Booksmart

The Lady Bird team reunite to create another relevant, fresh study of young womanhood – but this time with petticoats. Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan talk the modernity of Little Women, chasing down Florence Pugh and sockskating with Timothée Chalamet. If you’re sitting comfortably, let us begin…

- Jane Crowther

Jo was my North Star,” Greta Gerwig tells Total Film in her idiosyncratic breathless, sing-song cadence that makes everything sound giddily exciting when we catch up with her for a brisk October walk through New York. “I think it’s almost indistinguishable for me – wanting to be a writer and a creator, and my love for Jo. I don’t know what came first.” She’s rhapsodizing about Jo March, the gusty, uncompromising, direct and honest tomboy in Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel following four Victorian-era sisters through adolescence to adulthood via joy, heartbreak, death, and singed skirts.

Jo – with her lust for the arts, clear-eyed sense of self and ear for language – is a character who could be Gerwig after last year’s triumphant directorial debut with Lady Bird, which took her all the way to the Academy Awards. And it’s especially true of the way Gerwig went after Little Women, demanding a meeting with producer Amy Pascal in 2016, sure she was the person to interpret a new, pertinent version despite having never directed before. “I went in, and I said, ‘This movie is about art and women and money, and it’s about the impossibility of all three. It’s about: how do you become an adult, and keep the part of you that was a brave girl alive?’” she shouts over traffic. “I said I should [direct]. And in [any] case, I was able to write the script. So I wrote the script. And then I went away, and I directed Lady Bird. By the time I was done with that, they said, ‘We’re interested in making this movie, and you can direct it...’ The day after the Oscars, I went to a cabin in the woods with all my research and I spent two weeks there alone, trying to figure out if I was true and worthy of this task.”