Showing his support! Greta Gerwig’s partner, Noah Baumbach, called out the 2020 Golden Globes for failing to recognize his longtime love’s direction of Little Women.
Baumbach, 50, spoke to Variety about his disappointment with not seeing female filmmakers recognized in the Best Directory category. “So many of my favorite movies this year were made by women — Greta’s Little Women being one of them,” he told the publication. “I’ve been so excited by the work that so many women have done.”
The Marriage Story filmmaker first directed Gerwig in 2010’s Greenberg, which he cowrote with his then-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh. Baumbach and Gerwig later began their romantic relationship in 2011 and have since worked together on Mistress America and Frances Ha.
At the 77th annual Golden Globes on Sunday, Baumbach told The Hollywood Reporter that he visited the Little Women set “many times.” However, he also spoke to the publication last month about the influence Gerwig has had over his own work.
“It’s beyond advice, it’s like the roots,” he said during a THR roundtable in December. “She’s in there from the very beginning.”
Gerwig’s Little Women, based on author Louisa May Alcott’s book of the same name, stars Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern and Meryl Streep. The acclaimed film currently holds a 95 percent grade on Rotten Tomatoes and scored 91 percent on Metacritic.
At the 77th annual Golden Globes, only Ronan and the film’s score were recognized with nominations. The remake film, which debuted on Christmas Day, was also completely shut out of the upcoming Screen Actors Guild awards, which airs on Sunday, January 19.
Baumbach’s Marriage Story, however, scored six Golden Globes nominations. The praised film also walked away with a win for Dern, who won for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture.
Working on Little Women was a personal accomplishment for Gerwig, who once stated that it was “the book of my childhood” because of how she identified with the character Jo March. “I was ambitious, I wanted to be a writer, I was angry, I was artistic,” the 20th Century Women actress, 36, told Deadline on January 2.
“All of the things that Jo is, I was. She felt like she knew my secrets already, and that was thrilling. And I loved the book, and I read it and re-read it like you often do with books in childhood,” she continued. “And it had been so absorbed into my sense of myself that some of the secrets, and some of the things that the March girls do felt like they had happened to me.”
Ronan recently opened up to Deadline about how Gerwig has inspired her interest in becoming a director. “I think I’ve always wanted to,” the actress, 25, told Deadline on January 4 of becoming a director. “When I think about when I was younger and I would do press for films, they would always ask me, ‘What was it like to work with all the famous people?’ I’d be like, ‘It was great.’ But the director is who I always loved the most, and they were the one that I wanted to, make happy and I wanted to be close to them.”
The Irish actress continued, “It’s something that I would absolutely love to do and yeah, it’s just because I’ve picked up so many things from other directors that I’ve worked with. Watching Greta, and seeing what she’s done over the last few years, has been a massive motivation for me to give it a go.”
