as an adult, there’s a sadness underneath the text that I think has to do with this distance between what Louisa May Alcott’s life had been and what this fictionalized March family was. But, also, this distance from childhood and sisterhood and togetherness that’s now gone for her. And, then, beyond that, Louisa [in real life] is more radical than her characters are allowed to be. And, that she is, in some ways, constrained by these pre-Victorian standards of morality that she doesn’t live by. But, because she wants to sell books, she has to kind of tie everything up with a bow – particularly in the early chapters – how everything has to be a lesson to put these women back on track, in a way. But what’s interesting … is on the one hand, if you take it at surface value, there is, yes, everything is tied up at the end of each chapter and they learn their lesson, but if you remove that, then all you have is a lot of women with a lot of feelings that they’re not supposed to have – which is really great. Whether it’s ambition or anger or lust or envy or these kind of more naughty emotions … and I mean naughty [knotty] I guess in both ways – like a naughty girl but also like knots, like tied up in knots. All of those things were things that came out to me when I was reading it as an adult [and] that’s what became interesting to me about making a film about it. Because, I think I’m only interested in things that have some sort of argument with themselves, in a way…
KM: Do you think she was kind of, to use something professor Bhaer says in your movie, when he’s talking about Shakespeare [“He smuggled his poetry in popular works.”] – “smuggling” ideas within the narrative?
GG: Yes. I think, in some ways she was conscious of and other ways she was unconscious of, and both are worthy. I think there are some things [there] because it was published in two parts – she published the first part in 1868 and a year later, she published the second part – and there’s this invention of this character, professor Bhaer [played in the movie by Garrel] because she had to have Jo [played in the movie by Ronan] marry someone and it feels tacked on …
KM: Yes. Because Alcott didn’t want Jo to get married…
GG: Right. She didn’t want Jo to get married. She said, “I’ve made her a funny match out of spite.” But … there’s…different kinds of works of art. This one – it shows its seams…you can see that it’s made, and it’s made by a person who is figuring it out as she goes. I think [that] I, instead of resisting that “made-ness,” I leaned into it because there’s this tension between pleasing the audience and pleasing herself. I always think a lot about the fact that it’s not told in the first person – Jo is not the narrator – there’s another narrator who is presumably Louisa May Alcott and her voice is wry and a little … a little spicy, and a little snarky, actually. Even in the first chapter she says, “And because readers like to know what characters look like, here, I’m going to describe what they look like…” And you’re like, “Oh, I see! You’re judging us for wanting to know what they look like.” (laughs) I think – that the voice that comes through – she knew she was smuggling some spinach in with the sugar, and I like that. I also like that it doesn’t feel like a perfect complete thing that was handed down from God. It felt like it was made by a person.
KM: It’s interesting, when you’re talking about…sneaking ideas into the narrative… when, in your movie, Jo’s publisher [played in the movie by Tracy Letts] who says of Jo’s heroine: “Make sure she’s married by the end or dead.” I was thinking of watching older movies and films featuring what would be called the femme fatale, like how she usually had to die at the end.
GG: Yes. Of course.
KM: But then many love watching those characters and are often rooting for [those “femme fatale” characters]. Sometimes, just how she’s going outside the societal norm. Or, that she’s just so interesting (how I watch, say, Leave Her to Heaven and am fascinated by Gene Tierney – she’s this incredible character). But of course she will die at the end… Things one might think of beyond … I wonder, if, in a kind of similar way, reading Little Women as kids, you are wondering if there is more going on here …
GG: No, it’s much stranger than I think some people remember… But I often feel that way with things that take on a sheen of classic – that people stop engaging with them…
KM: They take it for granted almost …
GG: Yeah, and I think there are probably really smart essays written about this – how once something is considered art it’s impossible to see it anymore because it blocks your ability to look. Maybe [art critic] Clement Greenberg wrote about this… I mean, this is really stretching back into some art history class! But in any case, I think that yeah, there is so much strangeness in the book. To your point about the femme fatale, it’s interesting this fate of female characters. Yeah, femme fatales have to be killed – they’re too interesting. (laughs) I feel like there’s a variety of ways we’ve disposed of female characters. And one thing I was thinking about when I was writing this, and here’s something I think she [Alcott] was unconscious of but became a trope in literature: this idea of the crazy woman in the attic.
