The forthcoming relationship drama “Blue Valentine” earned a fair share of buzz coming out of Sundance and unsurprisingly, much of it surrounded the performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.
Speaking with the NY Times, the actors and director Derek Cianfrance revealed that during the preparation and shoot for the film, the actors pretty much lived and breathed together and that much of this interaction was captured on film to create home video “memories” of the couple’s fractured relationship. Even more intriguing is that Cianfrance has said some of this footage is going to be leaked:
Q: When you finally got it off the ground, was it a short shoot?Mr. Cianfrance: It was about 24 days, but we spent about three months together almost every day, working on it. We had a lot of time built in the middle there to kind of develop memories and grow things, and just bond and build. When I first started working with Ryan – I met him in 2005, he said, I love this movie but he said, ‘I don’t think I can do the older guy. I’m just not that guy yet.’ So I said, O.K., why don’t we shoot the past now and wait six years and then we’ll shoot the present six years later. I wanted to do it in real time but no one would give me money for that. So we had to live a month and make that six years. But whenever we were shooting, we were shooting. The thing I hate most in movies is when what’s going on behind the camera is more important than what’s going on in front of the camera, when there’s all this technical machinery that you’re trying to wrangle, and crane shots and all these tricks. So we tried to just eliminate all of those distractions and just build our days so we would have only time to shoot. So if we had a 14-hour day, we would spend 11 of those hours shooting. Ms. Williams: It was really productive time. It wasn’t just sitting around doing other things at all. We were really at work, every day. And we lived in the house. We got to decorate the house, we got to make birthday cakes, Christmas, home movies, take out the trash – Mr. Gosling: dog house, dishes. We had to clean up after everybody, even the crew when they were there. We went fishing, slept there, watched movies. It was really important to Derek that we build an archive of home video of actual memories, and that we not really discuss the scenes or rehearse the scenes. We had fighting days where we just fought all day, and then we’d have to go have family fun day, and just pretend like we hadn’t been fighting all day, trying to have a good time. There’s a whole movie of that. Q: What’s going to happen to that footage? Mr. Cianfrance: It’s going to get leaked.
It’s difficult to tell if the director is deadpanning or if, indeed, some of what we imagine to be a bulk of footage is going to see the light of day. If it does, we can easily see it being used for some kind of viral campaign or on a clever website for the film where users can get a glimpse into the relationship of the characters of the film.
“Blue Valentine” remains one of our more anticipated titles of the year. The Weinstein Company somehow scraped together enough cash to acquire this at Sundance and we hope it doesn’t end up with the same fate as the still unreleased “All Good Things” directed by Andrew Jarecki and starring Gosling and Kirsten Dunst.
