There’s been a lot of excitement for Saoirse Ronan’s new movie Lady Bird (check out the trailer here), which is getting strong reviews on the festival run as well as talk of an Oscar nomination for Saoirse.

The new film - which sees Saoirse play a dissatisfied, teenage girl who dreams of escaping her school and family by going to college in New York - got a standing ovation when it was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

TheWrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman sat down with Lady Bird’s writer-director Greta Gerwig and Saoirse’s co-stars Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts to talk about the film. When the subject turned to Saoirse’s performance, Gerwig was singing the actress’s praises.

“I had seen Brooklyn and met her at the Toronto Film Festival in 2015,” Gerwig said. “She’s always been a person that I’ve been drawn to, even just to look at. Even her face is very compelling. When we met, we read through the script out loud. She read all of Lady Bird’s lines and I read everybody else’s lines, and I knew right away that she was right for the job.

“She was so funny but so deeply felt, and it was almost like her emotion made it that much funnier. She didn’t play the comedy, she played the honesty and that made it funny.”