↑ From top Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet as Jo and Laurie; the March
sisters: Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Ronan, and Eliza Scanlen
G
GRETA GERWIG DOESNÕT REMEMBER A TIME
before she knew Jo March. “[Little Women] was
very much part of who I always was,” the writer-
director, 36, says. “It was something my mother
read to me when I was growing up. It’s been with
me for a very long time.”
She joined Sony Pictures’ new Little Women
adaptation when she was hired to write the script
in 2016. Once Lady Bird bowed the next year, she
emerged as a candidate to direct the film. “Greta
had a very specific, energized, kind of punk-rock,
Shakespearean take on this story,” Pascal says.
“She came in and had a meeting with all of us and
said, ‘I know this has been done before, but
nobody can do it but me.’ ” She got the gig.
In her approach, Gerwig drew on her lifelong
relationship with Little Women; beyond child-
hood, she discovered new, complex layers to the
novel, and in turn to Alcott’s legacy. “As a girl, my
heroine was Jo March, and as a grown lady, my
heroine is Louisa May Alcott,” she says. It’s per-
haps why Gerwig ’s Little Women feels like the
most adult—and modern—version of the story
that’s reached the screen to date. The movie
begins with the March sisters in adulthood—
typically where the narrative’s second half
begins—and unfolds like a memory play, shifting
back and forth between that present-day frame
and extended flashbacks to the childhood scenes
etched in the American literary canon.
In that, Gerwig finds fascinating, fresh areas of
exploration regarding women’s lives: the choices
society forces them to make, the beauty and
struggles of artistic pursuit, the consequences of
rebellion. Jo’s journey as a writer anchors Ger-
wig ’s direction; tempestuous Amy (Florence
Pugh, see sidebar) gets more of a spotlight as she
matures as a painter (and Laurie’s eventual wife);
and Meg is realized with newfound nuance: “We
felt it was important to show Meg juggling all her
roles—a mother, a wife, a sister—whilst also
celebrating her dreams, despite them being dif-
ferent to those of her sisters,” says Watson. But
Gerwig doesn’t see herself as reinventing the
wheel. “A lot of the lines in the film are taken
[read] the book out loud,” says Dern.
Gerwig expected the script’s words
to be memorized precisely. “I knew
I wanted them to get this cadence
that felt sparkly and slightly irrever-
ent,” she says. “I wanted to make
them move at the speed of light.”
She poured the same love into
iconic scenes, like Jo and Laurie’s
ebullient dance that follows their
first meeting. Here it goes on lon-
ger—and more vibrantly—than in
any previous iteration. (Ronan says
they filmed it at 3 a.m., to boot, add-
ing, “We must have done it, like, 30
times.”) Then there’s the devastating
moment when Laurie asks Jo to
marry him and she rejects his pro-
posal. Gerwig tasked the two actors
to unleash here. “Emotions just bub-
bled over,” Ronan says. “[Greta] just
let us go with it, wherever it went,
from take to take. What I loved about
that scene is that every take would
be different emotionally. It didn’t
have the same trajectory.
“The two of us, it’s a relationship
I have with no other director,”
Ronan continues. “She makes me
feel like I can try anything.”
right from the book,” she explains.
“When Amy says, ‘I want to be great
or nothing ’—she says that in the
book! I don’t think we remember
that, but she does say it.” Gerwig
also loves one line spoken by the
sisters’ mother, Marmee (Laura
Dern), also revived in this version:
“I’m angry almost every single day.”
Gerwig compiled a “bible” filled
with cultural references: to Whis-
tler tableaux of family life, to David
Bowie–Jean Seberg hairdos that
inspire the look of Jo’s mid-film cut,
to Alcott family letters. “I wanted it
to be footnote-able,” Gerwig says.
“I wanted to point to it and say, ‘This
is where this is from.’ ” She consid-
ers Alcott’s text sacred: “I wanted to
treat the text as something that
could be made fresh by great acting.”
Beyond those charged but less
quoted Little Women lines are its
famous ones—throw-pillow staples
like Jo’s “Christmas won’t be Christ-
mas without any presents,” that no
adaptation is complete without. The
actors rehearsed these “almost like
a song,” pushing to move through
them with a rapid musicality. “We
EW ● COM NOVEMBER 2019 33
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