[Swicord] It's really important, I think,
for people to appreciate adaptation
by thinking about it in terms
of our right to approach a story
from a lot of different angles.
You're really just taking the core idea
of something that's kind of slight,
and you are embellishing and inventing
and creating something else
that speaks back to the original thing,
but isn't the thing itself.
One of the things, thinking about "Little Women,"
is that people would often say to me,
"It was such a faithful adaptation."
But the truth is, we left out a ton of that book.
There was just a lot
that there was no room for in the movie,
but what we did try to do was capture what it was
that Louisa May Alcott wanted to do with her novel.
And so trying to understand the author's intention,
I think, helps makes something feel
like it's a faithful adaptation when it's not.
But I also think that there's nothing wrong
with an unfaithful adaptation,
as long as it works on its own terms.
But for people who are really in love with a book,
they are not going to necessarily want
there to be any kind of change.
"'Revenge is mine!' quoth he."
[Women clapping]
"Excellent instalment, Mr. Snodgrass."
[Swicord] I had read "Little Women" as a little girl.
By the time I was 16,
I had seen the other iterations of "Little Women"
that were available to be seen, which were two movies.
One at that time was from the 1950s
and one with Katharine Hepburn.
I really loved Katharine Hepburn as Jo,
but my problem with that movie and other movies
was that it wasn't what the core of the book was about.
Both of those movies were about
who were these girls going to marry.
And even when I was eight
I knew that the book was about who will these girls become,
and so the core of that book for me was about ambition
and desire and young girls growing up
with some idea of who they were.
"If I weren't gonna be a writer,
I'd go to New York and pursue the stage.
Are you shocked?"
"Very."
[Swicord] So when I became a screenwriter,
one of the first things I wanted to do
was to answer that childhood wish.
I couldn't imagine that anyone
would love this book more than me,
and I was so committed, in a way,
to trying to do this adaptation
so that it reflected my reading of the book.
And so when I started walking around Hollywood,
first of all, there were practically no women
who were writing movies at that time,
and certainly no one was writing
for a female audience at that time.
So walking around and saying
"I wanna do a new adaptation of 'Little Women'"
was getting me absolutely nowhere.
Except that I met Amy Pascal.
So she took me to lunch, and that's how I met her,
and her name was Amy Beth and we talked about "Little Women"
and her mother had loved "Little Women"
and had named her after two characters of the book.
And we said, "We should do this."
And we started trying to set that up
without any success at all.
And 12 years after that,
she had been the overseeing studio executive
on "League of Their Own" and "Groundhog Day,"
which were two big hits, and they had finally said to her,
"You can develop something of your own."
And she just turned right around
and said, "Let's do 'Little Women.'"
So it was the great joy of sitting down with my friend
and finally, for both of us, making a dream come true.
At a certain point Amy had said, "I've been thinking
that it may be time for a new 'Little Women'
for a new generation.
What do you guys think of that?"
And we talked about a lot of things, like,
"Oh, should we do it for film
or should it be for TV?" for instance.
Neither of us really disagreed with her.
We both thought it would be interesting
to see what somebody from the next generation wanted to do.
It was hard for us to imagine what that would look like,
and then Denise suggested Greta Gerwig and I thought,
"Wow, she's a really interesting young filmmaker."
For me, what makes the film so interesting
is that it's a different point of view,
that she's looking at the book anew
and she's taking things from the book
that I didn't put into my screenplay,
things that fascinated her.
It was a way of looking at that family
in a very contemporary way.
She brought a kind of looseness
and modern
and contemporary feeling to it
that is... It is its own thing.
"I've always known I would marry rich.
Why should I be ashamed of that?"
"It's nothing to be ashamed of.
As long as you love him."
"Well, I believe we have some power over who we love.
It isn't something that just happens to a person."
"I think the poets might disagree."
"Well, I'm not a poet. I'm just a woman."
[Swicord] You know, I think that this book
is really a work of genius in the sense that it's timeless.
It's an extraordinary work of memory and art.
I think that people keep coming back to it
because that world of women, the veil is lifted
and behind it there are these figures
that have only been shadows on history,
and they are these real people - each of them so different,
each of them with such a longing
for something that's slightly beyond their reach.
It feels a lot like real life
when you feel how modern everything is in the book,
and I think that's why people keep coming back to it.
It's like the way we come back to Shakespeare.
You know, we say, "Oh, it's historical,"
but then once you get in there you're going,
"No, it's modern."
And you just wanna participate with that.
[Uplifting string music]