David Remnick: I've rarely if ever seen as much hype and buzz about a film as we're seeing for Barbie, Greta Gerwig original story based on the Mattel Doll, but maybe the hype is justified. Gerwig's, two previous films, as a writer, director were really terrific. There was Ladybird about a high school senior in California and Little Women, there adaptation of the classic. Both of those films like Barbie are concerned with how to live in the world as a woman, I talked with Gerwig back in 2019.

It's got to take a certain amount of, I don't know, nerve or something to take on a book that's so beloved, that's been adapted before for film, I don't know a number of times-

Greta Gerwig: Seven.

David Remnick: -and make it your own. Tell me how all this started and what the thinking is going into it?

Greta Gerwig: Well, this book was my book, it was the one that I loved and lived through and I couldn't really distinguish between what the March sisters went through and what I went through, it all melded into one thing. Jo March was my favorite character.

David Remnick: You were in a theatrical production?

Greta Gerwig: Yes, I was.

David Remnick: How old were you?

Greta Gerwig: I think I was 10 or 11. I was in a community theater production, a children's production and I played Jo.

David Remnick: This is in Sacramento?

Greta Gerwig: Yes. I remember I was wearing my hair-- Jo had this line, Meg says, "You're almost a young lady now you'll turn up your hair soon." and Jo says, "If turning up my hair makes me a woman, then I'm going to wear it and two tails until I'm 20." I remember thinking "I'm not saying this right but this is all I have." I think in some ways, maybe you become a director because you in some way know your own limited capacity as an actor so you get to vicariously live through other people.

David Remnick: Why did Jo March mean so much to you? Because of what she stood for in feminist terms or creative terms or independence terms?

Greta Gerwig: Well, what's wonderful about really when you're a child is you have no sense of what you should or shouldn't like, and you have no sense of something being politically activated or not. You just like what you like. I loved Jo because she was competitive, because she was angry, because she wanted to be a writer, because she was ambitious, and I felt like I was all of those things.

David Remnick: For those who haven't read Little Women in a little while, tell us about the four March sisters. You have Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. What did they represent to you when you read the book and how are they different in the film?

Greta Gerwig: Sure. Well, what I will say about reading the book and my history with the book is that this rereading love of it lasted until 14 or 15, and then I didn't read the book again until I was 30. When I read it at 30, I couldn't believe it. I felt like I'd never read it before. I felt like I couldn't believe how modern it was, how strange it was, how spiky it was, that I allowed it to become this snow globe of sweetness. It was nothing like that, it was much more complicated.

David Remnick: What was spiky, for example about it?

Greta Gerwig: So many lines that I put in the movie, like Marmee saying, "I'm angry almost every single day of my life." I didn't remember Marmee saying she was angry almost every single day of her life. Of course, she was. She was a woman in the 19th century, why wouldn't she be pissed off, but that wasn't how I had internalized what she'd said or Amy saying about her art, "I want to be great or nothing." That's a very ambitious thing to say, or her saying, "The world is hard on ambitious girls," which I thought the world is still hard on ambitious girls. There were just so many lines that I couldn't believe how much they jumped out at me. I had this thought when I was rereading it like, "Oh, I would love to make a film out of this." At that point I hadn't made Ladybird, I had not solo directed so it was a thought that didn't really have anywhere to go.

Then in any case, I heard that Amy Pascal and Sony and Denise Di Novi and Robin Swicord were interested in making Little Women and I begged to get in that room and I explained to them, "I want to write it and I want to direct it and here's what I'm going to do."

David Remnick: What was the reaction? Did you get a good reaction right off the--

Greta Gerwig: I think they were like, "Who are you? Do you act or what's--" I was like, "No, yes, but I'm on my way to directing. Just hang on." To my great delight, they did actually hire me to write it. That was in 2015, I started writing it.

David Remnick: When you're in this meeting with Sony executives and potential producers, and you say, "I want to do Little Women," and once they got over the shock and informed you that it had been done a number of times before, what's the thinking process to take a book of the 19th century and make it your own, make it a personal vision? Is there a model for that in adaptation?

Greta Gerwig: Oh, is there a model? Oh, goodness, if there was, I don't think I followed it. I was aided in that I had this, whatever-- I had a vision for it, I had a vision of how it should look, how it should feel, how it should sound, the restructuring of time. To go back to your question about these girls, Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy are very distinct from each other, but also, I wanted to take-- first of all, I wanted to take each of their artistic ambitions quite seriously. For example, with Beth, I didn't want her to be some girl who only plays hymns in a corner. I wanted her to be playing Bach and I wanted her to be playing Schumann. With Jo, of course, in my film might collapse the space between Louisa May Alcott and Jo March, but she's selling scandal stories.