KM: Oh, interesting… yes…
GG: She didn’t know that – that was a thing that sort of came in literary theory and in fiction became more obvious … However many years later when Virginia Woolf writes To the Lighthouse, and the painter Lily, at the end, takes all of her paintings and puts them in the attic because what do you do with your artistic output? Nothing. “What’s going on in your attic?” “Oh, nothing. That’s just my crazy ex-wife who’s going to burn down the house…”
KM: Bertha [from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre].…
GG: Yeah – I think that’s where her unconsciousness is interesting – because you know she’s in the sweep [of] history… There is this thing where – What in the world do you do with a family of genius girls in the 19th century? Nothing. You do nothing with them. What could their life be? There’s not a life for them, not one that allows them to expand. So where do they go? They get married, or they’re dead or they go to the attic (laughs). And I think that’s part of the reason why I wanted the end of the movie to be split – the ending of the book and the ending in real life – to watch this process of externalization and having art you make enter the stream of capitalism, which is so complicated, but then [the art] – it stops being something inside you, behind a door, up in the attic, and it becomes something out in the world that’s an object that people pay money for… That moment is something – it’s capitalism, it’s industrialization, it’s art made into something that exists in the world. And I think that it’s complicated, and I have a complicated conversation with it, as does Louisa. [The conversation is] there is an idea of the pure artist, but… you don’t want to “pure” yourself into nonexistence.
KM: When adapting a literary work – you get really obsessed with the author…
GG: Yes.
KM: And you get really fascinated by every aspect of their life, you want to know everything… I’m assuming you knew a lot about Alcott before you made the film, but you must have done a really deep, deep dive… Because, from what I’ve read, her life is so fascinating, her family is so fascinating…
GG: The whole thing. Yeah, I did. I got really interested in her. Her psychology is fascinating in terms of… in a way, as a writer, that she splits herself … I think when you don’t write or make things there’s this sort of narrative that exists in the world. This question: “Is it autobiographical?” or “Is that how it happened?” Which is, on some level, so uninteresting to me, and also not how people make work. Because [the work is] grounded in reality but then it becomes… something else. Also, I think there’s a very literal interpretation of autobiography in work where people try to draw one-to-one correlation; where they’re like, this is Jo, who is Louisa, because obviously Louisa is a “Lou” a girl with a boy’s name, and that’s Jo – Josephine, and she wants to be a writer and all of this. But, then, it’s like an author hides themselves in all of these different places. And… in the book, she [Alcott] gives her father the arc of war, he goes to war. But in life, he didn’t go to war, Louisa did. She was a Civil War nurse and she developed typhoid fever and almost died, not him. It was her. And she hid herself there. And I believe that she hid some of her own artistic ambitions in things that Amy says in the second half of the book. There are all of these different pieces of her. And, yet, it’s also an act of imagination, and an act of idealization. But, yeah, the psychology of Louisa is fascinating. With her and her mother, her and her father, her and her sisters. There were different things all throughout her life that I found cinematic and interesting. Things like – she was a runner – which is why I have Jo running at the beginning. The first time I encountered that, I was thinking, they can’t possibly mean she was running, I mean, what? Running-running? But, yes, she ran. She would run for miles in the woods in Concord. She’d tuck up her skirts and just go tearing through the woods. She was apparently an amazing runner – which is so odd to think of. She [also] did teach herself to write with her left hand, because it meant she could keep writing, which was something else I wanted to explore, [and] I gave it to the character of Jo – this ambidextrousness. But I think sometimes writing is seen as a brain-in-a-box activity, like it’s an intellectual activity. But it’s a physical activity – it’s like running or boxing – you have to physical discipline to write, which I think is often overlooked … It’s hard making movies about writing, it’s hard (laughs), you know? It’s one activity, which is why I came up with that sort of throwing-of-the-pages-on-the-ground – I think David Lean did a good job of [showing] writing in Dr. Zhivago – but it’s hard…
