Director Derek Cianfrance went 12 years between his first two feature films, “Brother Tied,” which he says “no one saw,” and the Oscar nominated examination of a disintegrating relationship, 2010’s “Blue Valentine.” Fortunately, the wait for his third film, an epic about fathers and sons called “The Place Beyond the Pines,” has been significantly shorter. The crime drama, which opens today, stars Ryan Gosling as troubled motorcycle stuntman Luke Glanton and Bradley Cooper as the young police officer Avery Cross – two men haunted by their fathers, whose lives become intertwined attempting to ensure the same does not happen to their sons. ARTINFO recently sat down with the filmmaker to discuss the importance of legacy, why face tattoos are a bad idea, and how he was influenced by the show “Cops.”
You started thinking about this film back in 2007. What was it that got you interested in the idea?
Back in ’92, I saw “Napoléon,” by Abel Gance, for the first time in film school. I was blown away by the triptych ending and for years wanted to make a triptych movie. It was around then I saw “Psycho” for the first time. I’d always known there was the shower scene in “Psycho,” I just didn’t know you had to live 45 minutes with Janet Leigh before she goes into the shower. I was blown away by that baton pass between characters. I had that kind of formal and structural idea floating around my head for so many years, but I didn’t have a story to tell. Then in 2007, my wife was pregnant with our second son and I was thinking a lot about legacy. All of a sudden this idea of these baton passes, this kind of fire being passed from one generation to the next.
Where did the idea for the story’s characters come from?
We were thinking a lot about the tribes in America. In terms of this idea of legacy, when you’re born into a small town, you’re born into a certain tribe, and thinking about what happens when tribes collide. What is the reverberation and echo of that collision over the generations. We also wanted to tell the story of two different people on different sides of the law. Subvert the genre piece. I’d originally thought of it as more of western actually. [Writer] Ben [Coccio] suggested we modernize it, take out the horses and put a motorcycle in it.
So you started out thinking of this film as a western?
I love westerns. They’re American movies. “Blue Valentine” ends on Independence Day, this movie ends with a shot of the American flag in the far distance. Think about the bloodshed that’s in this country’s history. Now we’re very domesticated. We eat with forks and knives, we say please and thank you, but we can’t get away from the brutality of our past. It’s still there. I really firmly believe that those things never go away.
That seems to be a part of Luke’s essence, that you can’t escape your past sins.
Ryan and I thought a lot about him as a matinee idol, the kind of guy that the Shangri-Las would sing about. He’s literally in a cage when we first see him. He grows up without a father and when he finds out he has a son, the last thing he wants to do is have his son feel the way he felt when he was a kid. He tries to avoid that by being there for him, but he has no skills for being a father. He’s a danger.
Avery, on the other hand, had all the things that Luke didn’t, but seems just as ill-equipped to be a father.
I think the thing with Avery, he’s also trying to avoid something. He grows up in the shadow of a very powerful father, a very present father, a father who’s sort of royalty in this small town. He’s meant to be his father’s son, but he’s going to try to prove himself as a cop. As a cop he ends up making this mistake, then instead of owning up to it, he buries it because he can’t deal with the trouble. He’s still a good man, so he tries to clean up everything else around him, but he still has this toxic shame that never goes away. I think in America there’s a lot of reward for self-preservation. He’s a guy who preserves himself, but that corruption never goes away from his life, that corruption becomes manifest in his child, and that comes back to get him.
How much did the actors contribute to their characters?
I always ask my actors to do two things: please surprise me and please fail. Because if they fall on their face, they can also succeed. As a filmmaker, if I’m on set, if I’m surprised, I know that’s going in the movie, because I know that’s what the audience will feel. Ryan called me a few months before we started shooting the movie, and he says: “Hey D, how about the most tattoos in movie history. And I want to get a face tattoo. Face tattoos are the coolest. This one’s going to be a dagger, and it’s going to be dripping blood.” Flash forward to the first day of shooting and he’s covered in tattoos, has put on 40 pounds of muscle, and he’s got this face tattoo. He walks up to me at lunch time and is like, “Hey D, can I talk to you for a sec? I think I went too far with the face tattoo. Think we can take it off and reshoot all that stuff?” And I say, “Absolutely not, that’s what happens when you get a face tattoo, you regret it, and now you have to walk through the movie regretting it.” So now this thing that was cool to him, and was probably cool to Luke at the time, all of a sudden now, he can’t get away from it, and it’s not very cool. It becomes this shame, so when he holds his baby for the first time, he feels dirty. What I’m looking for in my movies is the place where acting stops and behavior begins.
This probably results in a lot more work for you though, right?
If they do the script, I’m disappointed. To me writing is like dreaming, shooting is like living, and editing is like murder. You take all these beautiful moments, all these gifts that actors give you, you take entire performances sometimes. I’ve had to cut my mom out of a movie before. They talk about 10,000 hours to be a master of something, I’ve at least clocked 30,000 hours in the editing room. I know it more than any other aspect of filmmaking. It doesn’t make things easier for me. I don’t like killing things. But when you take them out you reveal the sculpture. That’s the x-factor for me in my movies. I want them to be honest. It’s not about my shouting, it’s about my listening, it’s about funneling in the world.
Something that might surprise some viewers is the action scenes, which are particularly intense. What was your approach to the louder scenes in the film?
I know “Blue Valentine” was recognized for its realism, its frank take on sexuality, and for this movie I wanted the action scenes, the genre elements, to feel just as true. My reference points weren’t other movies, it was “America’s Wildest Police Chases” and “Cops.” I watched “Cops” my whole life, it’s one of the greatest shows on TV. So we decided let’s make it like that, which means camera in the passenger seat, and we have to go fast. I remember that we wanted to do a lot of unbroken takes, like real chase scenes. It raised the stakes for it. All of a sudden we were making a film that was in a dangerous place.