Interview (Written): Greta Gerwig

An in-depth conversation with the writer-director of the movie Little Women.

Greta Gerwig’s screenwriting credits include Frances Ha, Mistress America, and Lady Bird which she directed. She is back as a writer-director with a remake of the Louisa May Alcott book Little Women.

IMDb plot summary: Four sisters come of age in America in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Here is an excerpt from an excellent in-depth Film Comment interview with the magazine’s assistant editor Devika Girish.

How did this movie come about?

I knew that there was a desire with Amy Pascal and Sony because it’s been 25 years [since the 1994 version], and a lot of young women don’t know what this book is. This was before I directed Lady Bird, but I had written the script for it, and I heard from my agent that people were meeting about Little Women. And I said, oh you have to get me a meeting. I have to write and direct that film. And he said, no studio is going to hire you to direct a film when you haven’t directed a film. And I was like “That’s semantics! I’m on my way!” So I went in and I had this very clear idea. To me, it was so clear that the book was about women, art, and money. The emotional core about sisterhood and family was true, but there was this other very nuts-and-bolts side of it, which was equally emotional. The first line of the book is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents. It’s so dreadful being poor. It’s not fair that some girls have lots of pretty things and other girls have none at all.” And I was like, “This book’s about money.” And Louisa’s life, as it turns out, as I did my research, was also about that. A lot of the lines I give Louisa — or Jo/Louisa — are from [Alcott’s] letters, from her diaries, from her writing. When Jo says in the film, “I can’t afford to starve on praise,” that’s from her. She was making economic decisions constantly.

The unromanticness of her writing, the mercenary way in which she approached it as a job, feels so romantic today. She sold her stories to make a living.

Yeah, like, what sells? And Little Women did sell out in its first printing in two weeks, and she did keep the copyright because she knew to, and she also got 6.6 percent of the profits, because her publisher didn’t think that people would buy it. I also thought each of the girls’ pursuits aren’t “adorable” — they’re big and serious. All the chapters of Amy in Europe realizing she’s not a great artist, they’re amazing. As I dove in, I realized that the moment when May, who’s the Alcott sister Amy is based on, was in Europe, was exactly when we saw the very beginnings of modernism in art. Cézanne is painting, Manet is painting, and to go to Rome and see the Old Masters and think, no, I’m not going be that, and then to go to Paris and see people who are starting to use paint as the subject itself, and realize you’re not doing that either… that’s a crisis of faith, if that’s what you thought you were meant to do.

So I had all these ideas. And the thing that I read that articulates that idea — “women, art, and money” — the best is Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. Which everyone remembers as [high-pitched voice] “To write you need a room of one’s own.” You think of a garret and a little cozy fire and you’re wrapped in your shawl and you’re alone and you’re writing. But what she actually says is you need a room of one’s own and money. Because she was asked to speak on why there are no great women writers, and she said the question isn’t why are there no great women writers, the question is: why have women always been poor? Because women have always been poor, not for 200 years merely, but since the beginning of time. And she said, “Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom, and intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry.” How could you possibly? If you don’t have money, you can’t write poetry.

I felt like that idea is being expressed both through Louisa May Alcott and through Jo, and I wanted to make a movie about that. And the other thing, when I started writing, I started looking at the two parts of the book as two separate books. The girlhood part, the first half, was Christmas to Christmas, 1861 to 1862 — that was the first publishing. And then the second book, Alcott joked, should’ve been called The Wedding Marches, because she had to marry them all. Suddenly there were all these things I felt were mirrored in each other, the biggest one being Beth and her illness. To me it’s the fairy tale versus what life is. In the first book, she gets sick, then she gets better, and in the second book, she gets sick and then she dies. And it was that doubling that made me think, well, what if I could layer these two things on top of each other, because in my experience of a lot of fiction about women, there’s this sense that all the adventures happen when you’re a girl or a teenager, and as soon as you become an adult, it’s all over, and it’s not that interesting. And I cannot have that be the story we’re telling young women. I felt like I wanted to give the March women back what they had as girls. That felt to me like part of the task of this film, because I can’t tell you how many women are like, “I only read the first part.” If the thing we’re telling girls is that once you become an adult, it’s all over, that’s not good enough, because then there’s nothing left to desire, there’s nothing to look towards. If there’s no bravery and ambition and scope once you’re an adult, if it all existed as a girl and then you put away your childish things, it just feels not right. So I wanted to ground it in adulthood.

Reading the interview, Gerwig’s passion for the story is palpable. The first time she encountered the book was when her mother read it to her when Gerwig was a child. In her early teens, she read and re-read it many times. She had to do this movie because in part she wanted to bring her contemporary sensibilities to it. Witness this comment she made about the movie’s ending:

I just knew I could not do the ending just as the book [did] — especially because Louisa didn’t really want to end it that way, and she really did think Jo’s true fate should’ve been as “a literary spinster with books for children.” And so I thought, I can’t in good faith do this ending, number one because it’s not in me, number two because she didn’t like it, and if we can’t give her an ending she would like, 150 years later, then what have we done? We’ve made no progress.

I often wince when I read about someone doing another remake, but reading this interview and watching the trailer below, I’m excited to see what Gerwig and her cast have done with the underlying material.

Movie Website

For the rest of the Film Comment interview, go here.

For 100s more interviews with screenwriters and filmmakers, go here.