Filmmaker Derek Cianfrance’s 2012 crime and family drama, “The Place Beyond The Pines,” starring Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, and Bradley Cooper, was one of our favorite films of 2012, but it almost didn’t happen. Or at least, it almost didn’t happen the way it was intended to.
In a recent IndieWire Screen Talk live at the New Directors/New Films festival, Cianfrance, who was there in attendance in a conversation as part of the festival, revealed that following some heavy script changes, Bradley Cooper tried to exit the ‘Pines’ movie at the last minute.
Cianfrance, known for doing countless drafts of his films, co-wrote the feature with frequent collaborator and future “Sound of Metal” director Darius Marder. In the movie, Cooper plays a morally conflicted police officer who kills the lead character in the film, the empathetic thief played by Ryan Gosling. The film is divided into two halves: the first chapter with Gosling and a young Cooper and the second half with a much older version of his character still grappling with his actions and their consequences. The film then becomes an echoing exploration of both of their children against the legacy of Gosling’s character’s death. In the conversation, Cianfrance divulged that he tasked Marder with rewriting the script and, in doing so, spooked Cooper to the point that he wanted to drop out.
“I had given [Darius Marder] the script and he had a lot of notes for it, and I kind of agreed with a lot of what he was saying. And so, we rewrote every word from 10 weeks to six weeks,” Cianfrance said. “I remember giving Bradley Cooper the copy of ‘The Place Beyond the Pines,’ the new script, and getting a voice message from him saying, ‘Bro, I just want to let you know I read the new draft, and I’m out.’ He was like, ‘That’s not the movie that we had signed up to do.’”
Funding for “The Place Beyond The Pines” was contingent on Cooper’s participation, so when Cianfrance heard the voicemail, he scrambled, got on a plane, and convinced the co-star to stay with the film.
“I was moving my family up to Schenectady the next day [to be on location], and the whole crew was coming up there. I had all the money anyway,” Cianfrance explained. “I was like, ‘Can I come talk to you?’ So I went up to Montreal, and I had a long conversation with [Cooper] from midnight to 3:30 in the morning where I got him back on. It was only in the last five minutes [when I convinced him]. I think he just got tired. He wanted to go to bed.”
A nerve-wracking situation, to be sure, but one Cianfrance figured it out at the eleventh hour. At the time, Cooper hinted at his own trepidation and reluctance to play the part.
“He was f—ing complicated to get my head around,” the actor told EW at the time. “He made a lot of decisions that me personally I can’t even relate to, so to find a way into that and to explore that…maybe I feared those things in myself. I definitely had never been more scared to play a character in my life.”
The duo almost collaborated again, which probably means no bad blood exists over the situation. Cianfrance was briefly attached to the cooking drama, “Burnt” in which Cooper starred, but ultimately dropped out (John Wells ultimately directed it in 2015).
Cianfrance’s next movie is likely “Roofman,” a true-crime drama starring Channing Tatum based on the story of Jeffrey Manchester, an eccentric and charming serial robber who broke into more than 60 McDonald’s overnight and evaded capture from police while holing up in Toys’ R Us and Circuit City stores in North Carolina.