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Interview: Derek Cianfrance on The Place Beyond the Pines, Ryan Gosling, and More

The director talked about Ryan Gosling, family, fateful collaborations, and how, in art and life, choices mean everything.

Interview: Derek Cianfrance on The Place Beyond the Pines, Ryan Gosling, and More
Photo: Focus Features

Ryan Gosling may have started to truly turn heads with 2004’s The Notebook, and netted the Academy’s attention with his work in 2006’s Half Nelson, but his current surge as both actor and star can probably be traced to 2010’s Blue Valentine, an aching romantic drama that firmly hoisted the hunk’s rep, and may still boast his best performance. It was a performance coached out by writer-director Derek Cianfrance, a relative unknown at the time, who, this year, returns with The Place Beyond the Pines, a sprawling saga of bloodlines and ripple effects that reunites the filmmaker with Gosling. It also features Bradley Cooper, Dane DeHaan, Rose Byrne, Bruce Greenwood, Ray Liotta, and Gosling’s squeeze, Eva Mendes, in a shifting trio of tales that breaks the usual rules of narrative. It’s a big story, with big twists, and, according to Cianfrance, it sprouted from a growing desire to push himself further.

The director—who began working professionally in his early 20s, and has a lot of documentary experience under his belt, profiling the likes of Diddy and Run-D.M.C. for television—adheres to a philosophy about drive and perfection of craft, a philosophy he can credit to his father, which, given his new film’s paternal themes, is only too appropriate. For The Place Beyond the Pines, Cianfrance carries over a handsomely gritty look many will recognize from Blue Valentine, but he gives himself far more room to work, a raise of stakes that doesn’t seem to have daunted the filmmaker. Recently, Cianfrance took some time to chat about his blooming filmography, which, evidently, points to even broader projects to come. He talked about Gosling, family, fateful collaborations, and how, in art and life, choices mean everything.

One might say that Blue Valentine charts the epic evolution of a relationship, but The Place Beyond the Pines has a much more epic feel in terms of scope. Were you determined to be much more ambitious this time around?

Yeah. I mean, I started writing this movie before I did Blue Valentine, but I felt like I had to finish that one before I did this one, just as part of my own evolution. Blue Valentine is about intimacy on a very microscopic level. It’s about two people. This movie has 56 speaking roles and takes place over two generations, with three stories. But at its heart, it’s still that intimate story about people, and families, and their secrets, and these personal tragedies that they’re trying to avoid but just keep running into. With Blue Valentine, by the time I made it, I honestly didn’t want to, because it was an old idea. I had been working on it for 12 years. I came up with the idea when I was 24. [The Place Beyond the Pines] is more close to who I am as a man now. It’s about me dealing with my experience of being a father. It’s more personal. And I should also say that, as an artist, I think it’s important that you push your own boundaries. I was interviewing Danica Patrick a few years back, because I was doing a lot of documentaries, and I asked her, “How do you go so fast? How did you do this in your life?” And she said that her whole life she’d always known how fast she could drive, so whenever she went out to drive, she would drive to her limit, and then go a little faster. When she did that, oftentimes she would crash, but she was also able to push her boundaries by going to that dangerous place. So that’s been a theory of mine—to risk failure, and to put yourself in a place that is ambitious. That’s how you push yourself forward and that’s how you push the cinematic medium forward too. After Blue Valentine, I had a number of offers to make these pre-approved ideas—movies that were already okayed by people and had a lot of money behind them. But I felt it was my responsibility as an artist to go back to the well, and to do something that was really personal and challenging.

The red jacket Ryan Gosling wears at the start of the film becomes very emblematic of his character, and it recalls the scorpion jacket he donned in Drive. Is there any intentional nod or connection happening there?

