LITTLE WOMEN AUTHOR MOVIE
“But unfortunately, knowing what I know - I worked with a director on a movie who was told to ‘please not nurse’ because the crew would consider it a sign of weakness. “It’s wild and beautiful, and I’d love to say, ‘Wouldn’t it have been glorious to know?’ - frankly, just so we could have been part of that ride with her,” said Laura Dern, who plays March family matriarch Marmee in the film. But she kept the news to herself throughout filming, hiding her growing stomach underneath bulky layers in the winter chill.
LITTLE WOMEN AUTHOR PROFESSIONAL
Unlike Alcott, whose financial obligations dictated her choices, the filmmaker was enjoying personal and professional highs simultaneously. Just as Gerwig was beginning production last year on “Little Women” - the first studio film she’d ever directed - she found out she was pregnant. I mean, now I sound like Jo: My friends got married, so I had to figure something out.” And there are treasures to be had, but only if you are willing to accept reality.
But there’s a part of me that still connects to how much I wish we could all just stay living together - us as a little tribe. “There was this sense of wanting to freeze the moment and not let it get beyond that,” she said, walking back to a car waiting for her outside the park. She also met her version of the Alcott sisters - five women she still considers her best friends - and became so attached to the idea of a female utopia that she found it difficult to accept them growing up before she was ready to. “It wasn’t really about a wedding.”)Īt Barnard College, she finally started to learn about and admire important female creators. (“It was really a musical theater number, is what I wanted,” she said, laughing. She wasn’t concerned about getting married, though as a teenager she did conjure up a fantasy of her dream wedding, which involved her surrounded by a tap-dancing chorus of 100 men in tuxedos and top hats.
In high school, she often found herself wishing she was a boy because the writers she idolized - primarily Tom Stoppard - were men. She began writing the famous novel when she was 35 - the same age Gerwig was when she directed “Little Women” - and proudly remained without a husband or children until her death two decades later.įor most of her life, Gerwig felt a real connection to this ethos. In her own life, however, the author remained a self-proclaimed spinster. At the urging of her publisher, who felt no 19th century woman would sympathize with a purposefully unmarried woman, Alcott gave Jo a husband at the end of “Little Women” - not Laurie, but a quirky German professor. It is Gerwig’s take on “Little Women,” though, that elucidates the connection between Jo and Alcott. And, perhaps most memorably, she turns down the proposal of the handsome, wealthy and charming Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) because she wants to stay true to her heart. She frequently laments that she is not a boy. She is unconcerned with vanity and spends late nights toiling away on a novel in the attic.
She prizes her family above all else, cutting off her long hair - her “one beauty,” Alcott writes - and selling it to help her father recover from an illness. Jo, played in Gerwig’s adaptation by Saoirse Ronan, is the girl in “Little Women” whom most young readers aspire to be even if they do not wholly understand why. “Walking the paths that they might have walked, or the ground they might have sat on - it gave me some sense of permission to dramatize it because I’m making it real again, hopefully.” “This bridge, even, had such proximity to where Louisa lived, and it’s where Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfather watched the war start,” Gerwig said. As a child of Sacramento, where the temperature virtually never dropped below 40 degrees, she’d romanticized the frostbitten storybook lands inhabited by her literary heroines, Jo March and Anne of Green Gables. When Gerwig decided she wanted to make her own version of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” - out Christmas Day - the first thing she did was come here, to New England. Her fiance, the director Noah Baumbach, was in Europe, promoting his own new movie, “ Marriage Story.” For this moment, she was alone with nature, with the spirits of the writers and thinkers who made this sacred ground. Nearby, her infant son, Harold, had been fed and was napping under the watchful eye of a caretaker. “It looks like a winter wonderland,” Gerwig said, her breath forming a cloud.
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