‘Along for the Ride’ Filmmaker Sofia Alvarez on the Netflix Rom-Com’s ‘Very Real’ Ending

thewrap.com:

. David, who’s our art director and who plays Clyde was a punk DJ in Malibu in the ‘80s, and so we had like lengthy conversations about what that song should be. […] I think that place is magical when they walk in and then I think when that song comes on, it becomes even more magical.”After getting to know Auden, Eli suggests she put herself out there and do a quest full of things she’s never done before, sort of like a bucket list. “Eli is someone who Auden connects with very quickly and they feel comfortable with one another very quickly, but it takes her a beat longer to sort of find that same comfort with the women in the movie both with Maggie, the other girls she becomes friends with in Clementine’s, but then also with her stepmother,” Alvarez said. “So [it’s] tying those two storylines together, and having it be like a romance, which is I think why we all come to these YA films is you want to see them get together, but this idea of female friendship was an equally important part and it’s something that was just as important to Auden to find in Colby.”Despite the fact that “To All the Boys” came out just four years ago, Alvarez says the landscape in which she wrote “Along for the Ride” had markedly changed.

And adding on directing duties challenged her — in a good way.“When I was writing ‘To All the Boys,’ I was just the screenwriter, and I was writing it before this huge boom of like teen rom-coms having their moment,” she said. “And then with ‘Along for the Ride,’the biggest difference was, this is kind of an established genre at this point, but also I knew I was going to be directing it.