Timothée Chalamet & Saoirse Ronan Reunite After 'Lady Bird' and 'Little Women'

We've obviously gone off

to make other projects away from each other,

but I've not really had an experience acting

with anyone else like I have done with you.

There's a real sort of like aliveness I think,

when I work with Timothee,

that's how I feel.

Wow.

[audience clapping] [upbeat music]

[audience cheering]

[Announcer] All right, and please welcome

Timothee Chalamet.

[audience cheering]

What? It's you.

I didn't know you were.

My, oh, I didn't know this was live like this.

Yeah. Okay.

We're here.

[Interviewer] What do you remember

about the very first time you met?

Huh.

You won't remember the first time.

I do remember it was a rehearsal in Los Angeles

for Lady Bird.

Oh, yes. And I just remember

Saoirse arriving with an assistant

and I thought that was very impressive.

[audience laughing] I've never had an assistant.

I also drive myself to work.

That's not my recollection. Do you? [laughs]

And, we had this rehearsal with Greta

and I, only,

I'm gonna do a lot of blowing smoke tonight,

so just get ready y'all,

but Saoirse who's continues to be a legend,

but already she was a legend then,

and I had worked with an actor named Emory Cohen

who had just worked with her

probably the year before in Brooklyn, or something,

so I kept hearing this name Saoirse, Saoirse

and didn't put two and two together when I saw the name

spelled out

because I'm an ignorant American.

Yeah. And then we got cracking

and I was just blown away immediately, you know,

just by her level of talent.

We were very lucky that we

clicked straight away, I think.

And we had Greta, who seemed to be sort of from day one,

she was so excited by whatever was happening

between the two of us.

I actually do remember that rehearsal now.

I was still at that point where I was just like,

Oh, great! Someone gave me a job.

Like, this is amazing.

I was a huge fan of Greta's.

I found her,

not because of anything that she had sort of given off,

but she was incredibly intimidating to me

because I wanted to emulate her so much

in her style, in the type of work that she made.

And at that stage I kind of,

I didn't even really know yet

that I would wanna direct one day,

but it was sort of in the back of my head

sort of percolating somewhere.

Even though Lady Bird wasn't like an out-and-out comedy.

The fact that it was more comedic than anything else

was something that again, really intimidated me

because I just think it's like the hardest genre

to pull off,

especially if you're not a comedian.

So I was really,

I was very, very nervous the whole way through,

which I think I feel like I spoke to you about,

I didn't speak to many people about it,

but I was very in my head on Lady Bird.

Wow. My memory is that the role

fit like a glove to you.

I didn't feel like that at all,

but I was, I felt really relieved to have you there

because even though you say that you're

like a dumb American or whatever,

I think the fact because you're not.

For sure, for sure, for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. He is not, he's not, he's not.

[audience laughing]

But having someone who had this sort of like

European flair in the way that you did

and you were so sort of like,

unique and like nothing I'd ever met before

that was really refreshing for me,

I think to have someone there where I could be like,

can we just like,

have a moan about everything today?

I think I really needed that.

So I clung to Timothee whether he realized it or not.

This is all new information to me. [laughs]

[audience laughing]

This is brand new information.

I love it. I love it.

[Interviewer] And so, how did Greta present

to the two of you to do Little Women?

I sort of had to tell her that I was going to be in it

[audience laughing]

because she hadn't sort of landed on me yet.

We were at an event and you were doing stuff

for Call Me By Your Name,

and I was like, by the way,

I'm obviously gonna be Jo, right?

She was like, I guess, sure.

But I wasn't sure how you got involved.

Did she just ask?

She did just ask. [laughs] Great. Great.

But it was,

I was shooting The King, in Budapest,

and I had met with Denis a couple times about Dune,

so that was really the thing

I was chasing and really excited about.

And then Greta called me about it

and she was already

such a fabulous director just off of Lady Bird,

just the experience working with her,

you know, on Lady Bird I read for both parts.

