As the first play by a black woman to ever be produced on Broadway, 1959’s A Raisin in the Sun is a historical milestone as well as an astonishing piece of writing. In the latest screen adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic, Phylicia Rashad, Sean Combs, Audra McDonald, and Sanaa Lathan—who all starred in the 2004 Broadway revival—play a 1950s African-American family that is nearly torn apart by their conflicting ideas about the best use of a $10,000 insurance check. After Wednesday’s premiere received a standing ovation, director Kenny Leon and several members of his cast addressed the question: what happens to a dream no longer deferred?

Q: Can you describe the adaptation process from stage to screen?

Leon: In the original television version, they stayed in the apartment, just like the stage version. So we decided to open it up into 15 or so locations. And screenwriter Paris Qualles, his goal was to make sure that his poetry matched Lorraine’s poetry.

Q: How long was the shoot?

Lathan: We did the play on Broadway for over 100 shows, eight shows a week. It was intense. Anyway, executive producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan came to the show, and they said, “We want to make this movie.” When the show was over, we had about two years before we could all come together and get our schedules together. We shot it in Toronto on a stage 20 hours a day.

Leon: We had 24 days!

Lathan: And so we were all terrified coming back to it after two years of leaving it. It was amazing, though, how once we started speaking the words again, it was like the characters were hibernating inside of us and they woke up. And we were a family again.

Q: How did Audra McDonald get in touch with the character of Ruth, the long-suffering wife?

McDonald: Well, Ruth doesn’t have a very good time of it in the film, does she? So it was easier to do it on Broadway in that sense, because you’d have the entire play to ramp up to it. Shooting it was actually very difficult because I had to stay in that down state for 15, 16 hours a day for 24 days straight. But all I had to do was trust Lorraine’s words and put myself in a woman’s position at that time, in the 1950s, especially an African-American woman’s position and see how few choices Ruth had.

Q: What did the project mean to the actors?

Combs: I mean, I never had that many words to say in a movie! So I’m definitely just bugging right now. And your head is just so big on the screen. But the most important thing was for me to try to really, really portray what it feels like being a young African-American man and just wanting to be somebody. Like my favorite line is: “Don’t my wife deserve to wear no pearls?” And that feeling of anxiety when you’re just trying to get a better life for yourself, and you don’t want to see your son sleep on the sofa, and you just want to be a man. And that’s what it meant to me. It meant that maybe people could see what young men are going through.