Derek Cianfrance Talks Twindom, Two Mark Ruffalos & ‘I Know This Much Is True’ [Q&A]

You were worried immediately about how it could potentially take the audience out of the emotionality of the story.
Yeah! I was like, “there’s got to be a way we can do this where it’s not like we’re going to shoot Dominick before lunch and then you’re going to go and put on a wig and a mustache or a fat suit and come back and play Thomas later.”

These two guys are identical twins, but they’ve had 40 years of completely different life experiences and choices and that’s going to affect them differently. Not to mention that Thomas is on all this medication that’s going to give him some bodyweight to him.

So, Mark agrees. Eventually.
Mark agrees. He took a similar hiatus during “Normal Hearts,” for one of the actors to lose weight. On “Blue Valentine,” I shot all of the youthful stuff with Ryan [Gosling] and Michelle [Williams], and then we took a month off and came back and shot the present. So, I’m always obsessed with this idea of the process. We decided to shoot Dominick first because this is really subjectively his point of view, his psyche, his memory. The whole story is from his internal/external space.

Then for Thomas, it’s gotta be different. We decided 30 pounds as one aspect. Mark lost 20 pounds and he became just in the best shape of his life for Dominick. They’re a yin and yang, be flip sides of a coin, they had to be each other’s duality. It was a duet between these two guys.

How does that manifest in the shooting?
On day three I’m shooting a phone call scene, he’s calling Juliette Lewis. It’s good cause Mark is Mark, but before one take, I had an impulse, “Hey Mark, could you do 50 pushups?” Mark, being Mark, he just dropped to the ground and did 50 pushups and he came up and he took the phone call, and the scene came alive. “Can you do another 50 pushups?” Mark’s like, “Why am I doing pushups??” And I was like, “Well, it’s changing something in your Dominic.”

I didn’t want to tell him at the time, but the veins in his neck were engorged. All of a sudden, his breath was more shallow, his chest was very masculine. Mark became this pent up, angry, angst-ridden masculine character. And so that became what we did with Dominic the whole time, he would do pushups. Mark had lost 20 pounds, so he was always hungry, hangry, he was just like a bit of a wiry bear. Mark’s a wrestler by nature, so I felt like I was having a match with a wrestler the whole time for 16 weeks.

That sounds about right, Dominick is kind of an emotionally exasperated character.
Yeah. He’s definitely on edge. There’s a moment in episode two when he goes to see Thomas’ therapist and at the end of this session, his therapist realizes you need some help here too buddy. Dominic is the classic story of the caregiver. The caregiver who cares for others, but forgets to care for themselves. Such is the story with oftentimes, and I’ve felt in my own life, the feeling of being a survivor of certain things. It’s survivor’s guilt and it’s really hard for that person to turn the care in on themselves because it’s just not the way they’re wired. That’s one of Dominic’s journeys throughout is to try to become more whole. He has to have his break and hit his own rock bottom.

So, then Thomas?
Then we took six weeks “off” and we shot the nine-year-old version of the twins, they were great, the college-aged version of the characters—Philip Ettinger’s one of my favorite actors—then all the grandfather’s story.

I would text Mark all the time, “Are you eating your donuts?” He went from a 1200 calorie diet to a 4,000 calorie diet to get up to Thomas’ weight. Mark said it was harder for him to put on the weight than it was to take it off. He was eating around the clock.

What was he like when he came back as another character?
Man, we started shooting Thomas’ story on September 11th, 2019. Mark is a dream actor, the least prima donna actor you can find. So, we triangulate the cameras, match the light from four months earlier to make it appear seamless, all the same actors as waitresses and whatnot. Mark wouldn’t come out of his trailer. For like an hour. He wouldn’t come out.

Wow, yeah, that is so not Ruffalo.
I go over to him and so method. He’s Thomas. He was terrified to come out of his trailer, so ultra-sensitive, so vulnerable. For every way that Dominic was like a bear to wrestle with, this was like dealing with just like a fragile lamb.

I remember Mark would ask me sometimes, “Do I need to gain all this weight? I feel like shit. There are fat suits I can wear that will do just as good.” I kept on imploring him to do it. What I’m interested in as a filmmaker is not performance as much as I’m interested in behavior. And physicality alters behavior. One character is essentially starving, when he was Thomas, he moves differently, he’s not as confident anymore.

So, we eventually get him out of the trailer. I walk with him to set and there’s a wave of gasps from the crew because they had worked with this ornery, but affable bear. Now all of a sudden there’s no pectoral muscles. And more importantly, there’s a guy who is not out there shaking the entire crew’s hand and saying hi. This is someone who couldn’t even look anyone in the eyes.

Heavy.
We sit down to shoot. It’s September 11th, my assistant directors ask if everyone will take a moment of silence. We’re all in silence having our own private reflections and all of a sudden we hear Thomas and he began saying this unscripted prayer for America that’s in the show. It was so chilling and poignant to think about this character who in the story was trying to avert a war. He was trying to stop the war in the Middle East and here we are September 11th all these years later, and Thomas is saying a prayer for us. It was one of those moments—what I’m always trying to find in my movies is where fact and fiction blur a little bit and we’re actually living something really honest and true.

The third episode of “I Know This Much Is True” airs on HBO, Sundays at 9pm ET.