Little Women film: Florence Pugh’s radical take on Amy March

Florence Pugh found an unexpected role model in Little Women, playing Amy, who declares “I want to be great or nothing”.

Actress Florence Pugh stars as Amy March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Picture: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times/Contour by Getty Images

Florence Pugh doesn’t set out to be likeable. Not on screen, at any rate. She is drawn to playing women, she says, “who say something and women who are something”. As an actor she wants her characters to be understood, no matter what they do, to be in “some way appreciated even if they’re not in any way likeable”.

And in Greta Gerwig’s rich and resonant new version of Little Women — that much-loved, much-adapted novel that has been a powerful influence on readers for more than 150 years — she plays a character whom many take issue with. One who is often regarded, she says, as the villain of the piece.

Little Women is the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, four sisters growing up in straitened circumstances in mid-19th century Massachusetts. There have been feature film, theatre, TV, radio and anime versions of Louisa May Alcott’s book, and Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 feature, starring Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst, is a deservedly acclaimed adaptation.

While it’s a story of family ties, one character has always stood out. Jo, the passionate, strong-willed aspiring writer, is the March sister whom most identify with and is a much-referenced, inspiring figure.

From Simone de Beauvoir to Susan Sontag to Ursula Le Guin to Patti Smith, creative figures have paid tribute to her influence.

The youngest of the sisters, Amy (Florence Pugh, left), is the aspiring artist and is often in competition with sisters Jo (Saoirse Ronan), centre, and Meg (Emma Watson).

“Like countless girls before me, I found a model in one who was not like everyone else, who possessed a revolutionary soul yet also a sense of responsibility. Her dedication to her craft provided my first window into the process of the writer and I was moved with the desire to embrace this vocation as my own,” wrote Smith in a recent essay in the Paris Review.

Pugh is determined to remind us that there’s another recognisable character with artistic ambitions and dreams of achievement, a young woman who proclaims, “I want to be great or nothing”, and means it.

This is Amy, the youngest of the sisters, the aspiring artist, the one who loves “pretty things” and who is often in furious competition with Jo.

As opposites, competitors, they fight for space, attention, love. And for many readers, Amy is defined by what she took from Jo.

For Pugh, who brings Amy to vivid, forceful life, that all-or-nothing statement is an important clue.

It’s made in the context of Amy’s ambitions to be a painter, studying in Paris and making a name for herself.

“It’s a testament to just how passionate she is. She doesn’t want the middle ground. She doesn’t just want to be OK.” It’s something Pugh identifies with, she says: “I think I’m quite similar.”

For Pugh — and for Gerwig — Amy as a character deserves more credit than she often receives. “(Greta) wanted her to have ambition,” Pugh says. Gerwig wanted “to show that she had a craft, that she wanted to be a painter, and that she actually had plans for her path”.

Those elements are there in the book, Pugh adds: they’re not Gerwig’s inventions but aspects she has chosen to underline and highlight.

“But for many years she’s had such a bad rep. We’ve never ­really given her the opportunity to be anything other than the enemy,” Pugh says.

Amy has been regarded as Jo’s prim, conventional opposite. In this Little Women, however she’s a more nuanced, rounded character, more thoughtful and self-aware, who has things to offer Jo.

Florence Pugh brings Amy March to vivid, forceful life in Little Women. Picture: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times/Contour by Getty Images

Pugh, 23, landed her first movie role when she was in her final year of school in England, cast opposite Maisie Williams (Game Of Thrones) in Carol Morley’s uncanny 2014 drama, The Falling, a tale of teenage best friends caught up in a mysterious outbreak of fainting fits.

Amy’s wish to be “great or nothing” was already in her mind in a way, Pugh says.

“At school I knew I wanted to be the best. And I remember it being a very fine line of, it’s not a joke what I’m doing and I really do feel like I need to work harder. I don’t think I’d be OK if I was just OK at it or if people just didn’t appreciate my work. I’ve always felt like that, I think most actors do. Most creators do. They always want to push themselves and they feel like their art is everything.”

In this new incarnation of Little Women, Gerwig makes some distinctive, thoughtful choices. Alcott’s tale was originally published in two parts, separated by years, and this version embraces the notion of a double time frame.

