It Ends With Us is the first Colleen Hoover novel adapted for the big screen. The Columbia Pictures film tells the story of Lily Bloom (Blake Lively), a woman who overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life in Boston and chase a lifelong dream of opening her own business. A chance meeting with charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni) sparks an intense connection, but as the two fall deeply in love, Lily begins to see sides of Ryle that remind her of her parents’ relationship. The feature was directed by Justin Baldoni and produced by Alex Saks, Jamey Heath, Blake Lively and Christy Hall.
Barry Peterson served as director of photography on the project, with Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan handling the edit. Here, Flaherty (pictured) talks about her editing set up and the challenges of working on this feature.
Hi Oona! Can you tell us a bit about your editing setup and some of the tools you rely on?
“My personal workstation setup depends on whether I’m working from the editing suite or from home. In an office, I work with three monitors on an adjustable (stand-to-sit) desk, plus a large client monitor off to the side for the director. I like to have the director behind me and off to the side if possible so that I can turn to speak with them face-to-face. We typically request an LCR three-speaker setup, although that can depend on space and project. At home I have less space, so I downsize to two larger monitors on my adjustable desk, a smaller client monitor and a stereo, two-speaker setup. Typically, my assistants and I are all connected to a shared storage space called the NEXIS. This is where all of our media and the project lives. From home, I use Jump Desktop to connect to the office system, which works well if you have fast internet. I love ScriptSync for when I work with the director, and the DeNoise audio tool is very helpful for dailies that have a lot of background audio that you want to clean up.”
What was your approach to editing It Ends With Us?
“I think as an editor I’m always looking for what feels truthful. Without truthfulness, there is no bottom to a film – nothing to hold it up, and you risk losing your audience’s connection to the characters, the story and the overall film. It Ends With Us was such a complex and tough story to tell and it was filled with very flawed and complicated characters. When working through the film, I kept checking in with each character’s ‘truth.’ Why are they making these choices – to be in love, to trust, to not trust, to stay, to leave, etc.
“Especially with our main characters, it was important to have each moment with them represent more than just being a victim or an abuser because that would have simplified the kind of story we were trying to tell, and which Colleen Hoover wrote in the book. By grounding each character, we have some understanding as to why they are making the choices they are, and we can go with them on the journey. It allows for us to have complicated feelings about them, which is what we wanted for this particular film.”
Is there a specific scene from the film that stands out to you?
“The birth of Emmy is one of my favorite scenes in the film - beautifully acted and shot. Because this was a place in the film that was wrought with complexity, I wanted to give a moment of breath and simplicity. I didn’t want there to be time for contemplation of action – but I did want the scene to offer tiny, simple moments that made the audience both reflect on these characters' journey and reflect how in-the-moment humans typically are during a birth. I decided to try it with a beautiful piano piece and no additional sound to help draw closer attention to the minutiae, and, I hope, allow space for the audience to experience the scene in their own ‘words.’
“This scene beautifully leads us into what I think is the most impactful scene in the film – the divorce scene. We come out of this beautifully-moving scene of birth into the silence and stillness of the hospital room. The feeling of hope (hope for Lily, hope for Ryle, hope for Lily and Ryle, hope for this tiny baby – it could be any or all of those) is lingering and our characters are newly bonded over the birth of their daughter, and yet there is distance because of everything that came before. As scripted, it was important to have Lily invite Ryle back into her intimate space with their daughter and once he enters that space, we tried to stay in the closer coverage as much as possible to both see how Lily is processing this moment in her life and making the central decision of this film, as well as to give Ryle that moment to take in his daughter. It’s a heartbreaking scene, and Justin and Blake deliver an incredibly truthful breadth of human emotion through the scene. And although we believe most of the audience is rooting for Lily to divorce him, I still think many people had compassion and sympathy for Ryle’s character, and a slight hope for them to make it through.
“It’s such an impactful moment because of its complexity, and deep emotions – the stakes are extremely high for Lily and now her daughter. Ultimately, as filmmakers, we wanted it to empower people in abusive relationships to leave those relationships by seeing Lily make that very difficult decision and to understand just how hard, but right, it can be. So not only is it a great scene artistically, it’s a scene that hopefully had an impact beyond the screen.”
What were some of the challenges you encountered, and how did you overcome them?
“Developing the character of Lily was probably our biggest challenge on the film. As our main character, Lily needed to cover a lot of ground, emotionally and logistically, to make it from the beginning of the film to the end. We were essentially following three main intertwining storylines – flashbacks to young Lily meeting Atlas and witnessing her mother’s abuse; her entire romantic and abusive relationship with Ryle; and her relationship with own identity, which included her flower shop, her new best friend, and reuniting with adult Atlas. So it was a lot to squeeze into a two-hour film. It was important to us that each of those storylines had time to grow and that Lily was not just defined by the people around her (especially the men), but that she had some ownership over her own identity. I think because it was such a challenging part, there wasn’t always consensus on her portrayal and the dailies overall presented her in a somewhat muddied fashion. So, we spent a lot of our editorial time finding and fine-tuning the character of Lily, and mining out the moments that both Blake Lively and Isabela Ferrer (young Lily) provided for the character of Lily that helped us understand who she was and how and why she moved through the film in the way that she did.
“We actually had a very unique opportunity as editors in this effort. Production of the film was shut down due to the writer’s strike, which gave us an opportunity to put together an initial cut of what was shot and assess what we were missing. Robb Sullivan, the other editor, director Justin Baldoni, and I took some weeks watching through the scenes we had and slating in the scenes we still needed in order to find any gaps that we may want to add to the script when production resumed. Of course, no writing could be done, but we played with using stock images, footage and other creative inserts to get an idea of what might work, or what we might want to add to bring Lily’s character more to life and give her more depth. It’s not often filmmakers get that kind of time to sit with the film in editorial with the opportunity to go back into so many days of production with that kind of perspective.”
Can you talk about your collaboration with Robb Sullivan and some of the other departments?
“Robb Sullivan and I were put together on this project having never met before. However, because of the time constraints that the film had due to the strike, Justin and the producers felt it would be advantageous to have two editors working simultaneously on the film. Robb and I really complemented one another in how we worked on the film. As the dailies came in, we would each gravitate toward certain scenes and take a first pass on those, then pass them to each other for notes. Or, if we felt inspired by the other’s cut, we’d take a stab at the scene ourselves, then review both versions and do what Robb coined, ‘our greatest hits’ of the scene – combining the best moments of each cut together.
“It was a really fun, collaborative way to work, and it went really smoothly because neither of us have big egos. We would sometimes have things that we disagreed on or wanted to fight for in our version of the scene, but if that happened, we’d discuss it, bring in the assistants sometimes and ultimately (as with all scenes), show it to Justin to get his thoughts. As we got deeper into post, and things got pretty hectic with cutting and juggling visual effects, sound, music and all things that go into finishing a film, we were so in sync with one another that we were able to divide and conquer.
“If I was in the edit with Justin, Robb would run visual effects meetings and we’d check in at the end of the day to go over what we both accomplished. Robb is also one of the most optimistic and positive people I’ve ever met, so every day was fun and full of good energy, which makes a huge difference when working in this intense business.”