The Notebook director: Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams despised each other during filming

Noah and Allie’s convincing love story in 2004’s The Notebook helped the film become one of the top-grossing romance movies of the modern era. Amazingly, director Nick Cassavetes just revealed Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams were barely able to stand each other during production.

“Maybe I’m not supposed to tell this story, but they were really not getting along one day on set. Really not,” Nick told VH1 this week. “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.'”

Nick said Rachel had a similar opinion about Ryan.

“They started screaming and yelling at each other. 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,'” the director recalled. “And it got better after that, you know? 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.”

Eventually, Ryan and Rachel really worked it out: They dated from 2005 until 2007.