Ryan Gosling tried to get Rachel McAdams fired from the hit film The Notebook because he he could not stand working with her, the film’s director says.

Ten years after the iconic love story hit the silver screen, the film’s director Nick Cassavetes has revealed the stars spent much of the film fighting with one another.

Would you take her out of here and bring in another actor to read off camera with me? – Ryan Gosling on Rachel McAdams

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

The former couple at the 2005 MTV Movie Awards couldn’t keep their hands off one another. Photo: Getty

“He’s doing a scene with Rachel and he says, “Would you take her out of here and bring in another actor 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’.”

Cassavetes says he held an impromptu therapy session in his trailer between the pair.

“They started screaming and yelling at each other,” he recalls.

“I smoked a cigarette and everybody came out like, ‘All right let’s do this’. And it got better after that.”

“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.”

Cassavetes also said he was considered “out of his mind” for casting Gosling in the lead role of Noah.

The Notebook was based on Nicholas Sparks bestselling novel of the same name and the roles were hotly contested in Hollywood.

“When I told [New Line Cinema] I wanted to hire Ryan for the lead, they kind of looked at me like I was out of my mind,” Cassavetes told VH1.

“And we found Rachel through an audition process and she was wonderful. A lot of studios wouldn’t have had the courage to put two relatively unknown people in a movie like this. But they did and, gosh, weren’t they terrific?”

Gosling and McAdams started dating once filming wrapped on The Notebook. The relationship lasted four years.