How I Wrote Little Women — Greta Gerwig's Writing Advice

This is Behind the Curtain. Today we're gonna be learning what script technique Greta Gerwig learned from playwrights, how Greta snuck extra scenes into her film, and in her opinion what the most difficult part of writing is I don't remember a time when I didn't know who Jo March was. She's always been with me. So I read it and I read it again multiple times when I was young and then I hadn't read it until I was around 30 there was a 15 year I read it until I was like 15 or so and then I didn't read it for 15 years then I read it again and it was I couldn't believe how modern and strange and urgent it was and I'm so sick of people saying that that love is just all a woman is fit for I'm so sick of it I'm so lonely I mean I would say the biggest part was how much this book was my book as I was growing up and how much this book was the thing that really gave me any idea that I would be able to write at some point and I wanted to kind of reverse engineer the movie so that the last thing that you you saw is that girl getting her book because to me that's that's the image that in cinema isn't usually associated with you know the kind of visceral satisfaction of a of a kiss but it could be it ended and it should be that it's not girl gets boy girl gets book the truth is it is these two different timelines and people sometimes say oh it goes back in time but actually the way it's structured is there's just two different origin points of the story but everything moves forward so one starts in 1868 and everything moves forward and one starts in 1861 and everything moves forward so you're never jumping back within a timeline you're only moving forward and I wanted this sort of interplay of the time to be you know clear so you can follow it but also in way to create this sense of um everything's happening all at once the biggest moment for that for me of that for me was the best death and Beth getting sick and this is sort of parallel this time time period it's you know it's all moving into one and in these two realities in this one she comes out alive and in this one she she doesn't and I always said that that was the starkest contrast to between the magic of girlhood and the reality of adulthood to be totally honest there's sort of a narrative issue in the book when you try to make it into a movie which is if a character gets sick and then gets better and then gets sick and then dies it's a bit of a hat trick to make it work so I was like okay well I want to do this because it felt like it it felt like it also gave it this thing that people intuitively have when people someone someone dies which is that I've said it I've heard other people say it they say but I just saw them I just saw him and it's almost as if this kind of as if as if presents could inoculate you from from death and you know cinema is one of the art forms where you can literally have those two moments live next to each other because that's how it feels in life even though that's not how linear time works unfortunately so dreadful being poor here I wanted to almost treat the dialogue from the book the way you treat you know Shakespeare you don't change it you're not you're not changing it to suit our modern ears you you find the way that it's modern you find the thing that is universal so many of these lines are so famous and they're embroidered on cushions and and they can have a sort of the must eNOS to them like and I was just I just all this hadn't heard all these lines I was like what if they said them like at the speed of life the way girls talk the way sisters are and they're saying the lines but it's the first time anybody's ever said them and so they're coming out so quickly so a lot of it was actually in the delivery and I work a straight of the delivery by it's a specific device that playwrights use a lot Caryl Churchill uses it Tony Kushner uses it this device of the slash to indicate overlap sort of don't make and then there's a slash fun and then lorries I'm not so the word that overlaps is fun and I'm so don't make I'm not like that's sort of the way it's supposed to sound it's something that I find really useful because if you want to specifically hear certain words but you like a controlled cacophony it's very helpful because it it allows me to especially with the group scenes treat all the actors like an orchestra I mean when I grew up with a book I loved the book but I actually never really dug into who the person who had written it was it wasn't something I thought about because I don't know I I think that's the way children approach fiction or approach most things and that the person behind the thing is not interesting with Louisa I started reading other things she's written and then I started getting into her letters and her Diaries and I what I found was this just incredibly fascinating complex woman who was both an artist and a businesswoman and I thought that that was worth exploring and playing with narrative Lee you know the text is not I told it's not first-person it's not Joe narrating it it's Louisa and there's a lot of sadness in that person behind the people and this perspective of you know Louise's real sister is already is already gone she her sister Elizabeth died and Louisa herself had gone to the Civil War as a civil war nurse and had suffered through typhoid fever and almost and her sister not Meg but the character big bit is based on she'd gotten married and it was devastating for her and so there's all these things of like she is writing about a thing that already passed I knew that that the adaptation I wanted to do was not just an adaptation of the text as it is in the book although I did rely heavily on the text in the book I also wanted to treat all adaptations as almost an ER text as a collective memory of what Little Women is and I do think that there's this sense of an earth text or a collective text which it means more than even what the original text said so what I wanted to do was kind of find a way for