I Genuinely Can't Watch "The Idea Of You" The Same Way Again After Learning These 15 Facts About The Movie
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🚨Warning: There are MASSIVE spoilers ahead for The Idea of You!🚨
1.First, Nicholas Galitzine, who stars as Hayes Campbell, said that his chemistry test was "the most daunting audition I've ever been asked to do." He explained that he had to perform several scenes with Anne, "convince her to do an improvised dance," and "serenade everyone."
2.In fact, Nicholas and Anne Hathaway met for the first time during their chemistry read. "Annie's someone who perfectly encapsulates the type of career that I want for myself in the sense that she's incredibly versatile. She really is so gifted," Nicholas said. "She's obviously this extremely radiant, beautiful human being." He also said that he and Anne "just immediately had an understanding for each other, and both saw the potential fun that [they] could have with these characters."
"She was wearing these silver space boots, like high-heeled things, and everyone was just kind of commenting on the glow and the glimmer that was emanating from these boots," he recalled. "So I kind of went into this room and it became very human and chill very quickly, which was nice. Anyone who's been in an audition room knows it's a very scary place, very vulnerable."
3.Anne was very involved with choosing the art for Solène's gallery. She partnered with Amy Williams, The Idea of You's production designer, to make the gallery feel "authentic." Together, they sought out local artists to find pieces. Along with finding art for Solène's home and office, they also ended up building three different art shows for the gallery.
"One thing I'm really proud of as a production designer is that I use real artists in almost all of my films," Amy explained. "That's hard to do these days with legal clearance, but it's so important for shaping the character, what they have on their walls. When you see a boring abstract, it's too safe of a choice. And I don't like making safe choices. I like making daring choices!"
"I always love giving artists exposure and giving them the money that we can offer to use their art because artists are often so exploited," she says. "It was really fun going on studio visits and meeting artists in Atlanta," she added.
4.Nicholas, Jordan Aaron Hall, Jaiden Anthony, Raymond Cham Jr., and Viktor White, aka August Moon, bonded by having "a lot of game nights playing Mario Kart." During filming, they all stayed in the same hotel, which helped make the band's friendship translate onscreen.
"It's just spending time with each other and creating that very sort of palpable friendship with each other. It's all those little moments on stage that you see between them that I think really sells it," Nicholas said.
"There were countless nights playing Mario Kart in my hotel room and going out for meals, playing Nerf wars with Nerf guns down the hallways. We’re probably bad hotel guests …but still to this day, we hang out with each other all the time," he mentioned in another interview.
5.Nicholas and the rest of the August Moon members all had to participate in "boyband bootcamp" to prep for the movie. "Boyband bootcamp looks like a lot of dancing," Nicholas explained. "Doing the choreo over and over and over again just so you remember it. There was a lot of it. We had six numbers of choreo to do, not all of it made it into the movie."
"It was pretty grueling because we didn't have a huge amount of prep to get to grips with everything. It was a crash course, which was a lot of fun," he added.
6.Nicholas actually sings all the August Moon songs in the movie and said that even though he had "such fun" doing it, he probably won't make the leap to becoming a pop star.
"I have some friends who are musicians and pop stars," he said. "And the lifestyle to me — it’s so crazy. I have such admiration for them because whether you’re going on tour or performing in front of 80,000 people, it’s just entirely different. Acting is quite insular in a way, whereas being a musician, you have to give all your energy outwards. I had such fun doing the music side of it. But whether I can be a pop star in real life, I think is maybe a different thing altogether."
7.Several of August Moon's songs, including the lead single "Dance Before We Walk," were written by Cark Falk and Savan Kotecha, aka the team behind One Direction's "What Makes You Beautiful."
8.The film adaptation actually has a different ending than the book. In the book, Solène and Hayes break up, part ways, and go on with their separate lives. This also happens in the movie, but we also catch a glimpse of them both five years later when they reconnect at Solène's gallery, and they get the happy ending their book counterparts never had. Robinne Lee, the book's author, wasn't actually involved with the change, though. "The book is a book, and the movie is a movie," she said. "You have to step away and let the filmmakers do what they're going to do and not get too concerned with what it is you've created and when it stops because it's a completely different medium."
