And what about Timothée?

Oh, then Timothée I mean, he was always Laurie, because I knew I was going to be grounding them as adults and that’s where we were going to start. I was also just having a moment of figuring out like what age do I want everyone? And what I decided on was kind of in the middle. I wanted, you know, 23-year-olds to play both down and up, if that makes sense. Because you’re going to play 17 then you’re going to play 27 or whatever it was. So as soon as I knew it was Saoirse I knew it was Timothée, because if it hadn’t been Timothée, it was going to be someone who had that spirit. But it was always him, and he fit exactly. I love him as an actor. I mean they’re both—Saoirse’s so extraordinary and such a partner in filmmaking for me. And it’s hard to overstate how much she is a partner in what the movie ends up being. And then as just Timothée, I adore working with him. He’s wildly talented. He’s completely unexpected. He’s a completely different energy as an actor than Saoirse. But watching them together is extraordinary. He’s beautiful and handsome and that’s the same of Saoirse. And I love watching the two of them act.

What was it like to direct Meryl Streep?

Oh, it was amazing, she’s Meryl Streep. We talked about it a lot because the book had meant a great deal to her. And she said she wanted to play at March and that she wanted to be the battle ax, as she described her. And the conversations I had with Meryl informed the script. There’s a speech that Florence Pugh as Amy gives to Timothée Chalamet as Laurie, where she says, Here’s the situation for me as a woman, and this is why marriage is this question for me, and what I can and can’t do as a woman. And that came directly out of a conversation I had with Meryl. Meryl said, the thing you have to make the audience understand is it’s not just that women couldn’t vote, which they couldn’t. And it’s not just that they couldn’t have jobs, which they couldn’t. It’s that they did not own anything. You could not own anything if you were married, every single thing you owned was your husband’s, including your children. So you could leave a bad marriage, but you would leave with nothing, not even your children. So that’s the stakes of who are you going to marry because it’s so if you had no options. And so I just essentially took that almost verbatim and gave it to Florence. So directing Meryl is not a thing that only happens on set and it’s not a thing that I’m doing to her. It’s that getting to work with her makes me a better filmmaker because she is a comprehensive actress and a comprehensive mind. She is not Meryl Streep for nothing.

Do you believe in kind of connecting with people from beyond? Where there any weird experiences where you felt like Louisa was on set?

Yeah, but I don’t want to sound like a lunatic. We were shooting in Concord, Massachusetts, where she lived. As I said, I’m 36, she was 36. As a cast we all went to the house that she wrote Little Women in, Orchard House. It’s a 10-minute walk from where I was living, everything is so right there. So we went to the house, we saw the desk she wrote Little Women at, we saw, her sister May drew on the walls, who is the artist Amy’s based off of. You saw her book collection. You saw George Eliot, which is why I put George Eliott in the film as what she’s reading to her sister Beth. You can walk 20 minutes one direction and you’re at Walden Pond. Right there, that’s where Thoreau decided to set up shop and then you can go to Sleepy Hollow cemetery and they’re all buried there. And people are leaving pens for Louisa at her grave to inspire them to write and to thank her for what she’d written. You can walk 20 minutes the other way, and you were at the North Bridge, which is where the Revolutionary War started. It’s where the first shots were fired on the British who had marched from Boston. And so when you’re there, you really get this sense of this is a place where the idea of the imaginative act of democracy, it was very present. It was not a thing that had been done a long time ago. It was right then. And remaking the country better, in order to form a more perfect union, that’s forefront for everyone. And so Louisa feels present and I think everyone felt that. But yeah, going to Sleepy Hollow and paying our respects was—I don’t know that she was there, but we showed up for her anyway.