The Notebook director wants to apologize for saying Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling didn't get along on set

It's been 10 years since director Nick Cassavetes let it slip that Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, the stars of his 2004 film The Notebook, didn't get along on set — and he's now offering a mea culpa.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly for a 20th anniversary retrospective on the beloved romance flick, Cassavetes says, "The last time I did an interview on this thing, I spilled the beans on that. I regretted it. Everyone's like, why are you telling that? I'm like, I don't know. It caught me on a bad day, but if [McAdams and Gosling] are around, I apologize to you guys. I shouldn't have spilled the beans."

In a 2014 interview with VH1, the director revealed that the stars, who played one of the silver screen's now most legendary couples in the hit film, initially had no love lost for each other on set.

“Maybe I’m not supposed to tell this story, but they were really not getting along one day on set. Really not,” Cassavetes said at the time. “Ryan came to me, and there’s 150 people standing in this big scene, and he says, ‘Nick come here.’ 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.'"

He continued, "[Later] we went into a room with a producer; they started screaming and yelling at each other. I walked out … 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.”

As they say, all's well that ends well. In fact, despite mixed reviews and topping out at No. 4 at the domestic box office, The Notebook (available on digital platforms) would ultimately go on to be considered something of a defining romantic film of a generation and continues to find new audiences today, with a Tony Award-nominated Broadway musical adaptation debuting earlier this year.

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Of course, things got better for McAdams and Gosling, too — the two would eventually go on to date from 2005 to 2007, as Cassavetes notes to EW. "They fell in love, and became a wonderful, wonderful fiery couple. I still think they got lots of respect and love for each other, but in the beginning, it wasn't like that," he says, adding, "but they're both the greatest actors in the world, and some of the things that I asked them to play were so difficult, and there was nothing they couldn't do."

In fact, he credits the "supersonic" McAdams and Gosling with the movie's staying power. Says Cassavetes, "If you want to know why The Notebook is considered kind of a romantic classic, the answers are Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and that's the beginning and the end of it."