“I made a little playlist this morning,” Chalamet announces to the room.
He returns to the camera, which snaps him and Ronan at a furious pace.
It’s their first joint cover shoot.
He keeps cracking her up; she musses his hair with doting affection.
He sings and dances very Elio-in-the-town-square-like to Bob Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues.”
He creeps behind a distracted Ronan before spooking her with a yelp.
“I didn’t even know you were there!”
They’ve known each other, after all, for some time.
That goes, in fact, for the whole of Gerwig’sLittle Women.
In advance of filming in Concord, Mass.
For Ronan and Chalamet, the contrast between this and their earlyLady Birddays was immense.
“OnLady Birdit was, like, 25 people hanging out in a house!”
They fell back into each other’s rhythms instantly.
“That only progressed more and grew more.
It helped that we do have a very natural rapport with each other….
These two characters physically need to be very comfortable with one another.
They’re literally intertwined for half the film.”
Chalamet credits Gerwig, too, for establishing a playful, comfortable atmosphere.
He thinks back to his first day of rehearsal: He reunited with Ronan.
He introduced himself to Emma Watson (who plays the eldest March sister, Meg).
He recalls fondly: “Everyone breaks down and becomes a little kid.
When it’s someone you’re actually friends with, it makes it easier.”
Ronan smirks, gearing up for a jab: “We’re not friends!”
Delighted, Chalamet keeps the bit going.
“We’re not friends,” he says, solemnly.
For once, they’re not very convincing.
Greta Gerwig doesn’t remembera time before she knew Jo March.
“It was something my mother read to me when I was growing up.
It’s been with me for a very long time.”
She joined Sony Pictures' newLittle Womenadaptation when she was hired to write the script in 2016.
OnceLady Birdbowed the next year, she emerged as a candidate to direct the film.
She got the gig.
But Gerwig doesn’t see herself as reinventing the wheel.
“A lot of the lines in the film are taken right from the book,” she explains.
I don’t think we remember that, but she does say it."
“I wanted it to be footnote-able,” Gerwig says.
“I wanted to point to it and say, ‘This is where this is from.'”
“We [read] the book out loud,” says Dern.
Gerwig expected the script’s words to be memorized precisely.
“I wanted to make them move at the speed of light.”
Here it goes on longer and more vibrantly than in any previous iteration.
Then there’s the devastating moment when Laurie asks Jo to marry him and she rejects his proposal.
Gerwig tasked the two actors to unleash here.
“Emotions just bubble over,” Ronan says.
“[Greta] just let us go with it, wherever it went, from take to take.
What I loved about that scene is that every take would be different emotionally.
It didn’t have the same trajectory.
“She makes me feel like I can try anything.”
“They are two halves,” as Pascal puts it.
“These are really bold characters that are really different than you’ve seen them before.”
He responded: “Yes.
Yes, c’mon.")
[I had] to try things that I’d never tried before.
Be a bit messier with a performance.”
Gerwig set up etiquette lessons for the cast; whatever the instructor said (“Don’t shake hands!
Don’t gesticulate with your arms!
“), Ronan made sure to ignore it.
She speaks now of this as freeing, even transformative.
“Finding that was just amazing.”
Ronan is taking a little break.
“I’ll wait for the right thing to come along,” she says.
It’s been a long day.
They’re back in comfy clothes; Ronan is taking a late lunch.
“I just haven’t thought about it that way,” Ronan admits.
That will always be relevant.”
“I love that inLady Bird, you broke my heart,” she says to him softly.
“InLittle Women, I got to break your heart.”
(Chalamet, ever the goofball, finds an obvious opening: “Yes, that’s true.
Then I married your sister.
Ha, ha, ha!")
But Ronan, chuckling, doesn’t let him off the hook.
“Will I have, like, a chapter?”
“A chapter of Saoirse,” he says.
At this rate, one chapter won’t suffice.