KM: As you were talking about the other characters that inform Alcott, I thought of Amy [played in the movie by Pugh], and how Amy is presented in your movie in a more complex manner, which, you do see that in the book… What were you seeing in Amy when you were re-reading the book and studying Alcott’s life that informed the script and this character, because she’s such a great character and so wonderfully played by Florence Pugh…
GG: I felt that Amy had always been given the short shrift in terms of how people thought of her and when I was re-reading it, I was just incredibly fascinated by her. She’s hilarious as a kid, and she’s so clear about what she wants and why she wants it. But when she’s an adult, and she’s in Europe, and she’d engaged with the fact that she’s never going to be a genius, which is heartbreaking to her, that part of it I was like, Oh she’s so interesting, and I felt like I had never really seen it. I wish I had seen it when I was young, but I hadn’t. Amy was not the one that I was drawn to. But as an adult, she definitely is. And she was the one with the lines that I underlined the most. Like, “I want to be great or nothing.” And she has the line, “The world is hard on ambitious girls.” And she has another line, “I don’t pretend to be wise but I am observant.” She is just full of great one liners… I think it’s interesting that the character who most clearly stated what she wants is the one we didn’t like for so long. (laughs) It’s telling. And Florence Pugh is an extraordinary actress
KM: Yes, she is…
GG: And I knew I wanted her to play Amy. I wanted someone who could be Jo’s equal in a certain way because it didn’t seem like a fair fight otherwise. Florence Pugh and Saoirse are such brilliant actresses but they do come at it so differently… I think they are opposites in some way, but equally powerful…
KM: I recently read your piece in Vanity Fair about Jo and Amy discussing writing… I really liked what you said… it’s so interesting – because you said you were worried that your scene was too on-the-nose – for people who haven’t read that, can you discuss that scene, because I do love that you include it in there as sort of a way to have Amy talk to Jo, and, in a sense, Louisa May Alcott too…
GG: Yeah, that scene where she says, “I’m just writing a story about our little life… who’s gonna care about it?” And it’s “not important.” And Amy says, “writing them will make them important.” And Jo, says, “No, no, no writing about it doesn’t confer importance it reflects it.” And Amy [tells her] that’s not true. “Writing them makes them important.” And that discussion – it’s funny – when I was writing, I thought, “Oh, god, everybody is going to be like, ‘snooze,’ she’s saying what it’s about…” And, truth be told, for the most part, that’s not what anyone took from it. Now people are saying, “Oh yeah, I see what you’re doing there.” But I think it’s also helpful to remember that when I think I’m being obvious no one else thinks that (laughs)… because I’m… sort of … I’m scared of being too clear about certain things because I never want to be didactic. I never want to make something that has a clearly defined intellectual position on a thing. I’m interested in surrounding a problem, not diagnosing one. I just want to hear the sides. But in any case, I do think … writing it, making it, [it] does tell you what’s important. It helps you organize your life. I think stories are important for lots of things, but I do think one thing that they’re important for is this sense of organization of what matters in life. There’s a reason religions are organized around stories… because that’s how we understand things… I think, in many ways, we’re pattern seeking machines, but we’re also narrative machines, and I think what Louisa did – again, whether she knew it or not – was… no one had written about the lives of girls or women. No one had written about what happens in kitchens or in bedrooms or when their father was gone… There’s no inherent reason [that] a moment in a kitchen is any less important than a moment on a battlefield…
KM: That makes me think of the conversation Jo and Marmee [Jo’s mother, played by Dern in the movie] have – when Marmee says: “You remind me of myself.” And Jo says, “But you’re never angry.” And Marmee says, “I’m angry nearly every day of my life…”
