Most critics scoff at the idea when a filmmaker says they’ve turned their TV series is just an extended movie, and yes, this notion is overused and abused. But the limited series format—five or six episodes—is the perfect format for telling the ideas in a feature-length film over the course of five or six hours. This is true for Derek Cianfrance’s outstanding limited series “I Know This Much Is True,” both emotionally cinematic and intimate, an epic drama taking place over six chapters and now airing on HBO (two episodes have aired as of this writing).
Written and directed by Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine,” “The Place Beyond The Pines”) and based on the bestselling novel by Wally Lamb, this limited series follows Dominick Birdsey as he struggles to care for his schizophrenic twin brother, Thomas, while discovering the truth about his own family history.
In a towering, emotionally harrowing dual role—one of the best this year— Mark Ruffalo (“You Can Count On Me”) stars as both disparate Birdsey twins. The series explores many of Cianfrance’s bread and butter preoccupations of family, legacy, lineage, passed down trauma and if we can move beyond what feels like a pre-destined dark fate (the show also features an exceptional supporting cast that includes Melissa Leo, Juliette Lewis, Kathryn Hahn, Rosie O’Donnell, Imogen Poots, Archie Panjabi and many more).
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But the layered and thematically rich, “I Know This Much Is True” also examines the complexities and contradictions of care—those who you love no matter what, but also resent for feeling like a weight around your neck—and ideas about America itself, perhaps just as doomed as some of the deeply troubled souls in the series.
I spoke to Cianfrance about so much, so, in the first of two parts in our extended interview with the filmmaker, we discussed how “I Know This Much Is True” came together, working with Mark Ruffalo, and the challenges of making a film about twins and why he was initially reluctant to take on the series for that very reason.
“I Know This Much Is True,” feels so you, like such a personal work with the same preoccupations you often swing back on. I feel like if author Wally Lamb hadn’t written it, you would have.
Yeah, I felt the same way. I had never read this book, but Wally for years had been trying to get this made as a movie— turning a 900-page novel into a two-hour movie was impossible. When the rights reverted to him, Wally told his agent that the perfect person to play these characters would be Mark Ruffalo. He read it over a weekend and then he was like, “Yeah, I’m in.”
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That turned into a search for a director. Mark and I had known each other a little because we were in the same class of directors at Sundance in 2010— he had “Sympathy for Delicious” and I had “Blue Valentine,” and he was always my favorite actor.
You hit it off I imagine?
When we met, it was instant— he felt like a brother to me. But I can’t say that’s necessarily unique to me because that’s kind of the quality that Mark has. I don’t know if you’ve met him, but he just feels familiar. I loved him as an actor and loved him as a person when I met him. He feels like family to anyone who meets him because he’s just so damned human and empathetic and vulnerable and open. He’s just a giant, beating heart.
Mark eventually reached out to see if I was interested. So, it was kind of a backward process—the novelist casts the lead and the lead casts the writer/director. But it did feel like something I was born to make—it deals with all the same themes of family, of legacy, of paternity, and then even deeper themes I haven’t explored is this idea of ancestry and heritage.
I was gonna say, you’re of Italian American descent, and there’s this whole “Godfather” prequel-esque aspect to the series.
Yep. So, this story presented that opportunity to explore that stuff. My Italian-American heritage was always the part of me that inspired me to deal with legacy in the first place. It was all my heritage twisted up in these stories that I was trying to unfurl as I was becoming a father myself, and inspired a lot of “Blue Valentine” and a lot of “The Place Beyond the Pines.” So, this was so perfectly suited and exactly where my psyche has been for the last 10 years. I felt so fortunate, blessed to be able to work on it.
It’s very much your wheelhouse.
Yeah, and Wally, like Mark— he’s so insightful and thoughtful about human beings. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do is make movies about regular ordinary people, but cast them in extraordinary lights—make these ordinary circumstances feel epic. Because in my life, the smallest little family feuds or hurt feelings sometimes can feel very epic. I’m trying to tell regular, blue-collar American human stories that are specific, but also open for the viewer to jump in.
Tell me about working with Mark Ruffalo and specifically both the weight transformation and those challenges because the idea of waiting to gain weight—I think that’s what you did?—and return to shoot those scenes months later in the same exact location from a different perspective is fascinating.
Well, when Mark and I first had that meeting all those years back I was like, “Look Mark, I’m really reluctant to do a technically tricky movie.” There’s been so many movies with twins, even successful ones, but even “Dead Ringers,” which is awesome, I’m trying to look where the seams are, you know?