The following is from a roundtable interview the Tufts Daily attended and participated in with Derek Cianfrance, writer and director of The Place Beyond the Pines."
Question: Ryan Gosling shrieks in this movie. When you heard that for the first time, were you unbelievably excited?
Derek Cianfrance: Here's what happened - I'm always trying to find this collision, right between real life and fantasy. I'm always trying to take actors and kind of drop them into this aquarium of life and see how they swim. There's real cops this in movie working with Bradley Cooper, real or retired judges on the stand. I can't teach somebody how to be a judge, but I figure they can teach me. My concept was, I would put all real tellers who had been robbed before, and all people who had been in bank robberies before. So we take the first take, and Ryan came in, and no one was scared. Everyone was just relieved that it was Ryan Gosling robbing them instead of a real guy, so we didn't get the reaction we were looking for. They were just taking their cell phones, taking pictures of him. I told him, " If the guns [are] not scaring them, you better scare them." All 15 takes, he just kept trying harder and harder, and by the end he was just so desperate, he was screaming at them and his voice was cracking, and they were scared. It didn't happen the way I thought it was going to happen. His performance got so much more interesting because of this desperation of him as an actor.
Q: What did your documentary background bring into the film?
DC: I want to be surprised when I watch a movie. When I see "Pirates of the Caribbean" (2003, 2006, 2007, 2011), I know I'm never going to be surprised. I know that no matter what, Johnny Depp's never going to be in any real danger. He's not going to get stabbed. I want to see movies where something is actually happening, I want to see actually life on the screen. That's why I love documentary films, anything can happen, anything can break at any time.
Q: In terms of production, you had a lot more takes than with "Blue Valentine" (2010). Did you find production to be smoother on this?
DC: Well, I had 47 days on this
