BOP Interview: Derek Cianfrance
By Ryan Mazie
March 27, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Cianfrance’s creativeness is not only seen in his screenplay’s margins. Ryan Gosling, playing a carnival motorcycle stunt rider, and Bradley Cooper, as a police officer with bigger aspirations in the corrupt force, co-star in the film but do not share the screen. Placing the legacy of fathers and sons into an extraordinary light through a triptych arrangement with three distinct arcs (and a 15 year jump into the future), The Place Beyond the Pines manages to surprise even in its chronological format.
Writing over 37 drafts, Cianfrance’s controlled on-set improv expanded the story even further. During the roundtable Cianfrance touches on a myriad of topics from his on-set style, his documentarian background, and the intimacy of his films.
Cianfrance on making the extras just as convincing as the lead actors
Derek Cianfrance: I’m always trying to find this collision between real life and fantasy, fiction and nonfiction. I’m always trying to take actors and kind of drop them in this aquarium and see how they swim. There are real cops in this movie alongside Bradley Cooper. Real judges are up on the stand. I can’t teach someone how to be a judge, but they can teach me. The abortion doctor in Blue Valentine is a real abortion doctor. I come from a documentary background so I look for the real world to inform my movies. I’m trying to find that collision.
…My concept was that I would put all real tellers who had been robbed before [in the bank heist scenes]. So we shoot the first take of this and Ryan Gosling comes in and no one was scared. Everyone was just relieved that it was Ryan Gosling robbing them instead of a real guy (laughs). Normally you go into a place with a gun, people are going to freak out, but they are just taking pictures with their phones.
So all of a sudden, my whole process and concept of making movies is failing, it’s backfiring on us. So I told Ryan, “You'd better work harder. If the gun isn’t scaring them, you'd better scare them.” So for every take; all 15 takes we did, Ryan had to ratchet it up more and more until finally he was just so desperate to scare these people that it came off as being terrified and desperate and full of anxiety, his voice started cracking. Again, the process didn’t go as how I thought it was going to happen, but his performance I thought got so much more interesting because of the desperation of the real situation of him as an actor trying to get these people to be scared.
On making his films go in unexpected directions
DC: I tell my actors two things: “Surprise me” and “fail.” When I see Pirates of the Caribbean, I know that I am never going to be surprised. No matter what, Johnny Depp is never in real danger in those films. He is never going to get stabbed. I’m so bored. I want to watch films where things are actually happening with actual life on the screen. That’s why I love documentary films, because anything can happen. Anything can break at any time. And in terms of making documentaries, you have to ratchet up your awareness to the moment, because you don’t get a take two in a documentary. As a narrative filmmaker, I want my actors to do things and surprise me. I want them to break it on set, because to me that will be alive. ... So what I’m trying to do is find where acting stops and behavior begins.
On the film’s triptych format
DC: Twenty years ago I saw Napoleon by Abel Gance and I always wanted to do a triptych movie after seeing the ending of that movie, so I always had these ideas in my notebooks for the “holy trinity” for all of these years. Also, I had seen Psycho about 20 years ago. I had always known there is a shower scene in Psycho, I just didn’t know that you spent 45 minutes with Janet Leigh before she went into the shower. That kind of baton pass and Tony Perkins really blew me away so I had this structure of these baton passes and it was triptych. So for 20 years I kept thinking, “what is that?” and then in 2007, my wife is pregnant with our second son... I was thinking about this baby coming into this world being clean and pure and thinking about myself being impure. I grew up Catholic so I think just being a human is bad, you know? (laughs) I ate the apple, I was hungry, what do you want me to say? Just wanting my son not to have my sins and all of a sudden I thought about passing the fire between generations and thinking about a movie that all of a sudden, that was the triptych; about the passing of the torch.
On violence in film
DC: I was thinking a lot about violence in movies. Mostly gun violence. Having kids, my perception was really changing. I started to have an allergic reaction to this cool violence I seen on the screen. I’ve always liked Sam Peckinpah, but with his violence I thought I was riding in the flames with the characters. But once I had kids, all of a sudden I was turning off the TV during commercials, because I didn’t want it to be a normal part of their lives.
I see a lot of filmmakers nowadays choosing [an artistic visual style], doing the ballet of violence, seeing slow-motion bullets coming out of guns and into a brain and splattering the wall red. And I’m like, “It’s not beautiful.” It’s not cool. I don’t like the fetish of it. So I wanted to deal with violence in a narrative way. If I was going to put a gun in the film, I wanted it to have an impact. So all of a sudden, I started to think about this story of adrenaline and the choices that lead you to this violent moment where a gun comes in. There are three shots fired in this movie and I wanted them to have a consequence. A real narrative consequence. So this shot happens and as a viewer, you are like a person in the movie, you can’t go back from it. There is no sanctity of a flashback.
Early on a lot of people said who read the script, “Why don’t you cut it up? It would be more marketable that way.” But to me, I’ve done it with Blue... It’s great the cross-cutted storytelling, but I thought the bravest choice to make with this film is to keep it chronological. It’s about lineage, so I needed it to be linear. This gun violence that happens in the movie happens to the audience and no one goes back from it. That moment is transcendent to me when I watch it, because when I see it I feel like there is a sense of denial that happens often times in the theater, like “No, that didn’t just happen. Bring him back now. When does he wake up in the hospital? Where’s the flashback?” … But he’s gone.
On his fascination with intimacy
DC: Ever since I was a kid, I was trying to film those moments of conflict. I never knew why my family had pictures of us smiling on the walls. We weren’t sitting around smiling on the time. When I went to my friend’s house, why there were pictures of their parents smiling when I heard them upstairs beating each other up? So I always was taking pictures of my brother in tears and my mom screaming at him, you know what I mean? On a family vacation to Disneyland, my dad blew a tire in the middle of the Arizona desert. He’s changing the tire with the traffic going next to him at 75 miles per hour, and he’s like, “Turn the fucking camera off.” It’s always what I’ve been drawn to. I feel like movies are filled with secrets and intimacies and so are families.