No. I hadn’t seen Drive when I made this movie, and I had been writing this a number of years before Drive even came out. I think any surface similarities between this movie and Drive are just that: surface. I think Nic Refn and myself are very different filmmakers with very different interests. The jacket is a motorcycle-riding jacket, but it also reminded us of the Michael Jackson “Thriller” jacket. Plus, he’s an entertainer in this movie, so the blond hair, and the jacket—that’s him playing this character, Handsome Luke. And if you notice, in that opening shot, the Heartthrobs also have the dyed-blond hair and the red jackets. We thought of them as like a boy band, or like the matinee idols that artists like the Shangri-Las would sing about.

The film’s first act, specifically, has a really strong kinetic energy. Would you say some of that stems from the relationship you’d already developed with Gosling?

Yes. I remember I was at Ryan’s agent’s house back in 2007. We were having dinner and we were talking about Blue Valentine, and I kept asking him, “What are your fantasies, man? You’ve done so much in your life—what haven’t you done?” And he said, “Well, I always wanted to rob a bank, but I’ve always been too scared of jail.” And I said, “Really? I’m writing a movie about a bank robber. Have you given any thought to how you would do it?” And he said, “Yes, well, I would do it on a motorcycle. Because I could go in with a helmet on and no one would know who I was, and motorcycles are fast and agile, so I could get out of there quickly. And then I’d have a U-Haul truck parked about four blocks away, and I put the bike in the back of the U-Haul truck, because people would be looking for a motorcycle, not a U-Haul.” And I said, “That’s crazy. That’s exactly what I wrote into my script. I’ll make your dreams come true.” And that was one of those moments when I knew we were destined to work together. We had a lot of similar ideas.

And, of course, this movie has a lot more action in it than anything you’ve done previously.

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Yeah, well, in terms of how the whole thing works with that first segment—I’m dealing with guns and violence in this movie. As a filmgoer and as a father, I’m really turned off by violence in movies. I don’t know when violence became such a cinematic thing. I guess Sam Peckinpah? I love Peckinpah’s violence, because I feel like he’s really riding in the flames with his characters, but too often, nowadays, I’m seeing this fetishized, cool violence. If I have to see another slow-motion bullet come out of a gun and pierce someone’s skull, I’m gonna throw up. I can’t stand the way violence is dealt with in movies. So I wanted to put a violent moment in my movie that would actually have an effect. And you can see, in the first part of the film, all of the choices, and all of the adrenaline, that leads someone to a violent moment. And then I wanted that violent moment to come out, and I wasn’t interested in the violence itself, but the narrative of it—how a gun could come in and actually derail this life, this story that you’ve been watching. And then, as an audience member, as in real life, if you’ve experienced tragic violence, you’re forced to see that there’s no going back. You have to go forward. I wanted the viewer to experience that effect, of seeing violence approach, and then having to stick with the reverberation of it.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that the act of violence you speak of is killing off Gosling’s character very early in the film. It’s a bold and startling move that really forces the film to pivot. Can you talk a bit further about how you came to that decision?

Well, I saw Psycho 20 years ago for the first time, and I was absolutely blown away. I’d always known there was a shower scene, but I had no idea that you had to stay with Janet Leigh for 30 minutes or so before she went into that shower. And I thought that the baton being passed from her to Tony Perkins in that movie is just really one of those cinematic moments that are transcendent. I thought about that for a long time—that baton pass. This movie’s about legacy, and I had a similar idea about structure. Then I saw Abel Ganz’s Napoleon, and I started to think about making a triptych movie. I realized I could make a movie about legacy, and the passing of the torch, and the echoes of choices that are made.

In regard to those generational echoes, and the relationships between fathers and sons, how do they reflect your relationship with your father?

I have a great relationship with my father. He’s a much better father than I could ever be. He was always very supportive of me, and he taught me a lot about how to be an artist. He taught me how to finish. He had me mow the lawn, and our lawn was always the nicest on the block, so he taught me how to do things with a lot of care and responsibility. I was more thinking about this whole generational thing in terms of, like, ancestry. I was reading a lot of Jack London at the time I was writing the script, thinking about the brutality through which my ancestors had to live to survive, and thinking about, now, being a domesticated man, and eating with a knife and a fork, but still feeling that animal inside of me. So that’s pretty much where it came from.