She's selling stories that are low morals and pulpy plots, but she's making a living doing it. Amy's utter ambition with art to be this great artist and I was thinking about what would it be to be a 23, 24-year-old woman who goes to Europe in 1868 to study the old masters, which she does in Rome, and then she gets to Paris, and what's happening, impressionism. You would think to yourself, "Oh no, oh no, I've missed it." I just thought that's so fascinating. Then one interesting thing to me is the character of Amy, who's played by Florence Pugh is a character that I think for all of time, people have not enjoyed, because she burns her sister's book and she, spoiler alert, I don't know, I figured most people probably know the story,, marries Theodore Lawrence, who's the next door neighbor, who readers had wanted Jo March to marry.

Anyways, she's always gotten a lot of hate and what's interesting is I've talked to a lot of people who say, "Oh, my God, in this adaptation, Florence is so wonderful and you really are understanding. You're on her side." Also, almost everything that Amy does is from the book so it's all there. I think it might represent some cultural shift that now this character that says what she wants and goes for what she wants is not something we hate any longer.

David Remnick: In fact, Florence Pugh, who has one of the great voices in the history of cinema, playing Amy--

Greta Gerwig: The best and also laughs. She's got a great laugh. It's a deep weird low laugh. She's like Lauren Bacall, but cuter.

David Remnick: She's got the great BaVora speech, particularly on marriage.

Amy: I have always known I would marry rich, why should I be ashamed of that?

Laurie: It's nothing to be ashamed of. As long as you love him.

Amy: Well, I believe we have some power over who we love. It isn't something that just happens to a person.

Laurie: I think the poets might disagree.

Amy: Well, I'm not a poet. I'm just a woman, and as a woman, there's no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. If I had my own money, which I don't, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married, and if we had children, they would be his not mine. They would be his property so don't sit there and tell me that marriage isn't an economic proposition because it is. May not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

David Remnick: Who wrote that?

Greta Gerwig: That speech is not in the book. That speech came out of an early lunch I had with Meryl Streep, who is-

David Remnick: Also in the film.

Greta Gerwig: -the best of everything and also in the film and genuinely one of the smartest people I've ever met. She said to me, among many things she said to me, she said, "One of the things you have to make the audience understand is it's not just that women couldn't vote because they couldn't, it's not just that they couldn't own property, they couldn't, it's that if they wanted to leave a marriage, they would leave with nothing. They wouldn't even get to leave with their children. That decision is the decision. There is no bigger decision than that because that's your whole life." Essentially, wholesale took that and gave it to Florence. Another thing about that speech is I gave that speech to Florence on the day we were shooting.

I had heard a draft of the script that had that in it. This is technical stuff about filmmaking. As you're leading up to shooting, you're always trying to cut page count because you never have enough time and you never have enough money. I tend to write very long scripts that I know as a director will be said very quickly. There's a rule of thumb.

David Remnick: One page per minute, right?

Greta Gerwig: Per minute. That's not true of me.

David Remnick: You're zipping through faster.

Greta Gerwig: Much faster.

David Remnick: That's what you tell the money people anyway.

Greta Gerwig: Oh, I tell everyone that. I was trying to be a good student and cut my pages. What I ended up doing is I ended up feeding the actors all these pages either the night before or on the day, because then it was too late for anyone to do anything about it because by the time it's in the dailies, what are you going to do? Tell me I can't have the lines? They're already in there. I had given this speech to Florence the day we were shooting. There's so many things that I said with utter confidence, which I had no idea, but I remember saying while arguing for this to be in the movie, I said, "This will be the clip people play," [chuckles] and they said--

David Remnick: Because it's straight.

Greta Gerwig: She does it amazing. Also, she's not angry as a character. She's just explaining the world, which I think is compelling because that sort of explaining the world is almost more heartbreaking than saying all the ways you want to change it. Just saying, "Here's how I've got to get along." She does it fabulously. In any case, it's from Meryl Streep that I stole and then gave to Florence the day of because I knew I wanted to sneak it in, but I remember I was like, "Mark my words, this will be the moment."

David Remnick: I want to know all about that lunch. What else did Meryl Streep tell you? She seemed to be always--

Greta Gerwig: Oh, she said it. She said so many things. I feel like I quote her all the time. For her, she said it was one of the precious few books that girls had of girlhood and of sisterhood and of growing up in that way. She said that women have all kinds of practice imagining themselves as men and men have very little practice imagining themselves as women, which is just such an obvious thing to say, but it's completely correct.

