Many ideas for the film, he added, came from Lively.
“She was extremely involved, and she really made the film better,” Baldoni told Access Hollywood Aug. 7. “There were many instances where I honestly just tried to get out of the way and let her take the lead.”
Still, co-workers don’t always agree. And Lively noted there were sometimes creative differences in the movie-making process, including when it came to the decision to keep Lana Del Rey’s song “Cherry” in the film.
“They begged me to take that song out of the movie,” the Gossip Girl alum said in a recent interview with Hits Radio UK without naming names. “I’m not supposed to be talking about this, but because they felt like it was too charged and heavy and things were still good with Ryle at that point so you don’t want to feel that charge.”
As Lively saw it, “The moment Atlas enters, things are charged and heavy,” she continued. “There’s conflict, there’s pain, there’s turmoil, there’s tension. Because you’re like, ‘Oh my god. My soulmate, the one that got away, this person who’s haunting me in everything I do and everywhere I go is here now and we still had that connection.’ And you can be deeply in love with this person, but this person comes in and your insides are going to be a mess.”