Along for the Ride director talks working with Sarah Dessen to make the perfect summer movie
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Get ready to feel the ocean breeze, smell the salt in the air, and lather up the sunscreen from your couch, because Along for the Ride is kicking off summer in the best possible way.
Netflix's film adaptation of Sarah Dessen's 2009 novel follows smart-but-lonely Auden (Emma Pasarow) as she decides to spend the summer before college living with her estranged father in the small seaside town of Colby. A night owl, Auden sneaks away every evening to read on her own, and soon meets a fellow insomniac, the mysterious Eli (Belmont Cameli). As the two get closer while the rest of the town sleeps, they embark on a nightly quest to help Auden experience all the fun parts of being a teen that she's missed out on. And doesn't that just sound like the makings of an epic, swoon-worthy summer romance?
To All the Boys I've Loved Before screenwriter Sofia Alvarez makes her directorial debut with Along for the Ride. While she feels comfortable in the YA romance genre, she was most excited to create the perfect summer movie, and celebrate female friendships first and foremost. Below, Alvarez opens up about working with Dessen to adapt the novel, why she made so many changes to the story, and more.
Emily V. Aragones/Netflix
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When did you first read Along for the Ride?
SOFIA ALVAREZ: I had actually not read Sarah Dessen's book previous to becoming involved in this project, but the producers, Bryan Unkeless and Alyssa Rodrigues, found me and sent it to me, and I read it then and just could immediately see the movie in it. In some ways, it was a benefit that I hadn't read Sarah Dessen in my youth because then I wasn't super tied to my ideas of the book when I was young; I was coming to it fresh and knowing I wanted to adapt it, and so the very first time I read it, I was imagining how I would adapt and translate it for film.
As you read it for the first time, what made you want to develop it into a movie?
I have always really loved those nostalgic summertime movies that I grew up watching, and I think I immediately saw the potential for this movie to be one of those. I had said in my initial pitch that I really wanted it to be the kind of summer movie where you smell the sunscreen through the screen, or you could feel when the air conditioning is on too high, or it has a soundtrack that everyone is singing in their cars this summer when they're driving to the beach. I wanted it to be one of those timeless summer movies. And then beyond that, I just found Auden to be a really interesting character who I had some sort of odd overlaps with in terms of my own upbringing: I had a mother who's a professor and a father who's a writer, and this idea of always feeling like the kid at the adults' party was something that was very personal to me, and I could latch on to it in that way as well.
What were some of your favorite summer movies that you used as inspiration?
A movie that maybe wasn't one of the first that came to mind when I originally thought of it, but as I was developing a feel for the movie, I thought a lot about Now and Then. Do you remember that movie?
Yes! I loved that movie.
That felt like the girl's answer to a movie like The Goonies in a lot of ways, and I remember seeing that and just being so obsessed with it and then going back to watching it as an adult when I was prepping for this movie and still really loving it now in my 30s. And then, in terms of the classic nostalgic summer movies, Fast Times [at Ridgemont High], of course, comes to mind. That just felt so summer.
And then more recently, a movie that I love that I saw as an adult is this movie I Used to Be Darker, which is a Matt Porterfield indie movie, and I love the representation of female friendship in that movie. I love the way the girls sort of hang off one another, and they feel very real. Even the way they dress just seems so authentic to that age and those relationships. We talked about that one a lot in prep too. That movie takes place in Baltimore, and I saw it in Los Angeles, and I remember walking out of the theater and being on Hollywood Boulevard and finding it so odd that I wasn't in Baltimore. That's how evocative it was in sense of place.
With Along for the Ride, it was super important to us to have that same sense of place with North Carolina because Sarah Dessen is from North Carolina, and all her books are set there, and we were lucky enough to be able to film there. Immediately when we all got to location, it felt like we were in Colby, in this fictional beach town that Sarah Dessen created.
Emily V. Aragones/NETFLIX
How involved was Sarah in adapting this book into a movie?