David Remnick: I want to ask you about the activity of directing you. I first became aware of you when you were in movies that were known as Mumblecore films, this is quite a while ago, and then as an actor or writer. Being a director seems like you got to be a bit of a Napoleon. I once watched Lena Dunham come do a short film for The New Yorker. It was just a thing that went for three minutes. She was very young at the time. She's very young now. It was amazing. I was watching her not boss around, but direct set people and actors and this one and that one, electricians, and they were all doing exactly what she said. There were about 40 people there. She had command of the room. It was really interesting to watch. How do you learn how to do that when your activity before was being directed or being alone in a room with a blinking screen?

Greta Gerwig: [laugh] To be honest, I think that's who I always have been. I think I--

David Remnick: Even more than a writer or an actor.

Greta Gerwig: Yes. Well, writing was always a way to get to that moment for me. Maybe this is too much just personal information, but I think up until I was around 13 I'd say, I was the bossiest control freak you'd ever met. I remember my dad had a business trip in New York, and we went and I remember we saw Starlight Express which I just loved.

David Remnick: This is the roller skating thing on Broadway.

Greta Gerwig: Yes. It's Andrew Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express. It's about trains and it's on roller skates, and I can still recite every single word. I remember I came back to my kindergarten and I told everyone that I would be putting on a production of Starlight Express, and everyone better start working on their roller skating, which I did stuff like that up until I was assigned to do a group project, and I completely took it over in seventh grade. I was explaining how everyone was going to do everything. I remember some kid made fun of me and said that I was annoying. I then was considered a bossy, unappealing girl.

David Remnick: You tamped it down?

Greta Gerwig: I tamped it down. I deliberately tamped it down, but it didn't go away. It just went underground. I think in high school and college it simmered and then it started really coming out again. I think it's the person who I tried to crush.

David Remnick: How did you give yourself permission to let this thing resurface and set yourself free?

Greta Gerwig: Because I wanted to do it so badly. Just it was a desire that was bigger than my person. I think actually this is a strange but true thing that happened to me. I met Sally Potter, the director. I asked her about writing, and I said, "What's your process? How do you write?" I cornered her and I was asking her questions. Then she grabbed me by the hand and said, "Why don't you ask me what you really want to ask me about?" I was like, "Oh my God, what do I really want to ask you about?" She said, "You really want to ask me about directing?" I said, "How do you know that?" She said, "It's written all over you. That's what you want to ask me about." I did ask her about it. Four years after that, she came up to me at an event in London for Lady Bird, and she said, "You did it."

I was like, "Oh my God, you're a mystic and I love you." There were a number of things. There was also-- I was given a pair of shoes by not one, but two women directors. Rebecca Miller and Miranda July both gave me shoes.

David Remnick: That never happens to me.

Greta Gerwig: No. I know. Nor me. I was like, "I mean if you were going to send a sign, this is really on the nose." There were lots of things like that. I think they happened, and also, I was looking for them.

David Remnick: Nora Ephron, who was a friend, used to say that if I have to sit on one more panel-

Greta Gerwig: [Laugh] I know.

David Remnick: -about women in directing, I'm going to shoot myself or someone else.

Greta Gerwig: When she passed, they printed that in The New York Times, that she said she had that list, things I'll miss, things I won't miss, and under things I won't miss women in film panels was one of them. I think this awareness of the lack of women writer and directors in film has begun to be addressed. I think the Annenberg study just came out again, and actually, this year is going to be the first year there's real progress made in the number of films written and directed by women, I think in the top 100 grocers. It's difficult because all you really want is that you're thought of as just a filmmaker. To get to that point, we need it to be much closer to 50/50.

David Remnick: I want to ask you about your own future. In other words, Is there an aesthetic that you think, "I want to really pursue these themes, this aesthetic, and chase it up a tree for quite a while,"? Is there any sense of coherence in that?

Greta Gerwig: I will say what I am deliberate about and what I do care very much about is I would like to make a lot of films as a writer and director because there are films I'll be able to make on film 12 that I would not be able to make on film Two.

David Remnick: In terms of budget or you're just not ready for it?

Greta Gerwig: In terms of budget, but in terms of your development as an artist. I think I've always been interested in long careers of directors because making Fanny and Alexander is not a thing he would've done on his second film.

David Remnick: In Bergman's film?

Greta Gerwig: Right. There's a lot of people that I look at their career and of course, I'll actually go and I'll say, "Wait, what was their first film? Oh, and they made that second." Then "Oh my God, and then seven later they did this one." Again, I go to the ones who've made a lot of films for a long time because it's their way of moving through life and moving through the world.

[music]

David Remnick: I spoke with Greta Gerwig in 2019. In case you haven't noticed, Barbie is now out in theaters.

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[00:20:58] [END OF AUDIO]

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