Director Nick Cassavetes opens up that he put the on-screen couple in a room for an impromptu therapy session to work out their issues.
- Jul 3, 2014
AceShowbiz - Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams might have a great chemistry on screen in the romantic movie "The Notebook", but the duo didn't really get along on the set. In a new interview with VH1 for the film's 10th anniversary, director Nick Cassavetes shared the story behind the scenes between the on-screen couple.
"Maybe I'm not supposed to tell this story, but they were really not getting along one day on set. Really not," he said. "And Ryan came to me, and there's 150 people standing in this big scene, and he says, 'Nick come here.' And he's doing a scene with Rachel and he says, 'Would you take her out of here and bring in another actress to read off camera with me?' I said, 'What?' He says, 'I can't. I can't do it with her. I'm just not getting anything from this.' "
"We went into a room with a producer; they started screaming and yelling at each other," he recalled. "I walked out. At that point I was smoking cigarettes. I smoked a cigarette and everybody came out like, 'All right let's do this.' And it got better after that. They had it out. I think Ryan respected her for standing up for her character and Rachel was happy to get that out in the open. The rest of the film wasn't smooth sailing, but it was smoother sailing."
The movie went on to gross over $115 million worldwide and become the 12th highest-grossing romantic drama film of all time. On top of that, Gosling and McAdams won multiple awards for their performance as a couple. They dated in real life a year after the movie but broke up in 2007. They briefly reconciled in 2008.
"God bless 'The Notebook'," Gosling told GQ in 2007. "It introduced me to one of the great loves of my life. But people do Rachel and me a disservice by assuming we were anything like the people in that movie. Rachel and my love story is a hell of a lot more romantic than that."