There’s a lot of moral ambiguity here, as even the protagonists, like Bradley Cooper’s character, lace their good deeds with ulterior motives, like ambition. Apart from Ray Liotta’s corrupt cop, do you see the film as having a villain?

No, because I don’t really know villains in my life, just as I’ve never met a hero. I’ve met a lot of people who are both sides of that, who are pretty duplicitous. People I know don’t live in a black-and-white world, they live in a gray world. So I’m trying to have my characters live in that same kind of gray place. In terms of Bradley Cooper’s character, he set out, early on, to be his own man. He doesn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. His father is kind of royalty in his small town, and he expects that his son will assume this mantle that’s been set before him. But his son wants to be his own man, so he tries to become a cop, but he isn’t meant to be that. He’s meant to be his father’s son. So, he’s trying to avoid his own destiny, and in doing that, he acts, in one moment, with too much eagerness to prove who he is, and that mistake creates this kind of toxic shame or corruption in him. Instead of dealing with that, and fixing his own corruption, he fixes the corruption outside of himself. But that avoidance comes back to him. I think Bradley Cooper’s character is a good man, I just think he’s corrupted. He chooses to save himself. I think, in America, oftentimes that’s rewarded; you look out for yourself.

You were only 23 when your first film, Brother Tied, played at festivals like Sundance. Is there any advice you’d offer a young filmmaker trying to break into the festival circuit?

Ha. When I made my first film, yes, it got into Sundance, but there would be like six people in the audience watching. And afterward, I was put into this kind of cinematic desert to pay for my cinematic sins, because the movie was too egocentric; it was too much this megalomaniac approach to filmmaking, too much just about me. And the lessons I learned there…I got into documentaries just to put food on my family’s table, and in making them, I went outside myself and was able to tell stories about other people, and fall in love with other people, and kind of humble myself as a filmmaker. And then, when I was able to get off the bench and start making my own films again, I was able to make films about people. I don’t know how that goes as far as advice for others, but that’s my personal story of my own evolution. I think, when you go to these festivals, there’s so much competition, so many people making films, that when you step up to the plate, nowadays, you kind of have to knock it out of the park. You can’t get the base hit. Back in the day, you could make a lot of mediocre films before you made a masterpiece. Now, the pressure’s on because you don’t have as many opportunities. It’s difficult, but I would say don’t let that pressure force you to swing too hard. Because if you swing too hard, you might muff it, like I did on my first film.

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You also have Metalhead on the horizon, about a drummer who blows out his eardrums and needs to adapt. I’m assuming there’s some Beethoven influence there.

Well, yes, but also personal influence. I grew up as a drummer and now I have tinnitus. I never hear silence anymore. There’s always a ringing in my ears. I also think the deaf world is a very cinematic world. People are listening with their eyes, and cinema is built out of visuals. But that film was one I started making before I shot Blue Valentine, and right now, it’s sort of in a state of abandonment. Because it’s hard to go backward.

A visual motif of A Place Beyond the Pines is roads, and the paths that characters follow or forge for themselves. We’re eventually left with one character heading down yet another road. At the risk of asking too much or squashing ambiguity, where do you see that character going?

Well, I like open endings, like the end of Five Easy Pieces, where characters leave and go back into their world. They leave you. At the end of Blue Valentine I did the same thing. It’s like The Searchers, you know? It’s the horizon. Life goes on. I like movies with these endings because audiences can have their own answer to that question. I’m not really a message filmmaker. I make films to try to provoke an audience or try to instigate feelings and experiences in people that they can take on into their own lives. That said, the ending [of The Place Beyond the Pines], for me, is a very hopeful one.

R. Kurt Osenlund

R. Kurt Osenlund is a creative director and account supervisor at Mark Allen & Co. He is the former editor of Out magazine.

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