GG: That was from the book… Which I didn’t notice until I read it again. That was a big one … where I went, “What?” Marmee’s angry? What do you mean she’s angry?” I hadn’t internalized that she’s angry. She’s angry every day, which, I thought, that’s completely different than what I thought. But that sort of revisiting – that’s what makes it worthwhile to look at something anew. That scene with the two of them – it’s one of the things that I think about also when making movies. [The question]: What are you choosing to make 30 feet tall? Because I always think about it, as much as everyone will probably watch it in on their phones (laughs), I like to think, “Well what if it were 30 feet tall?” What…is worth that epic scale…
KM: To that epic scale – What were some of the challenges you faced making this picture? It’s so lavish and beautiful, the camera so fluid; it’s really alive, nothing staid about it…
GG: Thank you. I wanted it to feel kind of big and lavish and epic and that’s a hard sell (laughs). No one is rushing to … make your lavish epic about girls in the 19th century, that you made into a cubist movie… But I was in a blessed position, which was, after directing Lady Bird, and having it have some success, I was able to kind of put my chips down somewhere [where] I wanted to, [and where] I believed in and thought would work. But you kind of need the wind at your sails to do that. But every piece of it was complicated. My cinematographer Yorick [Le Saux] … he shot a lot of wonderful movies, he… has this combination of shooting things that are quite beautiful that look as beautiful as anything shot on film… but he also [has] a real kinetic energy behind the camera which I was also interested in… I felt like that kind of energy behind the camera – it was that combination of beauty and movement that I was looking for. But he knew right away. He said, “We have to shoot this on film.” I said, “Yes we have to… it takes place in the 1860s… this is not a digital picture. It’s just not. It can’t be…” But it was an endless fight to get that going.
KM: To shoot it on 35?
GG: On paper, it’s more expensive. But the truth is, in the long run, it’s about the same, because you spend less time in the DI. Because it falls off the truck, as they say. There’s just less you have to do. I mean, we had a wonderful colorist, Joe Gawler, but like, when we were doing hair and makeup camera tests and everything, he was like, “It’s just closer to what you want it to be already…” which is what we were going for. But, yeah, every piece of it: shooting it on location…the costumes, the sets, the whole scope of it … we fight for every inch of it. It’s kind of a military campaign. But that was what was so amazing but also surreal about making it – that I was having these conversations that were a mirror, in some ways, to what Jo and the publisher were having. There were many times where it was just… I can’t believe that this is happening (laughs)…
KM: One of the other, I suppose, challenges, was your decision to write the screenplay with a timeline that jumps around… I love it because it sort of injects new life into the material, and presents varied ways to look at it – to look at these lives. At what point did you decide to write it that way?
GG: The timeline – I was always sure that was the way to do it. This is very boring answer but… it’s two things. I think for one, I wanted to take the text of the book… as sacrosanct, and I wanted to use as many lines verbatim as possible, but direct actors to say them with alacrity … but I always wanted to take the fact that it had been adapted so many times to be part of what I was doing. That… the text of Little Women, the book…there’s the urtext of every time it’s been adapted…and it’s this kind of collective memory of what it is. And it was…this ability to play off of it, so that I could both deliver on the pleasures of Little Women and then subvert it. And so, starting when they’re adults – it allowed me to see what I think of what we all think of when we think of Little Women – which is primarily the childhood part of it, the girlhood part of it – as something that’s already gone, so it allowed it to have that ache that I was talking about at the beginning. It allowed it to have that distance of authorship which I was interested in. And then, the boring part of the answer is, I don’t know, when I sit down to write, I think I write a lot, I overwrite, I write in circles, and I collect all this material, but then at some point, there is a moment when, “OK. I’m in a movie theater. What do I want to see first?” And I just knew, I want to see her with the publisher and I was like, “Alright. That’s the first scene.” And then I go, “What’s next?” (laughs) I mean, it’s so boring to say that out loud….
