Lily Collins, the 27-year-old actress who impressed Beatty and everyone else in the 2012 film Mirror Mirror, is the daughter of the Genesis drummer and pop star Phil Collins. Her character in the movie, Marla, is endlessly waiting for her screen test from Howard Hughes, to the great mistrust of her mother, Lucy Mabrey, played by Bening. It was not unlike what Lily had to go through, waiting to hear from Beatty if she got the part.

“From our first meeting to the second, it was a couple of months, a long process of just meeting and talking about life. And then, finally, reading the script.” He eventually invited her to meet Alden and maybe try out a scene or two. “I still had no idea if I was doing the movie,” she recalled. Finally, her agent phoned Beatty, who assured him that, yes, she was in the movie. “There was never an audition, just a month of hanging out and chatting. I think Warren reads people. He’s a great judge of character. He was auditioning me in a way through just meeting me. That’s part of his brilliance. He knows what he’s looking for. I feel it totally mirrored my character—and I don’t know if that was on purpose! Marla just wants to please Howard Hughes, and is just waiting and waiting.”

Marla turns out to be a strong character, standing up to her strict, hovering mother. “I feel like that’s very Warren, because he loves strong women—I mean strong women in life, but also strong female characters. Warren has never been afraid of ballsy women—he loves that. He really respects women who are intelligent and not afraid to express their opinions. There’s no question as to why Annette is his wife; I mean, she is the most incredible, intellectual, brave, vocal woman, and he just loves that!” When asked about the other female characters in his movies—Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker, Annette Bening’s Virginia Hill, Diane Keaton’s Louise Bryant, Halle Berry’s Nina—Warren says, “Well, that’s no surprise, if you grew up with my mother and my sister [Shirley MacLaine].”

Beatty met Alden Ehrenreich in 2009 after seeing him in his first film, the Frances Ford Coppola-directed Tetro, when Alden was only 19. His audition for Rules Don’t Apply lasted five years, even longer than Lily’s. “I spent the first two years of our relationship where he wouldn’t let me read the script, so I just spent all that time talking and getting to know him. He really made it clear that he was kind of studying me while this was happening. And then, eventually, after a couple of years, he allowed me to read the script. I think his feeling was that I was too young for the role, but by the time we shot it, in 2014, I was 24.”

Beatty brought the two young leads together and involved them in the whole process—scouting locations, sitting in on production meetings. “It was extraordinarily generous of him to give me an insight into the process,” says Alden. “You usually just show up as an actor when those things are already done. This is as much about leadership as it is about artistry.”

‘Warren is not his age. He’s timeless, he’s fearless, he’s just . . . very singular. He stays up with the times because of his kids, or just because he loves what he does. There’s no one quite like him,” says Lily Collins. “Annette and Warren have created this amazing family who are, for all intents and purposes, ‘normal,’ and that’s a testament to how they both raised them.”

Just as Beatty was something of a sexual revolutionary in the years emerging from the strict mores of the 1950s, so his firstborn child is also a revolutionary. Stephen, who is challenging cultural norms of sexuality, is an activist for the transgender community. Identifying as transitioned at the age of 14, he changed his name from Kathlyn Elizabeth to Stephen Ira. A poet and writer, he posted an “Answer to Seven Questions” about his gender identity on the “WeHappyTrans” Web site. One is struck by Stephen’s insouciant intelligence—he manages to be playful, erudite, and eloquent all at once.

“He’s a revolutionary, a genius, and my hero, as are all my children,” Beatty says when asked about Stephen.

With his children growing up and two of them now out of the house, “there’s something about the empty nest that makes you say, ‘Well, maybe I should go out and make a movie.’ It’s like Cocteau said [quoting the French poet Paul Valery], ‘A poem is never finished, it’s only abandoned.’ And that’s the way it is with movies—like children. You continue to work on them, and work on them, but then you have to let them go.”