I read for the Lucas Hedges part

and the part I ended up doing

and I was just dying to work with Greta

because as Saoirse said,

she just gave off this incredible vibe.

And there's that whole generation of New York filmmakers

Greta, the Safdie brothers,

Ari Aster, Robert Eggers

who came up there too,

you know, that were like

all doing really unique work

but seemed to have clumped together.

But Greta was like,

one of the ones I really wanted to work with.

I got the call and I remember being,

not surprised but

Lady Bird was so,

so in Greta's voice.

Now, she's proven of Little Women and Barbie

that everything's in her voice.

But I remember, I was ignorant to how special,

what I felt was the ninth version of something.

I'm probably exaggerating,

but there had been many versions prior.

But I just wanted to get involved with Greta

and she was very persuasive.

I thought it was also a surprise for her

off the back of Lady Bird,

which it became this sort of like indie darling movie,

which is so beloved

and we had no idea even to this day

how beloved it was gonna become,

to then follow on from that

with an American literary classic

that had been remade so many times

and in a way it's, not with every version,

but it did feel a little bit twee.

Like Little Women was starting to feel a bit like,

it's a bunch of girls and it's Christmas time

and all they wanna do is fall in love and get married

and that was my take on it

just based on my memory of seeing other versions of it.

It was always wonderful.

But I was like, what's this director going to do with that?

And as you say,

in the way that every brilliant filmmaker does,

they can take something which the source material,

which we rediscovered through making the movie is

so unbelievably brilliant and revolutionary.

But it took,

I think Greta's voice and her vision to help us to see that.

And it was the same with Barbie

and it'll be the same with Narnia

and everything that she does in the future.

It's like, it's always a surprise

and she'll never disappoint

because she's so herself as a filmmaker,

which is surprisingly hard to come by.

And she was so fired up, I remember.

So I remember just trusting that

how fired up she was about the material

and she said she always wanted to do it.

Lady Bird and Little Women,

it was just such a fascinating,

so I look back on them so fondly in different ways

because you talk in terms of career,

I don't wanna say like,

I don't wanna be too self-referential or reverential

to Saoirse or Florence,

but everyone was sort of like at a genesis, you know?

Beautiful Boy was coming out at that time

and that was basically like the second

quote, unquote big-ish movie I was in

and I was having a hard time getting,

you know, people on the phone that helped me figure out

my schedule where I was gonna go.

You know? And I wanted to do a regional tour

and visit places in the States

that were affected by that story, you know?

So the intent was pure.

But I was in my trailer

and I only got a call at a certain time so,

and my hair and makeup was quick on that movie.

It was like a 10 minute, you know,

jump in whatever and I was out,

so I guess I was supposed to be in the chair

at a certain time and I wasn't.

But I was on the phone trying to do this thing

and I get this bang on my trailer door

like really intensely

and I'm thinking someone died

and I open the door and it's Saoirse in a bald cap.

[audience laughing]

Do you remember this?

Yeah. [audience laughing]

And she's like,

get your ass in the fucking trailer right now.

They're waiting for you in the hair and makeup.

And I always just love that memory, you know?

[Saoirse and audience laughing]

I just love it.

And are you on time now?

I'm on time all the time.

Good. [audience laughing]

Yeah, all the time. All the time.

That's what's so nice, I think,

about us all being at this point in our life

and in our career.

I was saying this to friends of mine the other day that,

you know, we made a movie together like seven years ago

that we've all got like history together now.

You know, we've made more than one movie together

and we're all sort of like growing up with one another

and we'll dip back in every few years

and we can catch up and that's what's so

beautiful about this point in our lives.

We're really, really lucky that, you know,

the two of us and the other people that we've mentioned

are doing really well

and our paths can continue to cross.

I think that's why I'm really grateful to people like Greta

as well because she is,

she's very much like,

like Denis, as well,

she's very much a believer in

bringing a company of actors together.

And I know that like she'll always want us

to come back together and work with one another again.

