Ronan’s introduction to Little Women was the Winona Ryder film, which came out in 1994, the year she was born. She grew up an only child, so for her, filming Little Women gave her a special opportunity: “I got to have sisters.” Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, and Eliza Scanlen play the sisters; Laura Dern is Marmee, and Meryl Streep plays their forbidding, rich Aunt March.

Gerwig shot on location in the book’s Massachusetts setting, where Alcott and her three sisters grew up. The director researched locations that the family could have inhabited, and in some cases, ones they really did—like the schoolhouse where Alcott’s firebrand father, Bronson, taught. “It gives gravity to what you’re doing,” Ronan says. “The physical place really reminds you of the story you’re trying to tell.” Gerwig also relied on paintings from the era, to give the film a vividness that the black-and-white and sepia portraits of the era couldn’t accomplish. An 1870 painting by Winslow Homer called High Tide created the texture for the beach scene; costume designer Jacqueline Durran modeled Jo’s look after a figure in the work.

“They were just people. They were not in a period piece, they were just living,” Gerwig says. “They were the most modern people who had ever existed, up till that point.”

Opposite Ronan, Timothée Chalamet (another Lady Bird carryover) plays heartthrob Laurie, the literal boy next door who develops an intense friendship with Jo. Ronan and Chalamet are close in real life, which added to their chemistry. Their characters’ friendship never becomes romantic, despite Laurie’s proposal—and the book’s fans’ copious letters to Alcott.

“I loved that in Lady Bird, he was the one that broke my heart, but I got to break his heart in Little Women,” says Ronan, laughing.

Emma Watson as Meg, Saoirse Ronan as Jo, and Florence Pugh as Amy, in one of the amateur plays the sisters put on in their house. Revisiting the text, Gerwig was struck by how seriously the sisters took their creative endeavors. The second chapter of Little Women includes a detailed description of the play the girls perform on Christmas Day: The Witch's Curse, an Operatic Tragedy. By Wilson Webb/© 2019 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Eliza Scanlen as Beth, the shy third-oldest sister. Author Louisa May Alcott based Beth on her own sister, Lizzie Alcott, who died of scarlet fever at the age of 22. Louisa and Lizzie, like Jo and Beth, were very close. By Wilson Webb/© 2019 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Alcott never married, prompting modern speculation about her sexuality. (In the book, Jo wears men’s clothes and laments her femininity, which adds to that speculation.) In Little Women, Jo’s friendship with Laurie is proving ground for a different kind of gendered relationship.