One of the hard-knock truths audiences learned watching director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance’s relationship drama Blue Valentine was that romance often ends sadly. After months of festival screenings from Sundance to Cannes and Toronto and opening in select art-house cinemas in late December Cianfrance experienced some hard lessons of his own. Making an honest relationship drama like Blue Valentine invited acclaim and contention, joy and disappointment. Perhaps, Cianfrance pondered that was to be expected from an honest film like his.
Dean (Ryan Gosling) and his wife Cindy (Michelle Williams) fell in and out of love and their story flitted between the past and present-day in a movie romance that defied expectations and earned plenty of acclaim.
In the film's pivotal scene, Cindy and Dean booked a room in a cheap motel in hopes of a romantic rendezvous but everything spiraled downhill.
That argumentative love scene in a rundown motel earned Blue Valentine a NC-17 rating until last-ditch appeals by its distributor The Weinstein Co. resulted in an "R" rating for Cianfrance’s marriage-in-trouble drama.
Twelve years in the making, or at least 12 years between finishing his first screenplay draft and finally shooting the film, Cianfrance insisted the delay was worth it and it's hard not to believe him.
“It took me twelve years to make Blue Valentine and I was inspired initially to make it because when I was a kid I had two nightmares,” Cianfrance said. “One was about nuclear war and the other was my parents getting a divorce. When they finally did when I was twenty I was so confused and bewildered. I started looking around to find something to make me feel not so alone. I couldn’t find it in the cinema, which is my favorite art form or literature for that matter. I kept finding the Romeo and Juliet example of two people at the peak of love and dying in each other’s arms and their love preserved for all time. But I never met anyone who had that great romantic fortune. I delved into making Blue Valentine because I wanted to tell a story about my own experience. It’s not my parents’ story. It’s more of what I saw my parents go through and a confrontation of all those fears.”
Cianfrance’s collaborations on the film go far back to college classmates like editor Jim Helton and co-writer Joey Curtis and more recent additions like cinematographer Andrij Parekh and the alternative band Grizzly Bear.
Inspired by the American avant-garde and his teachers Phil Solomon and the late Stan Brakhage, Cianfrance described how scenes set in the past were shot on 16mm film using a handheld camera and a single 25mm lens. Scenes set in the present were shot on two HDCAM cameras.
Boosting the experimental nature of the movie, scenes of Dean and Cindy in the past were told over a number of months while the present unfolded in just over 24 hours.
Sitting all alone on a lobby sofa at the Park Hyatt Hotel, the day following one of his final showings at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, Cianfrance stared out the window at an afternoon downpour and carefully explained why all extra effort from his crew and cast mattered.
The Brooklyn-based filmmaker detailed how elements of light and darkness, film and video were used to distinguish parts of the story that relate to Dean’s understanding of his marriage and those scenes that speak to Cindy.
Cianfrance remembered the first scene shot with Williams and Gosling together was when Dean came over with flowers to dinner at Cindy's parents' house and how he and his cast and crew made full use of Scranton and King of Prussia PA for authentically gritty, blue-collar landscapes.
Cianfrance worked collaboratively with his leads. Their joint efforts resulted in the sweet scene where Ryan Gosling played the ukulele while Michelle Williams tap-danced to the music.
Their hard work also paid off in a more dramatic scene as the two naked leads were exposed in a slippery shower with two cameras and two operators and a boom operator and an A.D. and Cianfrance all squeezed into a little bathroom and shooting the sequence in long takes.
Cianfrance admitted that the chemistry between Gosling and Williams was incredible and he credited them for much of what's successful about the movie. He also printed out the first draft of Blue Valentine in the summer of 1998 and he believed he would be shooting the film that fall.
Instead, after making his feature Brother Tied at age 23, Cianfrance went on to make documentaries about artists Mos Def and Sean "Diddy" Combs and Run-DMC and Cassandra Wilson and Annie Lenox.
Still working on Blue Valentine, Cianfrance met Michelle Williams in spring 2003 but the film still failed to gain financing. He met Ryan Gosling in 2005 but still had to work hard at gaining sufficient financial backing for the film.
The point of all their extra effort Cianfrance said was that the relationship at the heart of Blue Valentine was not always pretty.
“When I went to pitch meetings to get the film set up it’s not like I was pitching a story,” Cianfrance added. “I was pitching characters and feelings and how I wanted to make a movie that would not make people feel alone. It’s hard to do that in Hollywood. There’s a fascination with fantasy. You have to make movies that are about perfect people. They look perfect. They’re beautiful. They speak perfect sentences. They have clear arcs and clear conclusions. Whenever I see a film like that I’m lonely because my life is not like that.”
Before heading out into the afternoon rain, Cianfrance admitted that he did it all for honesty and it's hard to disagree after watching his film.
Blue Valentine is brutal in its honesty and gritty in its depiction of the working poor although the camerawork is beautiful from start to finish.
Cianfrance is at work on his new feature film Metalhead and fingers are crossed that he won’t suffer another 11-year-long delay.
One also hopes he remained committed to the gritty honesty that makes Blue Valentine stand out.
“I like characters that are flawed,” Cianfrance added as he headed out the door. “That’s what makes us human beings are our flaws.”
Blue Valentine is in select theaters and expands nationwide throughout January.