You know, I figured you'd love me Jo

and I realize I'm not half good enough

and I'm not this great man.

And yes, yes, yes you are,

you are a great deal too good for me

and I'm so grateful to you and I'm so proud of you

and I just,

I don't see why I can't love you as you want me to.

I don't know why.

I love in that Little Women scene,

how we had so much room to play

and we're just all over the place there.

I think they put the camera on a track

and we were just like all over the place.

We weren't limited any sort of blocking.

I remember rehearsing that with Greta and Saoirse

in Amy Pascal's house before the movie started

and Greta had us rehearse it once

and she said, Okay, I don't wanna go near this

because it already feels locked and loaded.

It makes me nostalgic for those movies.

But also, I don't know how you feel,

but I'm also like, you know,

happy to be older in some way

because I see where we both were at in life.

Not in any tragic way, but you're still,

you're figuring yourself out in your early twenties.

Yeah.

Like, at the beginning of a career

it's also overwhelming.

That's why I'm grateful to Saoirse period

because she's always had my back.

We had like maybe half-an-hour, 45 minutes

to shoot that scene.

We were chasing the light.

They wanted to get magic error

so we had no time to shoot it

and somehow the energy of that

and knowing that it was almost like going on stage

for like half-an-hour.

All of this energy that we'd stored up

was just gonna go into this thing.

And it really felt like two actors

and two people who were very much sort of in each other's

corner, you know, creatively and personally.

And I think that's

what I've always felt from working with you.

We've obviously gone off

to make other projects away from each other,

but I've not really had an experience acting

with anyone else like I have done with you

whether it's on set or in real life

and it really keeps me awake and alert

and it keeps me very creative.

So there's a real sort of like aliveness, I think,

when I work with Timothee. That's how I feel.

Wow. Yeah.

[Interviewer] That's nice.

Yeah, that's really moving.

I don't want to,

I just want to take that in.

[Saoirse and audience laughing]

It was so exciting to watch you as Bob Dylan.

I could tell that like you'd put

so much work into it

and the craft was there mixed with like

the magic, which was so great.

I was watching it and I was like,

I've forgotten that I'm watching you

but it didn't feel like I was

watching a movie about Bob Dylan.

I felt like I was watching this young man

who knew his own mind

but he was like still open to the world around him

and it sounded like this voice

that I've grown up listening to,

but also you'd added so much of yourself to it.

It was so beautiful.

This is getting very overwhelming.

[Saoirse and audience laughing]

But yeah, I'd imagine that was hard. Was it?

Yeah, I mean, I just fell in love with the process

and the young man that is Bob

and it's honestly very moving hearing and it's just weird.

It feels like worlds colliding

because I feel like I stumbled

into Lady Bird definitely and Little Women.

So, and the process on Bob was really like

an individual one for years.

Not that it was lonely but I was alone.

So to hear my sister in many ways

commend that is really moving to me.

I wanna use this beauty. [laughs]

They always keep it handy, don't he?

He's like a gunfighter with six, keeping it close.

[guitar music]

♪ Oh, the time will come up ♪

♪ When the winds will stop ♪

♪ And the breeze will cease to be breathing ♪

♪ Like the stillness in the wind ♪

♪ Before the hurricane begins ♪

♪ The hour that the ship comes in ♪

There was this whole war

on the movie in a sense of using pre-records

or doing the music live

and I was always in the camp of wanting to do it live

because it's folk music

and Bob Dylan certainly wasn't matching his voice, you know?

So I didn't want to be matching me,

mimicking Bob Dylan in a studio in LA

six months before we shot

because I had to be respectful of all the work that

we had done in the preparation.

But Edward Norton was always in my ear too,

saying, You sound better live, do it live.

[audience laughing]

So that gave me a good ammo.

But once you get into the Church of Bob,

it's hard not to revere

what an incredible artist this man is

and was, especially in this period when he was,

you know, we were talking about

Lady Bird and Little Women before

where you talk about press opportunities

and stuff we were going through,

you watch his early press stuff

and he's combative and confrontational and subtle

and peculiar

and I don't wanna be a smudge on that legacy.

