Last year, Blake Lively joined an elite club of actresses who can be considered Woody Allen muses—see also: Emma Stone, Kristen Stewart, and Scarlett Johansson—when she was cast to star in the director’s latest comedy, Café Society. As the actress told us at Cannes this year, she signed onto the project without knowing anything about it—not even its time period, let alone her character—because she was so eager to work with the Oscar winner. And in a new interview, Lively explains what it was like to be directed by the legendary—if beleaguered—filmmaker.

“It’s really cool to work with a director who’s done so much, because he knows exactly what he wants,” Lively tells Hamptons Magazine. “The fact that he does one shot for an entire scene—[and] this could be a scene with eight people and one to two takes—it gives you a level of confidence because when he’s got it, he knows he’s got it.”

Although Allen has a reputation for communicating minimally with his actors, Lively maintains that he was so clear with her about what he wanted, and supportive, that she felt empowered by him.

“He also is really encouraging as to why he cast you, so he’ll say, ‘Say the dialogue that’s written and then you can improvise for a while,’” Lively explains. “And his dialogue is so specific, and it’s speaking in a 1930s dialect and [with period] references, so it’s intimidating to think, Oh, let me just improvise there and hope that my words blend seamlessly alongside Woody Allen’s. Which they clearly wouldn’t and don’t. But he’s very empowering.”

This past May, Allen, Lively, and the rest of the Café Society cast made headlines when Ronan Farrow, Allen’s estranged son, called out the parties who continue to collaborate with Allen in spite of the sexual-abuse allegations made against him. In an essay published in The Hollywood Reporter the same day that Café Society opened the Cannes Film Festival, Farrow wrote:

Amazon paid millions to work with Woody Allen, bankrolling a new series and film. Actors, including some I admire greatly, continue to line up to star in his movies. "It's not personal," one once told me. But it hurts my sister every time one of her heroes like Louis C.K., or a star her age, like Miley Cyrus, works with Woody Allen. Personal is exactly what it is — for my sister, and for women everywhere with allegations of sexual assault that have never been vindicated by a conviction.

When we asked Lively about the essay in Cannes, the actress refused to comment on it, claiming that she had not read the piece and did not want to speak about something with which she was not familiar. Allen was on the same page.

“I never read anything about me, these interviews I do, anything,” Allen told us when we asked about the essay. “I said everything I had to say about that whole issue in The New York Times,” Allen said, referring to the 2014 open letter he wrote in response Dylan Farrow’s open letter. “I have moved so far past it. I never think about it. I work. I said I was never going to comment on it again. I said everything I have to say about it.”