KM: It’s not boring!
GG: But … the lights are down, it’s another Little Women, what are we going to look at? Let’s immediately change it. Let’s immediately do something where people go, “Wait. Where are we?” But I love that sensation in a movie theater. I love that sensation in a movie theater where it takes you a second to orient yourself, or I love the sensation in a movie theater where you’ve cut between two things and you realize something has changed. You’re kind of talking to the audience and saying, “Keep up. We’re moving forward. Keep up.” And I like that… I mean, my argument too was that viewers are so sophisticated now. I mean – just look at television – viewers are really really good at following complicated plots, no problem… When I was doing first cuts and working on it…I did show it to a lot of men who had no fucking idea who any of these people were, they were like, “I don’t know what this is, who any of these characters are. I vaguely know this as a thing.” But that was really useful for me, because it allowed me to see it more with a clean slate…
KM: What were some of the influences in the movie beyond Alcott – cinema, literature, art – that informed or inspired you and this movie, or that you had cast or crew look at or study… I know that’s probably a large answer but…
GG: Yeah… I looked at a lot of paintings because for me, the photography of the 19th century is really interesting but a lot of it is formal portraiture, with a couple of notable exceptions, both of whom, interestingly, are women, which wasn’t intentional, but that just happened to be who it was. Julia Margaret Cameron, the British photographer around 1861-75 who took these extraordinary portraits of women. These girls – they would wear their hair down and they’re kind of hippy… they’re wearing flower crowns and these flowy dresses, they’re not wearing corsets. They look like girls you could know. Like you would see in Silverlake or something… And they were like from nine years old to twenty-five. They were just incredible photographs. And then there was this other woman named Lady Hawarden – she would have people kind of dress up more in it [looking] like they were coming from the Elizabethan theater, but she was using light too, she would use light and shadow, and stage things in more complex ways. And I think it’s interesting, just as a side note, that these two women were using photography as an artistic medium before men were really using it as an artistic medium. Men were using it more as a scientific medium or… Record what it was. But these two women were using it as what are the possibilities of it as an art form. And I think it’s interesting that thing of maybe women more likely to explore … an art form before it’s an art form, in a way, (laughs) because maybe men aren’t looking there, because no one has claimed this as art yet… I was looking at a lot of Winslow Homer paintings which are so fabulous. And I was re-creating a lot of objects from Winslow Homer paintings like hats and coats. He was painting around the area of Massachusetts where they were at the exact same time. And there’s this great painting of these girls on the beach in Massachusetts which I stole from. And then the landscape paintings of Thomas Cole… which, in the 1840s, were a big deal. And then I was looking at, sort of, later things… Seurat, Renoir, Manet and Cézanne were starting to paint and so I was looking at that for Amy’s stuff… But then, in terms of cutting style, I was looking at all the Truffaut movies. Two English Girls, which is a period piece but doesn’t feel like it. Obviously, Jules and Jim, which is also a period piece but doesn’t feel like that – I think that some of that is because of that kind of swiftness of the [film’s] cutting – where you don’t feel like it’s heavy, or you don’t feel like everything lands, you feel like everything is cut on an intake of breath. I looked at the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro in Reds a lot. That also is a period piece that doesn’t feel like a period piece. I was looking at a lot of things for that… Oh, also, obviously, Two English Girls is where I got the talking-to-camera from, because, yes, why not? The heightened-ness in the colors and the kind of musical theater quality of it, that’s Minnelli… It’s Meet Me in St. Louis and Gigi. The opening scene with Laurie [played in the movie by Chalamet] and Amy on the Paris promenade – that’s just lifted straight out of the opening of Gigi. If you go and watch the opening of Gigi…
KM: I can see it… the carriages…
GG: The carriages, yes, and also in Gigi there’s … little tables and chairs just set up along the promenade. Anyway, I loved that and I loved the colors. My DP and I looked at… The Dead…
KM: The John Huston…
GG: The John Huston, yeah. It’s great because obviously it’s “The Dead,” it’s gone, even though in the context it’s all there. The idea is it’s already gone – that they’re writing about something that’s already gone – which was what we were interested in. And also, the camera movement is great in The Dead. They do a lot of things that don’t feel self-conscious. Things like, they’ll pan down to a shoe and then pan back up but it feels natural, it doesn’t feel like that heavy hand of a DP… Those are a few things I was looking at. It was a kind of way of how do we keep it a little lighter and irreverent, so it doesn’t feel all nailed to the floor.
