Little Women tougher to make than The Revenant says director

The director of the new big screen adaptation of Little Women has told Sky News it was a not an easy film to make.

Greta Gerwig said her cast were extremely committed to the movie and her vision for it.

“I’m just going to go out on a limb and I’m going to say these were… like, you know how The Revenant was really hard to make? I don’t know if they could have made Little Women,” she said.

Referencing a scene in the Oscar-winning movie where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character shelters under a dead horse, Gerwig said she also demanded a lot from her actors.

“I don’t know, getting in a horse versus [laughs] like it was genuinely, it was a hard shoot, it was a long shoot, it was a shoot that required so much of these actors,” She explained.

“It is a story of sisterhood, and it’s so beautiful, and they’re so wonderful and it’s so like delicious and cosy and, you know, lovely, but also they worked their asses off.”

Gerwig’s Little Women is the eighth film adaptation of the 1868 novel of the same name by American author Louisa May Alcott.

Saoirse Ronan, who worked on Gerwig’s last film – the acclaimed Ladybird – plays the lead role of Jo March.

She admits she didn’t give Gerwig much choice when it came to the casting.

“I knew because of the way her brain works that it was going to be this new sort of fresh thing,” Ronan explained.

“I wanted to be her Jo, and I didn’t want anyone else to be her Jo, and it was just really interesting that the spirit of Louisa [May Alcott] seemed to come through me at some award show we were at in LA.

“I just tapped her on the shoulder and said ‘I know you’re doing Little Women, I’m just letting you know I’m gonna be Jo, and that’s sort of the end of it’.”

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Ronan said that passion for the part – and for the project – was present throughout filming.

“That kind of went the whole way through the shoot where there was just this real belief in what we were doing,” she told Sky News.

“And I think everyone had a real belief in the characters that they were playing, which allowed us to get up at 4:30 in the morning and work for as long as we did.”

Little Women, which also stars Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Timothee Chalamet, Laura Dern and Meryl Streep, is released in UK cinemas on Boxing Day.

(c) Sky News 2019: Little Women tougher to make than The Revenant says director