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Saoirse Ronan as Jo March

“After the whole madness of the Academy Awards was over, I went away to the woods for a couple of weeks and just sat with everything and tried to puzzle it out,” [Greta Gerwig] says. And then it came: Jo’s seminal speech to Marmee (Laura Dern) in the attic after she has turned down Laurie’s marriage proposal (Timothée Chalamet) and sent him away.

“Women have minds and souls as well as just hearts, and they’ve got ambition and talent as well as just beauty. And I’m sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it! But – I’m so lonely!”

“I pulled that (from the book) and then I just wrote, ‘I’m so lonely’ at the end. I heard exactly how Saoirse [Ronan] says it in the movie in my head and I started weeping.” Gerwig says. Months later, without prompting, that’s exactly as Ronan performed it.

"That’s something that everyone goes through when they come out of childhood.” Ronan says. “Where they’re like, all of the plans I thought I could make and all the decisions I thought I could make about which way my life was going to go and who was going to be in it – I have no control over that at all. And there’s a real weight to that, you know?”

To properly tell the story of the March sisters, Gerwig felt it was crucial to immerse herself in Alcott’s world by filming in Massachusetts.

“To shoot in Concord, in Massachusetts, in this area, in this environment, was really essential in how I wanted to build this movie,” Gerwig told the Boston Globe during a press day at Orchard House. “It’s significant. The place matters as much as anything. The same way it was meaningful to shoot ‘Dunkirk’ at Dunkirk, it was meaningful to shoot this movie here.”

You know, I just feel like women, they have minds and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it. But I’m… I’m so lonely.

This is Meg, Amy, Beth, and Jo. 

In the film, [Florence] Pugh’s adult Amy outlines this philosophy in a monologue that illustrates her maturity. “I’m just a woman,” she tells Laurie (played by Timothée Chalamet, another Lady Bird alum) while both are in Europe.

[Greta] Gerwig didn’t have the speech in her script initially. [Meryl] Streep convinced her to include it, pointing out to the writer-director that she had to make clear to the audience why there’s so much pressure on Amy to marry, and to marry well. Amy is the one tasked with keeping the March family afloat, given Meg’s marriage to a poor teacher, Jo’s refusal to be engaged to Laurie—a man she considers more of a brother than a lover—and Beth’s illness.

Amy is the sister with the greatest understanding of how her femininity could work for her. “There’s something about Amy,” Gerwig said. “Jo can’t put her ego aside long enough to get what she needs to get, but Amy can. It’s just, I loved that [Europe] section of the book … I wanted that feeling in it, of Amy’s utter practicality when it comes to how to get ahead.”

[九月六号]