She's a producer on the movie. Something that was really wonderful was the very first thing that our producers had me do after I was hired was talk to Sarah. Before I wrote a word, Sarah and I had this really incredible three-hour conversation where I asked her what was really important to her, what she wanted to make sure was maintained, what she would be really sad to lose. And she said to me, "The book is the book and the movie's the movie, and no matter what the movie is, the book is not going away." She really gave me license to do what I thought was best in terms of choosing what to keep and what to let go. That's a real gift for an author to give a screenwriter.
And then also she wrote this book when she was a new mom, and I was adapting it when I was a new mom, so we connected immediately on those feelings you have early in postpartum. The idea that we were working on the same story at the exact same time in our lives and the idea of motherhood being a huge part of both the book and the film felt really special and made it easy to dig into those places.
What was the most important part of the story that you wanted to bring to the screen?
Something that Sarah had said in that first conversation was that the original title of the book was The World of Girl, and I thought that was really incredible. This story is, of course, a teen rom-com, so our central story is this idea of falling in love. But it's really more a coming-of-age story because there's so much going on that's not about the romance, and Auden's relationship with the women in the book, with her mom, with her stepmom, and then with those other girls she works with, takes a lot longer to gel and to find its voice than the relationship with Eli does.
The relationship with Eli is pretty immediate, and then it's through that relationship with him that she's able to further her relationships with all these other women. And I love that the movie focuses on her and Maggie [Laura Kariuki] too because it's the friends you make when you're 18 that stay in your life long-term, whereas those romantic relationships you have when you're 18 are really interesting pieces of self-discovery in your life, but not necessarily the lasting personal relationships as you get older.
Emily V. Aragones/NETFLIX
Can you walk me through the changes you made to the story and why you made them?
The biggest thing we did was that we got rid of Auden's brother character, and that was something that we had tried to maintain in the script and even in filming. But once we got into the edit, it was just really important for this whole journey and this whole idea that Auden wanted to try to be a different version of herself to be her idea. In the book, it was sort of a push from her brother, and having it not originate with her just felt not exactly in line with keeping her as active as we wanted to be and understanding that this was something she really wanted and not something that she was being sort of forced into.
And then the other thing that was a necessary change but again, we didn't find until the edit, was that Auden is a bit more rough around the edges, both in the book and in my first draft of the screenplay and some of our filming, where she's more overtly judgmental. She comes off as more dismissive of Colby than we eventually found in the movie. A reason for that is that in the book, you have all this backstory and internal monologue to show that this is a character whose actions sometimes are in direct opposition to how she's feeling or what she wants, and you can get away with that in a novel because she's explaining it to us. But then, when we were watching her in some of these scenes, and you didn't have her explaining, "I really want this thing that I'm pushing up against and pushing away," it was hard to understand her intentions. Rather than having her seem dismissive, we had to just shift it a little bit so she seemed more awkward or unable to connect, rather than trying to shut people out out of fear. It's tricky, right? Because you have to see what she wants, but that she's not good at it and getting in her own way, but you can't think that she doesn't want it.
How difficult was it to find actors who had the right chemistry for Auden and Eli?
Luckily, once we saw Emma and Belmont together, everyone was in unanimous agreement that their chemistry was what we wanted and needed. Before we saw the two of them together, people had different ideas about who had the best chemistry with whom, but then once it was Emma and Bel on their Zoom chem read, and Bel was telling Emma a story about his favorite movie from childhood — which I'd asked him to do because we were about to read the drive-in scene where he's showing her The Princess Bride. He was just telling her a story from his own life, and the way she was responding and the way they were looking at each other, even over Zoom, it was clear that these two had it.
And then, on set and off, they've developed a very deep friendship with one another and really love one another. It's been fun to watch them both on camera and off because you can just see how good of friends they are. And it was both of their first movie and it was my first movie too, so the three of us had that in common, which made it really special for all of us, that we were all going through this thing at the same time together, and that allowed all of us to really trust one another.
Along for the Ride is now streaming on Netflix.
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