try not to suck

“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?”

Aaliyah on the set of Lil Kim’s video “Crush On You” (1997)