"Adaptations are always a tricky thing because books are so much more cerebral, and you're reading the character's thoughts, and it's hard to convey character's thoughts in a film, so there's going to be changes," she added. "It's America — Hollywood's going to do what they're going to do, and they're going to throw a happy ending on everything. I don't know why. You hope they'll keep to what you've written because it meant something to you, but you also have to think about the box office and viewers and what their audience is going to want to see. Even though there's obviously a huge overlap between readers and movie viewers, I think when you are gearing something towards a movie audience, it's a slightly different fanbase, and maybe American viewers are not ready for [a sad ending]."
And then, when asked if her book's characters could've had a happy ending too, she said, "I mean, the movie ending could have happened in the book too, I suppose, years down the line. But that's not the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to make a point about how, as women, we put others' happiness before our own. She chose her daughter before Hayes, and she was also very aware that she was disappointing her best friend, Lulit, her business partner and the co-owner of her gallery, which was suffering from the Hayes relationship. She had to put those other things first. It would've been lovely if she could have balanced all three, but at that point in time, she couldn't."
9.The Coachella scenes were actually filmed in Atlanta. Production recreated the music festival in a field and hired about 500 extras to play fans. Nicholas explained, "[Coachella] was filmed at 3 a.m. in winter in Atlanta, and we had about 500 extras who we placed throughout at different points of the concert. And even performing in front of 500 people is very anxiety-inducing."
10.The movie's beach scenes were shot in Georgia, too. “In reality, we’re in Savannah, Georgia. We’re in the water, we’re freezing," Nicholas said.
11.In creating Hayes Campbell's signature look, costume designer Jacqueline Demeterio sought out inspiration from Harry Styles, Matty Healy, and Paul Klein from the band LANY.
"Nick Galitzine and I both wanted this band to really be its own thing, so it was never based off anybody in particular," she explained. "There were the obvious Harry Styles references, but it was also inspired by Matty Healy of The 1975, and Paul Klein of LANY. We needed it to look organic on Nick and on his body and with the way he carries himself."
12.And Nicholas loved some of his costume pieces so much that he ended up buying the exact same pieces for himself.
"He purchased not the actual costumes, but he would ask me where I sourced certain pieces and then would go buy them for himself," Jacqueline added. "The Loewe pants he wears at the gallery scene and the Isabel Marant cardigan, he bought it! And also a few of the T-shirts. There were definitely a few things he bought for himself."
13.In the scene where Solène travels to New York to meet up with Hayes at his hotel, Anne actually ended up wearing her own pair of Alaïa shoes with her costume. "We were in a fitting, and she just said, 'I have the perfect shoes for this outfit.' It was so important for her to feel sexy in that look, and it was important for that scene," Jacqueline said.
"Everything in Annie’s costumes was carefully collected and curated so well," she added. "There’s this Fendi two-piece—that everybody thinks is a dress but is actually two pieces—that she wore under a Dior trench, and she wears it with these sky-high Alaïa shoes. By the way, I haven’t told anybody this: Those are Annie’s personal shoes. ... I remember seeing a cut of that scene after they shot it, and I told her that I was just blown away. She needed to feel unbelievable in that outfit, and the costume really did it for her."
14.The moment where Hayes kisses Solène's stomach was Nicholas's idea, but when filming, the moment didn't exactly go as planned. "I’m thinking, OK, I’m gonna do something very sexy here. I’m gonna kiss her stomach, and people are gonna go wild for it," he explained. "At the moment I go to do it, she dips her stomach below the water, and I swallow a whole mouthful of seawater and start choking." The sexy moment did make it into the final cut of the movie, though...minus the choking.
15.Finally, in the movie, Solène refers to herself as "a people-pleaser from New Jersey," and Anne revealed that she came up with that line. "I think I’m a former people pleaser from New Jersey," she said. "So much of the reason I was drawn to acting is that it was an outlet for expression that I could not find on my own."
She's shared that she already relates to Solène on many levels as well.
The Idea of You is streaming on Prime Video.
