Lady Bird is Greta Gerwig’s love letter to Sacramento, the central California city where she—like her title character, played by Saoirse Ronan—spent her restless teenage years in an all-girls Catholic school. Given her deep attachment to the story, which she wrote and directed, Gerwig gave her creative team troves of personal yearbooks, photos, and journals—and led them on a tour of Sacramento, which included a walk-through of her childhood home. She also referred her collaborators to specific works of art—including Joan Didion passages; Gregory Kondos and Wayne Thiebaurd paintings; and Lise Sarfati portraits—so that they could help her realize the distinct aesthetic she had been envisioning. As Lady Bird’s director of photography Sam Levy remembers it, Gerwig hoped that the film would “look like a memory.”

Ahead, Levy, along with Lady Bird production designer Chris Jones and costume designer April Napier, reveal the references that informed the aesthetic in Gerwig’s deeply personal Lady Bird.

“Lady Bird is such an extraordinary character because she’s not bound by any era—she’s the thrift-store, punk-rock shopper,” said Napier. “I did the same thing myself when I was her age—trying to establish my own identity. She was influenced by the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, whatever appeals to her. A few pieces are contemporary of 2002, but she has the ability because of her identity and her individuality to pull from anything that appeals to her—a little bit like a magpie.”

“Before starting the film, I looked through a bunch of catalogues, like Delia’s, and watched movies from the era, like Bring It On, Empire Records, 10 Things I Hate About You. And I watched Kids, because Lady Bird was more like Chloë Sevigny’s character or Kathleen Hannah or Patti Smith to me.”

“Greta gave us a giant box of photos from her high school years, and then she gave us her yearbooks and her journals,” said Napier. “It was like a treasure trove—someone handing you the era in a time capsule, which helped for the general feel of the whole film. Greta had always referred to Sacramento as the Midwest of California, so even though it’s 2002, it’s really, stylistically speaking, 1999, because it’s not a fashion-forward city like Los Angeles or San Francisco. It’s still kind of rural.”

Gerwig and Levy spent many conversations figuring out how to make the film “look like a memory” without using gimmick-y sepia tones or blurred edges. Coincidentally, a happy accident occurred one day as Levy was printing out photos of Sacramento for inspiration to hang around the production office.

“I took a photo that already was printed out, I Xerox-ed it, and it emerged from the machine having lost a generation of image quality and a little bit distressed,” said Levy. “I didn’t really think about it too much. Then Greta came back from a casting session, stood there in the doorway, and picked it out, saying ‘That’s amazing. Why is that different?’

“I explained the Xerox machine and she said, ‘That’s great. . . the early 2000s were so the time of Kinko’s, and we would go there to Xerox books, and I’d decorate my room and make zines.’ From there, we were able to figure out the technical aspect of this aesthetic of memory she wanted, and I had a specific direction to focus my tests. I showed these reference images to everybody—to our gaffers, to our colorists, to our camera crew—and we just tried to make it a family affair, so we could all work towards executing and realizing this aesthetic of memory.”

Production designer Chris Jones explained how he incorporated the blue of Sacramento’s rivers into the film’s color palette—choosing a brilliant blue house in the fashionable 40s neighborhood as the home that Lady Bird covets on her walks home, which ends up belonging to the grandmother of her boyfriend, Danny.

“We wanted the images and photography to be plain and luscious,” added Levy. “If you’ve ever talked to Greta, it’s such a Greta Gerwig thing to say—brilliant but very straightforward. I know exactly what that means, too, because I start from a place of wanting things to look rich and dynamic and engaging, but not distracting. I want to take care of the viewer, but not have, particularly for something like Lady Bird, the viewer to be distracted by the images. I want people to watch it and just not think about the technicalities involved because they are totally absorbed in the story.”

Napier explained that she sourced most of her costume finds from thrift stores, flea markets, Etsy, and, on the rare occasion—as for the beige lace dress Lady Bird wears to Thanksgiving at Danny’s grandmother’s house—from costume houses. “Nothing was really expensive.”

“Greta went to Catholic school and understood that, because everyone has to wear the same thing, they all wear it slightly differently to express their individuality,” said Napier. “Lady Bird wears it very differently than Beanie wears it, who wears it very differently than Jenna. She wears her uniform kind of oversized and a little tomboyish, so she can accessorize with her plaid and argyle socks and her shoes, and then the leather string necklaces and bracelets that she wears.”

“One thing that Greta really remembered from school were those Mary Jane Doc Martens. She was like, ‘If you could find a pair of those, man, that would be amazing.’ We found a pair at the flea market that had been nice and beat up.”

“There were a couple of costume pieces that Greta was very specific about, like Lady Bird’s prom dress,” said Napier. “Greta wanted it to be a 1950s kind of lacy prom dress in a pink or red so that she would stand out at the dance.”

“A lot of the colors we used came out of the initial discussion Greta and I had of what Sacramento felt like,” said Jones, “which was lots of green, yellows, pinks, golds, pastel colors, like what you see in Wayne Thiebaud paintings, which really capture the color and the flatness and the beauty that is specific to Northern California. We used pink in Lady Bird’s room and in some of the school rooms. We had a great yellow in the kitchen of the family home, which was a real home in Los Angeles that we found. It had a similar floor plan as Greta’s childhood home, and it was well-loved, which was the big thing we were searching for.”

The styles of early-2000s teens were not, to put it mildly, especially attractive.

“Oh, it was so painful,” Napier laughed of digging through Abercrombie & Fitch and Juicy Couture early-aught fads. “For Danny, we put him in ugly ill-fitting baggy jeans, those weird, ill-fitting sweaters, and a puka necklace. The beginning of the 2000s was the beginning of fast fashion. . . so you can go to a costume house, and there are loads of 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s dresses because they’re made beautifully and hold up. But the early 2000s, with this disposable fashion really, it’s hard to find. . . it’s not quite old enough to be period, and the stuff you do find is falling apart.”

“Greta had sent me some photographs from Lise Sarfati as inspiration,” said Levy. “We were both drawn to her portraits—she takes these great portraits of women, young women, about high school-aged, teenagers that are very evocative. They’re not creepy. They don’t have the male gaze or anything like that, but they’re just very beautiful and dreamy.”