@Courtesty of Sont Pictures
Q: Have you ever been concerned about playing such a difficult character? Are you in some way afraid people will keep seeing you that way?
Justin Baldoni: To be honest, that is not something that I’m really worried about. I think for the most part audiences are really smart, they know that I’m not that person. And if they do then I will just lovingly remind them that my name is Justin.
Q: How much work and effort did it take to bring this movie to life?
Justin Baldoni: It takes so much energy in life to wail a movie into existence. That it’s not just a job It has to be something that I’m willing to make a real sacrifice for in my life. I have two kids, It’s been five years trying to get this movie. And there’s been other movies that have come and offers in between. This has been my focus, I believe that I have to be a hundred percent into something. Have a real passion for it to dedicate myself to it. I believe the impact of the film could be huge, and I do not mean financially.
We optioned this book in 2019 when it had only sold 1 million copies, there was not the idea that this was going to become some massive global best-selling phenomenon. The book had already been released for many years before I even optioned it, we thought that it was at the end of its life cycle, I was just interested in the story. Years and years after the book was released and after we optioned it, it became a global best-selling phenomenon again. And now to this date, it’s sold over 10 million copies. 9 million more than when I optioned it five years ago. Because it speaks to the reality that so many people face in their lives, that’s why I wanted to tell this story. My hope and prayer is that it makes a difference.
Q: Can you talk about the differences, between the novel by Colleen Hoover and Christy Hall’s screenplay?
Justin Baldoni: They’re very similar, of course, the obvious difference is that one is 400 pages and one is 115. There is no way to capture everything that’s in a novel, so you have to make some very hard choices. Early on Christie and I talked about how to do this. One thing that we decided on was to always make sure we were following Lily’s emotional journey. I did not want to ever put the audience in a situation where we were judging Lily too early. You have a different time in a movie to learn the reasons why she would stay with someone who was doing those things.
We’re not in her head. We don’t have the internal monologue and the dialogue. And so we can’t understand why she would stay with him. So the idea came to make Lily an unreliable narrator. Make the film more about her journey and convince herself that the situation she’s in is okay. Until we reach the point where neither Lily nor the audience can run away from the reality of what’s happening. That is not but that is a storytelling device that we created specifically for the movie that was based on real experiences in my life of recovered memories. From a moment of trauma but also through conversations and consultation with real survivors.
Q: How did you end up having Blake Lively and yourself as main actors?
Justin Baldoni: I’ll start with myself. When I first optioned this book, it was just to direct. It was not to act, I was acting on a TV show at the time. But there was a part of me that dreamed of playing a very complicated character like this but I didn’t know if I would be able to, in a truthful way, show the darkness, the complexity of this character. Colleen emailed me just before we had closed on our option agreement and asked if I had ever considered acting in the movie, suggesting that I could play Ryle.
That gave me the confidence and the freedom to explore it for myself. It took me a couple of years as we were developing this to figure it all out. I was 35 at the time. Early on in the process, we decided to partner with Sony. And when you’re making a movie, you need a big movie star. So we went through a list of all these big movie star names and Blake was thrown out.
I thought it was a really interesting idea because Blake is beloved she’s approachable. So many women just love her. I just thought that she would make an incredible Lilly, so I flew out to meet her: we had a three-hour meeting and at the end of the meeting, I just said: “You are Lily. I would love for you to play her.” And luckily she didn’t just sign on as an actress, she signed on as a producer and an executive producer and was a big part of the production. I’m so grateful that she agreed to because I believe she gives the performance of her life in this film.
@Courtesy of Sony Pictures
Q: How did you prepare mentally to play a complicated character? And what have you learned from him?
Justin Baldoni: I was lucky to have done so much research as a filmmaker before even stepping into the shoes of Ryle. It was very helpful to me. I didn’t know how somebody could become this way. Ryle is so different than me, I worked with a few different acting coaches, and I was just trying to create this character from multiple angles, trying to understand the story from a survivor’s perspective. I asked our partners if I could actually to somebody who works with perpetrators so I could understand the psychology of what’s happening in Ryle’s mind when he’s doing these things.
I got the opportunity to sit on some closed-door meetings with a psychologist in court-mandated rehabilitation groups for men who had been convicted of domestic violence. It was through those groups that I got to learn, listening to them. That was invaluable to me so that I could understand from an honest perspective. Then I did things like I had a journal as an example, and I went into detail about certain experiences in my life that shaped the trauma and the pain that I was in that I was burying.
It was very hard, very complex because I had a lot of judgment towards Ryle. This is not a person that I would want in my life or to be anywhere close to any woman that I know. And yet I had to find an entry point to play him. That brought humanity to him. The only way I could do that was by understanding him. So all of these things together permitted me to go into a character who did unforgivable things.
Q: What do you think makes some women want to stay in synch toxic relationships?
Justin Baldoni: I am not the right one to answer directly as to why these women stay. But I will need to point out the flaw in the question. Which is that it’s a question that we should not be asking ourselves. The question I believe we should be asking, especially as men, is why do men commit harm? It’s not so much about why the women are standing in these relationships, but why we are allowing these men to commit acts of violence against women in the first place.
That was one of the impetuses for making the movie in the first place. Which is so that maybe we don’t have to ask that question anymore. Maybe we can reframe the thinking to make sure that we are creating a world and a system where men are not able to Inflict this type of harm. I would just suggest that anybody interested in understanding more about survivors and the psychology of survivors or looking for resources, consider visiting no more.org which is our partners, learning about all of the ways that these things happen and all the reasons why.
Interview with Actress Blake Lively on “It Ends with Us.”
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