'Little Women': How Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan updated the beloved tale

LOS ANGELES – The most wrenching line of “Little Women” was born in a quiet cabin in the woods.

It was just after Greta Gerwig's critically adored film “Lady Bird” competed in the 2018 Oscar race. "Lady Bird" star Saoirse Ronan, 25, got wind that Gerwig’s next project would likely be “Little Women” (in theaters Christmas Day) and made her impassioned pitch to play Jo.

Then Gerwig, 36, went off the map, needing solitude to attack a rewrite on her screenplay based on Louisa May Alcott’s wildly popular, semi-autobiographical novel, which chronicled the lives of four forthright, financially stricken sisters coming of age during the Civil War. “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,” she 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 (Timothee Chalamet) and sent him away, possibly forever.

Jo leaps up, her eyes brimming, trembling angrily.

"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!"

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The speech represents just how artfully Gerwig worked to weave Alcott's biographical details (the author never married and sustained her family through her writing) throughout her version of "Little Women."

"I pulled that (from the book) and then I just wrote, ‘I’m so lonely’ at the end. I heard exactly how Saoirse 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.

“It was so weird!" Gerwig says. "I don't know how that works.”

Says Ronan: “There are certain people that you just have this very, very special working bond with. I feel like that’s what we have in bucketloads, and we've always had that.”

"Little Women” is hallowed ground. The book has never been out of print since its 1868 debut, and die-hard fans of the 1994 film adaptation tend to resist new incarnations. Gerwig’s version is very new indeed, launching with the sisters as adults before layering in flashbacks.

“From the very beginning, she had a specific take on the movie,” says producer Amy Pascal, noting room for fans to love the "wonderful" old versions and the new one, too. “She wanted to make it about women and economic independence, and she wanted to intermingle Louisa May Alcott’s real experience with writing the book. It was very ingenious.”

Under Gerwig’s watch, Jo is imbued with Alcott's fight to own her copyright over the objections of a chauvinistic editor. Florence Pugh’s Amy is tougher this time; she can go toe-to-toe with Jo. Eliza Scanlen’s Beth is as joyful as her end is tragic, Emma Watson’s Meg is a materialistic martyr and Meryl Streep’s acid-tongued Aunt March is even more of a pill.

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Back in the fold from "Lady Bird," Chalamet calls Gerwig's set "open and joyous and loud. ... It was one of the sweetest and replenishing (experiences) I’ve ever had.”

"Little Women" began filming just eight months after "Lady Bird" energized the Oscar race with five nominations. This time, Gerwig and partner Noah Baumbach ("Marriage Story") were quietly pregnant with Harold, now 9 months old.

Gerwig told no one she was expecting, including Ronan, who had noticed her director was eating healthier and draping her frame in woolen dresses and anoraks.

Production wrapped in December 2018, and “in January she called me and said she was having a baby," Pascal says. "I said, ‘That’s fantastic, when?’ And she said, ‘In two months.’ She didn’t want anyone to treat her differently, and she knew inevitably, male or female, people would have.”

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Where will “Little Women” go from here? Ronan scored a Golden Globe nod for playing Jo, but after missing key Screen Actors Guild nominations, the film has ground to cover ahead of Oscar nominations on Jan. 13 – made undeniably harder by the fact that “Little Women” is about women and made by a woman.

Just five women have ever been nominated for best director (including Gerwig for “Lady Bird”), and none twice.

“There is an unconscious bias that stories about women or stories about people who aren’t white are less than stories about men and boys,” says Pascal, who doesn't think enough voters have seen the film yet.

But no matter the incarnation of "Little Women," Beth's fate is where even the headstrong Jo falters. “She really believes, ‘I can stop it,’ " says Ronan, pointing to Jo's core-shaking belief she can cure her sister. "And then that's a very sad moment to realize when she's older that she can't.

"That's something that everyone goes through when they come out of childhood. 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?”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Little Women': How Saoirse Ronan and Greta Gerwig updated a classic