Justin Baldoni explains why he made that massive change to It Ends With Us

Warning: This article contains spoilers from It Ends With Us.

While the movie adaptation of It Ends With Us brings Colleen Hoover's romantic drama novel to life almost faithfully, there is one massive change from page to screen.

The movie (in theaters now) and the book both follow the same story: Lily (Blake Lively) is a woman who overcomes a traumatic childhood with an abusive father to begin a new life in Boston, and things seem to be on track as she follows her dreams to open her own flower shop. But when she falls in love with charming neurosurgeon Ryle (Justin Baldoni), she begins to realize his abusive behavior only continues the harmful cycle she's been trying to escape her whole life. After multiple incidents of domestic violence, Lily leaves Ryle, aided by her childhood love, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar). But when she is at the hospital being treated after Ryle's rape attempt, she discovers she's pregnant with Ryle's child.

Just as in the book, Lily does not get back together with Ryle, even as he tearfully begs her to reconsider. After their baby is born, she asks Ryle for a divorce, confronting him about the abuse, and he finally agrees. They co-parent their child for a while, as Lily takes time to heal on her own. The movie ends with an epilogue that jumps ahead in time as Lily and Atlas finally start a relationship together.

Everything in writer Christy Hall's script is pretty much directly lifted from Hoover's book except for one aspect: Lily doesn't fully realize the extent of Ryle's abuse until he attempts to rape her, which is when her repressed memories finally become clear. In the book, Lily is fully aware that Ryle is intentionally hurting her each time he has rage blackouts, but in the movie, the moments of abuse are hazy and excused as freak accidents — until Lily can no longer ignore what's happening. That's because Hall and director/star Baldoni didn't want Lily and audiences to recognize the severity of the abuse until later in the movie for a reason.

"This is a movie about love, and about hope, and about empowerment, and the ability that each of us have to make a different choice," Baldoni tells Entertainment Weekly. "In thinking about that, and what the theme of this movie is about, and what this book is about, I had to find a way to make sure that we were never judging Lily, and we were protecting her character arc, at all costs.

Adapting Hoover's book exactly as it was written "didn't feel right" to Baldoni because watching a movie is a completely different experience than reading a book told from that character's point of view. He also wanted to give audiences enough time to fall in love with Lily and Ryle's relationship before turning on him.

"Showing the abuse the way that it's shown in the book, that early on, by the time Atlas shows up on the screen, there wouldn't be a person in the audience that doesn't judge her for not leaving with him right away," Baldoni explains. "And we couldn't let that happen. I said this from the very beginning, before we ever made the movie: The movie has to be designed in a way where there is a portion of the audience that — even if they know what happened, even now knowing what Ryle did to her — would want her to forgive him. Otherwise, the choice she makes at the end doesn't hit as hard, doesn't land, and isn't as difficult of a choice."

Baldoni felt immense pressure to accurately depict how the difficulty in Lily's decision to leave Ryle. "Because she's choosing to end the cycle, and every single person has a version of that choice in their life," he adds. "We all know how hard that choice is, but the arc of showing that journey had to be very precise in order for that choice to have as much weight at the end. Because we have to not know what she's going to choose."

While the choice may seem black-and-white to someone who isn't living through it, Baldoni wanted to make sure viewers understood that it's never that simple in real life. "It could be so much easier to choose this wealthy doctor who seems like he's so sorry, and says he'll never do it again, and is the biological father of this child," he says. "And that is a choice that we also cannot judge many, many women for making because they do make that choice, and they make that choice for their own protection, or for whatever that reason is, and we are not allowed to judge those women. I wanted to make sure that there was no judgment for how hard of a decision that is for so many women who exist in the world today."

Portraying Lily's experience through repressed memories was also inspired by Baldoni's own life.

"The truth is that I had been on my own healing journey after writing Man Enough, and I had some hard memories come back to me," he says. "You can call them recovered memories, where I was able to see something that had happened to me in an entirely new way. And they came suddenly, and at random times, and it really threw me. The reality that I had created for myself, and the memories that I had then created as a response to the trauma, ended up being something that I created for my protection and not what actually happened."

But Baldoni doesn't want to take any focus away from the women, both in the story and in real life, by talking too much about his own. "What I don't want to do is have any part of this be about me, as like, 'Justin's past and Justin's trauma,'" he says. "This is not what it's about, but that is what inspired it."

He says he had long conversations with the screenwriter about how to infuse that experience into Lily's story. "I wanted the movie to feel like a memory with an unreliable narrator who was showing us what she had experienced," Baldoni says. "I wanted to put the audience into Lily's perspective so that they could really understand what she was going through, and why she would stay with somebody like Ryle, and show what happened one way, but then have the reality of what happened come at a time when it was impossible for both her and the audience to tell any other version."

Holding back on revealing just how bad Ryle's abuse is until later in the movie allowed Baldoni and Hall to not only protect Lily from harsh judgment when she stays with Ryle, but also bring to life a very real experience that happens as a result of trauma. "We're seeing what she's telling herself until the moment she can no longer run from it," Baldoni says. "So we wanted there to be gray areas in the movie that are not gray in the book. The entire script was created backwards from that moment, so I figured out the ending first, and then everything else fell into place."

Once the script was written, the next challenge was filming each moment of abuse and figuring out just how much to show in the first version when Lily doesn't fully recognize what's happening, and then later as she realizes what really happened. On set, as Baldoni was directing and acting, he made sure to "explore different versions of each scene, of what we saw, and how much he gaslights her in that moment, or how much he doesn't." Then when it was time to edit the footage, Baldoni had four different editors working independently on cutting together each scene.

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"I was going from room to room to room, working on each scene because I wanted everybody to give me a different version of what that abuse would look like," he says. "So we had four editorial rooms happening, and everybody was working on the exact same scene because I wanted to see what these two women did, and what these two guys did, and what happens to the scene if we see that Ryle hits her, and what happens to the scene if he actually gaslights her and makes her feel bad for the fact that she was even there. And what happens if we never talk about it at all and it becomes just about what they did together?"

Instead of choosing one version of each scene, Baldoni chose them all. "Through that process of four different edit rooms happening at the same time, we were able to bring them all together to form, as we called it, the greatest hits," he says. "Which is, essentially, what ended up in the film."

It Ends With Us is in theaters now.