that to be almost like the found materials and then to explode it and deconstruct it and put it back together again I don't outline I mean I say that I definitely don't outline before I start writing there is a moment when I do outline but it's only after I have a great deal of material I find when I outlined before I write it's the fastest way to kill all my ideas I can't and somehow it makes everything quite literal for me and you'd be ashamed can't help it even now I feel like it's more true in movies than any other medium that the person you see them with first is the person you believe they should be with I don't know why it works like that I just think it tends to work like that and so one thing when you tell the story straight through is that you know you see Laurie and Joe together and women it's like a Laurie and Amy are like what the hell is this I've been with these other people the second thing is then when you meet professor Barrie you're like Anna who's who's this guy like I don't know this guy I don't care about this guy at like who cares so I so in a way I mean that's just nuts and bolts see I was like if I see Amy run into Laurie first and obviously he's the object of her affection and if I see professor Mayer at the beginning then I'm les introducing a new a new person later with just the briefest outline of this is a romantic interest that you're like oh yes I see it is a romantic interest like it part of it is playing with narrative expectations the first scene of the movie when she's trying to sell the scandal story and he says you know if you have if the main character the girl makes sure she ends up married or dead either way and then the very first scene you see Rin it's like well well that's that's there you go there's the guy just set up guys because it's like he just told her married or dead so now we have to see is it married or dead it's like putting a gun on the wall in the first act and no amount of energy can make it so I want to be great or nothing I mean the truth is about the character of Amy she was one of the characters that I just kept underlining her lines in the book I mean she has she has a line the world is hard on ambitious girls and she has the line you know I want to be great or nothing about her art and it's just she's just wonderful and I thought when I what I was reading it again I was like oh my god Amy's so much better than I'd ever given her credit for and it made me realize - what an interesting diagnosis of our culture that that the that the character who says most clearly what she wants is the one we hated for so long okay so the line I've always known I would marry rich that's from the text she does say that and later she feels sort of embarrassed about actually having said that but this speech actually for the most part it comes from a conversation I had with Meryl Streep about this movie which she essentially said to me the thing that you have to make the audience understand is it's not just that women couldn't vote it's not just that they couldn't own property they couldn't it's that they didn't own anything and that they legally couldn't unless they were you know completely unmarried and had their own fortune but even then it was complicated they couldn't get educated and so she was sort of laying out these limitations and I knew I wanted Amy to have a speech like this but actually this particular speech I wrote ten minutes before we shot um in the run-up to making the movie what often happens is you know you end up having to cut a lot of stuff to make page count seem lower this is completely reasonable to me so you end up like cutting so much stuff and I what I was doing was I cut the script down but then I would just save the pages I wanted to make and then right before we go I just give them to the actors and I'd say all right we're gonna do this hearing Amy say I want to marry rich sounds quite crass if you don't really understand the stakes of what that means you know for women at that time it was the decision and if you married the wrong person if you married someone had a drinking problem or couldn't make a living or treated your children badly that's it does that's the worst decision you could make so in any case I wanted to give her I wanted to give her context when did you become so wise mm-hmm I always have been you were just too busy noticing my faults which were never there of course I don't get myself a page count because I actually have no problem generating pages pages are pretty easy to generate the real hard work of writing is the real hard work of anything which is you the thinking because you're gonna have 50 bad ideas it doesn't matter you have to have this thing that kind of lynches them together and I find that that's it's it's most similar to me and to as to you know like that feeling when you're staring at a master problem like I don't know and like precalculus or something and you just like cannot it's like you cannot understand it it is beyond you but it's that that that strip that cognitive struggle and then if you put the time in it does break something breaks and you're like oh hey I get it that's the thing about writing it's about sitting with the problem hi this is Nehemiah Jordan the creator of behind the curtain I have so many videos lined up that are coming in the next couple of weeks as well as a bigger project that I will be announcing soon go and subscribe so you don't miss anything I'll see you next week as we take another look behind the curtain

Channel: Behind the Curtain

Views: 152,731

Keywords: film, video essay, screenwriting, lessons from the screenplay, greta gerwig, little women, little women 2019, Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Meryl Streep, script notes, greta gerwig interview, lady bird, little women explanation, little women ending, Louisa May Alcott, how to write a screenplay, writing a screenplay in 48 hours, Official trailer, Jo March, new trailer, notes on a scene

Id: vG906HuUz38

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020