I mean, I know for us making The Outrun

because we produced it, as well.

So we know that there are

traps that you can fall into.

Like, you get drowned out almost by the real person

and you're trying to find

that gorgeous harmony between the two.

I think what's nice in both these cases

is that we're playing creatives.

So I don't know what Bob was like,

but I know with Amy Liptrot,

who I play

the art and the project,

and what her work and her life was going to turn into

was more important than

capturing every element of her personality.

She just wanted it to have the feeling of her story.

So we had a real

meeting of minds, I think,

from the very beginning

out of respect for one another's work

that we would combine both of our

personalities and our worlds and our voices

and how we moved and everything.

I don't even recognize you anymore.

I wish you were a completely different person.

Don't say that.

[Daynin] I can't do this.

What do you mean you can't do this?

[Daynin] I just can't do this.

Did I do that to you?

I'll never do that again. Right?

Whatever I did, I'll never do it again.

I'm never gonna drink again, I promise you. Right?

Because I don't want to lose you.

I don't want to lose you.

There was a lot of that experience

even though I haven't been through it myself,

but I've watched people I love go through it

and have received the energy off of that

and you do repress it or you don't deal with it

in a healthy way

and it just turns into anger and confusion and frustration.

And so to be able to actually

take all of that and rework it

and to put it into something productive

and something that I could see

in front of me was really helpful actually.

But also that's just why I do this.

I do it because it feels good for me to get that out

and to be able to take any messy emotion that you have

and give it some alignment,

give it some shape,

control it in a way

so that it doesn't get out of control within you

is I think, if what we do is used in the right way,

it's a very healthy occupation to have

if you use it in the right way.

So I loved it. I enjoy getting it all out.

[Interviewer] Was there a point in this business

where you had to decide

this is my career and not just a childhood hobby?

Yeah, I think for me it was really clear

because I was put on the traditional

American academic path, you know?

And didn't know why.

It was very peculiar to me that I was paying money

to be somewhere I didn't want to be.

You know, I was around when I was 18 or 19,

I had enough momentum with my acting stuff.

I thought okay, it's sort of now or never.

And this is not prescriptive,

whatever works for anyone works.

But I felt like if I had a plan B

or if I was working towards a plan B,

my plan A would be ruined

because I'd been doing it on and off for years.

You know, I don't wanna speak for Saoirse,

but I think she was more full-time earlier than I was.

I was doing it from so young

that it was just sort of

a part of me.

It was a part of how I saw the world.

It was a huge source of education for me.

Like I definitely had moments,

I remember distinctly that the first one was on

Atonement when I was 12

and I did my first crying scene,

which is a big moment for any actor

when they realize they can cry

and people love it when you cry.

[audience laughing]

You always get a round of applause.

And it was something that I'd never had to, you know,

a kid never has to do that on cue

and I got to do that.

I remember that myself and the director

had to really work on what this was going to be

and craft it.

And through my dialogue with him,

something came out of that that was new for me

and that really felt like acting at that point.

And I think your idea of what acting is

actually changes

depending on where you're at in your life and,

but that's what it felt like at that point.

And I remember going, this is what I'm gonna do forever.

[Interviewer] Is there a specific movie genre

that you haven't yet explored but you would like to?

Musical.

I really wanna do a musical.

Oh, man, you gotta do a musical.

I know. What musical would you do?

Wicked. [laughs]

[audience laughing]

I can't stop thinking about Wicked.

I love it so much.

I don't know, maybe an original.

I would like to do a biopic of someone,

but I'm not gonna say who it is

because I don't want someone else to steal it.

But you already have it in mind?

Yeah.

Is, alive? Yeah.

Do they know you want to do it?

No. Interesting.

[audience laughing]

It's Bob Dylan.

Fuck! No, no, no!

No! He's mine.

[mellow music]