Disappointingly, Ryan Gosling did not come out of hiding last week to celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Notebook, the weepy romance that launched him into heartthrob-dom. Now a Serious Actor, Gosling refused to shill for the iconic film (by cable TV standards) by doing a few quick junket interviews from a rowboat underneath rain machines. (Would it really have been that hard?) One person who was willing to discuss the project, though, was director Nick Cassavetes, who gave VH1 a handful of juicy behind-the-scenes tidbits about the film.
The most surprising revelation: that Ryan Gosling butt heads with his co-star (and eventual real-life girlfriend) McAdams so much so that he asked the director to bounce her from set like she was some kind of unruly clubgoer and not his romantic lead:
Instead of complying wtih Gosling, Cassavetes tells VH1 how he forced the two into a room together to scream and yell it out together. ‘“The rest of the film wasn’t smooth sailing, but it was smoother sailing,” he explains.
Another amazing tidbit: that Ryan Gosling wanted to torch his character’s dream house, which he had painstakingly restored in the film:
Cassavetes also identifies the one person in the world immune to Gosling’s charms: his former co-star, James Garner. Despite Gosling’s best efforts to talk about the character they were both playing (Garner, at a later stage of the character’s life), the Oscar nominee refused to acquiesce and spend any more time than necessary prepping for a film destined to be sold in bargain bins by the grocery checkout. As Nick recalls it:
For the rest of Cassavetes’s on-set anecdotes from The Notebook, click here.