‘It Ends With Us’ Director And Star Justin Baldoni Talks Choices Made To “Protect Lily’s Character”
SPOILER ALERT: For those who haven’t read the book, this piece spoils the plot of It Ends With Us.
Seven years after his Ted Talk about toxic masculinity, Jane the Virgin star and Five Feet Apart director Justin Baldoni combined directing and acting for the highly anticipated film adaptation of It Ends With Us, in which he stars as the abusive neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid.
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Based on Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel, the story centers on Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) who first encounters Ryle in a close-up rooftop moment before meeting him again later after she opens her Boston flower shop. Ryle foregoes his no strings attached relationship style to pursue Lily and eventually marry her, though she starts to experience violence at his hands before and after the wedding.
“I was very nervous to play [Ryle]. My north star with Ryle was always to look for his humanity because it’s very easy to judge somebody that does the terrible things that he does, and what he does in this film is unforgivable and unjustifiable,” Baldoni told Deadline. “To play somebody like him, I have to understand him. I was really focused on what are the great qualities that he has and then stepping back as a filmmaker, it was really important for me to inject as much goodness into Ryle as possible because I also had to protect Lily’s character as the movie simply won’t work if you don’t believe that she really loves him.”
Baldoni took a distinct approach to filming the scenes of domestic violence that would incorporate interviews he conducted with various women through the organization No More.
“Justin was very clear on how the abuse in the film would play out and what we ended up shooting was his vision from the beginning. The idea was to have this series of recovered memories during the final abuse scene so both [Lily] and the audience would realize what had been happening,” Producer Alex Saks told Deadline in a separate interview. “We worked with this organization called no more, and frankly, this is what happens to a lot of domestic abuse survivors. He wanted it to be realistic, but it was also an opportunity to be really beautiful cinematically and powerful emotionally, so it’s the confluence that all hits her in this moment. That’s a huge peak in the movie, both emotionally and story-wise. It’s this explosion that finally drives her out of this situation.”
Baldoni spoke more about getting into Ryle’s shoes, the style in which Lily’s situation is shown and how he views Atlas’ character as well as the final scene in the film. He and Saks also addressed a big change in terms of Ryle’s backstory coming to light as well as the end of the film.
Deadline: The first two sequences of Ryle’s domestic abuse are shown as happening really fast with Lily not fully realizing what’s going on, but by the third instance, she recalls the first two moments with more clarity. What went into that technique?
Baldoni: We had to protect Lily from any potential judgement of why she stayed and why she didn’t stay. In a book you have a lot of real estate, you have a lot of pages to understand her intention and her motivation as she’s talking to us in the book about what she’s experiencing. In a movie, we can’t do that because we don’t have internal dialogue. We just have our objective camera showing a scene and we have acting. My fear was that if we were to follow the exact skeleton of the book, that early on, seeing Ryle do what he did would make it very hard for us to accept that she stays with him, because there just wasn’t enough time to establish love or establish the romance.
As Christy Hall and I were developing the script, I had the idea to make Lily an unreliable narrator and make the memories recovered memories at the end so that the journey of the film was in Lily’s POV and actually in her memory. We see her throughout the movie, and you don’t know this until the end, justifying what’s happening to the point where she can no longer run from it. So these recovered memories, if you will, are very real. It was inspired by a situation that happened in my personal life also.
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This is a very common thing that happens where, essentially, you justify whatever the situation is, and convince yourself that it was one thing when it was really another. I thought that would be a very interesting device to experience in a film, and then to catch up to it towards the end, and have the audience learn, at the same time that Lily learns, that the man who she was convincing herself that she was with is actually very different than she thought.
Deadline: How did you direct Brandon in the role of Atlas and show the two men’s differences?
Baldoni: The analogy I gave [Brandon] for Atlas, is that Atlas was like a pitbull who was beaten and abused, but it’s a pitbull that, because he was beaten and abused, would never bite anybody. So it’s the sweetest, softest most gentle version of a pitbull. But deep down inside he’s still a pitbull, and that will come out if he’s threatened.
His audition made us all cry because he found a way to give Atlas so much pain and sensitivity, and he uses his gift of stillness, which is one of Brandon’s greatest strengths as an actor. It was really just making sure that in every scene that Brandon was in, he was sure in himself to the point where then Lily was able to feel safe with him. I wanted there to always be a contrast with Atlas and Ryle so even though at one point, we’re rooting for Ryle and we’re rooting for Atlas before we know the extent of what’s happening in the movie, whether it was the color scheme or the way they’re dressed, or or even the lighting I wanted to make sure that there was always a contrast and that Ryle felt a little more cold and distant and Atlas felt more warm and cozy and safe.
Deadline: Allysa (Jenny Slate) ends up filling in the gaps of Ryle’s backstory in the film while Ryle does it in the books. Why make that change?
Baldoni: It’s always about the ending and then reverse-engineering. The book had such a powerful ending with this moment in the hospital because you did not know what choice she was going to make. The brilliance of Colleen’s writing came into play, as you know, full well, what Ryle does to her throughout the course of this film, and yet, there were many women who wanted her to stay with Ryle, and I had to really understand that.
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I actually interviewed and met with a lot of women who read the book, and I wanted to know why they felt that way. And then doing work with No More and hearing from survivors and understanding the psychology of abuse and learning ‘Oh, there is real love.’ They all had to say, in order for the movie to work, the choice she makes at the end has to be one we might expect, but we don’t know what choice she’s really gonna make. And the only way that can happen is if we believe that there is deep, deep, deep love there.
Saks: I think it’s important that Ryle’s backstory comes from Jenny because at that point in the movie Ryle is no longer a reliable narrator. The fact that it comes from someone who clearly loves him very much, but is in some ways an impartial third party and frankly, was there, watched it all happen even as a child, it’s coming from a place of love, but it’s also just the truth. She’s able to see things that he probably wasn’t able to see about himself.
Deadline: How does the final scene balance Lily’s newfound freedom with the hope that she might still end up with Atlas?
Baldoni: “One of the first things [Christy Hall] said was that, to truly make a truly make a feminist film, we can’t have [Lily] end up with [Atlas] at the end of this movie, and I agreed completely, and yet, we had to find a way to satisfy the hope that maybe they would end up together. You don’t have enough real estate in the movie to see who she is, what she’s doing, get a sense of her life, to see what she’s accomplished and to see that she’s healed herself before just ending up with another man. I wasn’t interested in making that movie. Christy wasn’t interested in making that movie. Colleen wasn’t interested in making that movie. So it was this tricky balance of finding a way to show that she was independent, had left her bad situation and also that there was hope for the two of them to end up together. Maybe they were just meant to be together this whole time.
Saks: “We knew we had to end the movie with hope and the promise, especially because of how Atlas is set up in the movie. But at the same time, it was really important that that a reasonable amount of time had passed. So that Lily could really move on could establish this sort of new independent life for herself, but at the same time, we want her to find love whether that was new love, or a return to this true love. It was really important that there be sweetness to that moment, that there be romance, that there be some some level of Kismet.”
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