Greta Gerwig names the five movies that inspired ‘Little Women’
Taking on a classic work of literature as a director is no easy feat. It’s made all the more difficult when that work of literature has already been adapted to screen multiple times, with one of those adaptations starring Winona Ryder and Christian Bale and earning three Academy Award nominations. But if anyone has proven their ability to take on a mammoth, pre-existing story that defined the youth of millions, it’s Greta Gerwig.
Just four years before she brought Barbie to our screens and became the first female director to surpass $1 billion at the box office, Gerwig took on a far more subdued and homely coming-of-age story in Little Women. Bringing a simultaneous warm nostalgia and contemporary feeling to the story in the image of Lady Bird, Gerwig’s take on the film starred indie darlings Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet and became the most celebrated cinematic iteration of Louise May Alcott’s story yet.
Though the film is full of Gerwig’s own unique flourishes, she was inspired by movie musicals, epic westerns, and the French New Wave. Naming a list of films that influenced her during the making of Little Women in a conversation with Aframe, Gerwig kicked the list off with Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 musical Meet Me In St. Louis.
“Movie musicals were the first thing I ever loved,” Gerwig explained in an interview with Screen Daily, “and it informs my filmmaking to a degree that is hard to overstate.” On Meet Me in St. Louis specifically, she added, “It’s gorgeous and has a very particular feeling I was going for here.”
Though Gerwig’s love for musicals permeates her filmmaking, Meet Me In St. Louis is the only one to make her list of influences for Little Women. She goes on to note the influence of French new wave icon François Truffaut with Jules and Jim and Two English Girls. His style was particularly influential on her cutting style, she explained to Beverly Cinema.
“I was looking at all the Truffaut movies,” she explained. “Two English Girls, which is a period piece but doesn’t feel like it. Obviously, Jules and Jim, which is also a period piece but doesn’t feel like that – I think that some of that is because of that kind of swiftness of the [film’s] cutting – where you don’t feel like it’s heavy, or you don’t feel like everything lands, you feel like everything is cut on an intake of breath”.
Gerwig rounds out the list with Michael Cimino’s 1980 western Heaven’s Gate with Kris Kristofferson and Martin Scorsese’s own take on a classic novel with The Age of Innocence. Between literary adaptations and warm musicals, it’s easy to see how each of Gerwig’s choices informed Little Women.
Find the full list of movies that inspired Greta Gerwig’s Little Women below.
Movies that inspired Greta Gerwig:
- Meet Me In St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944
- Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
- Two English Girls (François Truffaut, 1971)
- Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)
- The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)