KM: You’ve talked about the fluidity of Jo and Laurie – which you can see in the book – and watching your movie I felt it with them…
GG: Yes, it’s in the book. Laurie is a boy with a girl’s name, Jo is a girl with a boy’s name. And then… it’s almost as if they exist with each other in a moment before they’ve decided on their gender roles in the context of their society. And I always saw the scene where Jo rejects Laurie as tragic, not because Laurie wants to marry Jo and Jo doesn’t, but because it’s Laurie deciding to leave childhood and she doesn’t want to… And there’s this all over the book: Jo’s always saying, “I wish I was a boy, I wish I was a boy…” which, there are a lot of ways to read that. I will say, that is a totally reasonable thing to want given the options for women. That’s just like, why wouldn’t you? There is no upside to being a girl – there really isn’t – all the good stuff is what the boys get. So, the pain of leaving childhood for Jo is the pain of knowing your options are limited …
KM: And Amy talks about marriage to Laurie, something like, it’s not an issue for you but it is for me… it’s realistic, because there are so few options…
GG: Yeah. One of the things that I really loved about Florence when we were working on that speech and that moment was that she and I came to this idea that I didn’t want her to be angry when she said it. Florence has this quality of just explaining the world, and it’s not out of anger… she just has to figure out how to get along in it. And, to me, it made it more heartbreaking that she wasn’t angry. It allowed it to be… the factualness of what she was saying [that] made it all the more heartbreaking… this kind of thing that’s so obvious to her that is completely invisible to Laurie, and she has to lay it out to him because why would he see that? He doesn’t know that.
KM: All of the characters in the book and your movie kind of inform Alcott and I hope more people want to know more about Alcott after seeing the movie …
GG: Me too…
KM: Because, again, when you do start reading about her – she is so interesting for so many reasons. For instance, the connections with Henry David Thoreau and with Ralph Waldo Emerson…
GG: Yes, her education was so tied to the Transcendentalists. Thoreau was giving her [Louisa] and her sisters nature walks and he was teaching them botany. And then Emerson was [saying] “Read Shakespeare, read this read that,” and that is completely fascinating. And, then, the position of the Alcott’s in that world was one of need of charity because they had a lot less money than everyone else. And that she [Alcott], through her industry, saved her family. It’s… another reason why I thought, oh there is so much money all over this book. This is so much about money… One of my favorite things that I read about her, and I gave a lot of lines Saoirse has from Louisa, but when Friedrich tells her he doesn’t like her work, she says, “I can’t afford to starve on praise,” which is what she [Alcott] said after Henry James panned one of her novels in The Atlantic. Her retort was, “I can’t afford to starve on praise…” which is a pretty great retort. And also, I mean, I love Henry James, he is one of the great writers, but he also didn’t have the same considerations she had. She outsold him by a factor of like, 100 to 1, and was a huge commercial success but she needed to be. He was a very fancy wealthy person from Boston – he didn’t need to sell fiction to save his family, she did. And when I think about who she was around, what her limitations were, but what she was standing shoulder to shoulder with, she’s really something.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
