Booksmart

Jo was my North Star,” Greta Gerwig tells Total Film in her idiosyncratic breathless, sing-song cadence that makes everything sound giddily exciting when we catch up with her for a brisk October walk through New York. “I think it’s almost indistinguishable for me – wanting to be a writer and a creator, and my love for Jo. I don’t know what came first.” She’s rhapsodising about Jo March, the gusty, uncompromising, direct and honest tomboy in Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel following four Victorian-era sisters through adolescence to adulthood via joy, heartbreak, death and singed skirts.

Jo – with her lust for the arts, clear-eyed sense of self and ear for language – is a character who could be Gerwig after last year’s triumphant directorial debut with , which took her all the way to the Academy Awards. And it’s especially true of the way Gerwig went after , demanding a meeting with producer Amy Pascal in 2016, sure she was the person to interpret a new, pertinent version despite having never directed before. “I went in, and I said, ‘This movie]. And in [] case, I was able to write the script. So I wrote the script. And then I went away, and I directed . By the time I was done with that, they said, ‘We’re interested in making this movie, and you can direct it…’ The day after the Oscars, I went to a cabin in the woods with all my research and I spent two weeks there alone, trying to figure out if I was true and worthy of this task.”