It has a divided, interwoven structure that deftly plays with temporal shifts and echoes, connecting them thematically and visually.

The film begins with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) visiting a publisher’s office with a manuscript to offer. She’s tailoring her talents to the marketplace, where there are very clear rules about the fate of female characters. If she wants to be published, she’s told, her heroines must end up married or dead. For Jo, writing is a need and compulsion, but it’s also a financial imperative. She wants to support herself and her family through her work.

Gerwig’s film highlights the lack of choices these young women have. For Pugh, the depiction of Amy is crucial to this: “Something wonderful about this version is that through Amy we can really see what it was like for women in this era.”

Aunt March (Meryl Streep) holds the family purse strings. She has been able to stay unmarried because she has her own money but she insists that’s not an option for her nieces. At 13, Amy is already being told that the fate of the family is in her hands. A good (“financially advantageous”) marriage is a duty and a responsibility; that’s the message she is given.

Clockwise from top left, Saoirse Ronan, Laura Dern, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen in Greta Gerwig's Little Women.

We talk about another of Pugh’s films in which marriage and opportunity are central to the life of her character. Her breakthrough role, after the attention she received for The Falling, came in 2016 when she starred in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, an austere, mesmerising adaptation of a mid-19th century Russian ­novella. Pugh plays Katherine, a young woman who is married off to an older man.

It’s a bleak union. Her life turns out very differently from what she had hoped for and her frustration and boredom spill over into something destructive, brutal, murderous.

They are extraordinarily different works yet, as Pugh points out, Little Women and Lady Macbeth were published three years apart. And there’s something about Katherine’s situation that is not far removed from Amy’s. Marriage is understood as an economic decision, yet one in which women have few rights. When weighing up the kinds of roles she looks for, she says she likes a challenge but wants to bring her characters closer to the audience’s understanding.

“The one I always come back to is (Katherine), who was so divisive, and such a horror”, yet at the same time “interesting and understandable”, she says.

When Pugh arrived on set for Little Women, she came straight from working on Ari Aster’s Midsommar, an unsettling story of pagan ritual and personal betrayal. Midsommar is set principally in Sweden. Pugh’s character, Dani, travels there with her boyfriend and a few of his friends to attend what is said to be a traditional folk festival. Dani, an anxious young woman, already has good reasons to feel distress and dread. Her boyfriend has been evasive and unsupportive and in the increasingly bizarre world of the festival and its rituals, she becomes more vulnerable, yet perhaps also more powerful.

Between finishing Midsommar and starting work on Little Women “it was four days, and they were travel days”, Pugh says. The intensity of Midsommar was “mainly emotional”, she says.

“And creating Ari’s vision was a lengthy process. He works in a way where all the pieces have to match up. So understanding his vision and understanding how he worked was completely different to understanding how Greta worked. And the whole rhythm of acting in both films was completely different.

“When I got to Boston I remember asking Saoirse how Greta worked and what I needed to look out for. And Saoirse said ‘She’s really, really strict on people knowing their lines and she really expects you to work knowing your stuff’.”

The rest of the cast had been rehearsing for two weeks, Pugh says. And it was a little unnerving, as well as invigorating, to be plunged into the midst of it all. She was immediately struck by the pace Gerwig was looking for.

“The rhythm on set was very intense and you had to make sure you had your caffeine because the momentum would just build,” she says.

“If you were slack in your cues, even just slightly,” she says, Gerwig knew the precise word where things had gone awry.

“She could hear the sound of the scene and she knew exactly how it was meant to be. It was almost like a conductor with an orchestra. And, when we got it, it would be so exhilarating.”

After Little Women, her next release is a Marvel movie, Black Widow, directed by Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland (Somersault, Berlin Syndrome). Pugh plays spy and assassin Yelena Belova, who has been both foe and friend to Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow character.

Post Black Widow, she says, there’s a gap in her schedule: “I’m taking a bit of a rest to gather my thoughts and breathe. I feel it’s so easy to keep on going, as an actor, it’s in your system to always be worried when you’re not working.”

And, for a little while, that’s exactly what she wants to do, by choice, she says.

“I need to take some time to appreciate what’s happened in the past year.”

Little Women opens on Wednesday.