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Boogie Nights: Behind the Scenes (Complete Broll) Mark Wahlberg, Heather Graham, Burt Reynolds

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It's all about the gut feeling in the film world.

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It's all about the gut feeling in the film world.

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After hearing all of this the thought of trying to secure funding for a film gives me a headache

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After hearing all of this the thought of trying to secure funding for a film gives me a headache

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The independent drama Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a married couple whose relationship has eroded over time; once madly in love, they spend most of their time fighting now, trying to figure out whether they can -- or should -- make their relationship work.

Filmmaker Derek Cianfrance shot the picture on a hand-held camera, giving the footage a shaky, realistic quality. He told Williams and Gosling that he wanted to divide the film shoot into three parts. During the first part, they would shoot all of the flashback scenes, in which Gosling and Williams' characters were still madly in love. During the third part, they'd shoot the rest of the movie, in which the relationship takes a nose dive.

And during the second part -- which lasted a month -- Cianfrance wanted Williams and Gosling to move in together, along with the child actor who plays their daughter. In the same house their characters live in in the movie, no less.

The three lived together for a month. (But only during the day: At night, Williams went home to her daughter, Matilda.)

"During the month, we tried to dismantle this thing that we had been building," Gosling tells Fresh Air contributor Dave Davies. "[Originally,] we all worked really hard to create this love story portion, when they're falling in love. We wanted it to feel genuine and real and true. And we spent all of this time building it up, and then we had to tear it down."

Cianfrance asked Williams and Gosling to take their characters' wedding photos, put them in a wheelbarrow and douse them in kerosene -- and then set them on fire.

"We also celebrated fake Christmas and put up Christmas trees, and baked birthday cakes and bought birthday presents, and went to Sears," Gosling says. "We fought all day, and then we'd have to take [our characters' daughter] Faith to the family fun park ... whatever we could do to create real memories, so when it came time to shoot the [last] part of the film, we were drawing on real memories."

Gosling tells Davies that Blue Valentine was the first film project he's worked on where he forgot along the way that he was making a film.

"Most movies, you have to try and forget you're making a movie, because there are trailers and booms and lights and marks, and it's everywhere," he says. "And with this, you're trying to remember that it is a movie, because it's so easy to get lost in it."

Interview Highlights
On the differences between filming the flashbacks and the later scenes
"When we were shooting the scenes in the past, we shot on film because it had a romantic quality to it. And it would all be in one take. No do-overs. Everything happened for the first time, and then it was over. And we would share the frame together. When you're working that way, it's easy to maintain a mystery, because you never have to go back and revisit a moment, and you can hide behind these personas that you've created -- which is a lot like when you're first falling in love.

When we were doing the latter part of the film, it was all shot on digital, which has a clinical, surveillance-camera feeling. And we were locked off into singles -- we were never sharing the frame. And we would do takes 50 times. We shot one scene for two days in the shower, just all day. So when you're doing 50 takes with somebody, there's nowhere to hide. It's very exposing."
On Blue Valentine's initial NC-17 rating
"I was very confused. It seems like I don't really understand this rating system. I was told it's because my character performs oral sex on his wife, and I thought, 'There's plenty of movies with men receiving oral sex from women with R ratings.' It seemed like a double standard. On top of that, it seemed like there are horror movies that are like torture-porn that are R rated. What a lot of people don't understand about the NC-17, which I didn't understand, is that you can't show it in major theater chains -- and you can't even air spots for your film on television. It really stigmatizes the movie."
On performing on The Mickey Mouse Club
"These kids were prodigies. Not all of us. I wasn't. But you look at someone like Christina Aguilera, who was singing like Etta James [as an adolescent]. And you see someone who is realizing their destiny. This is where they're supposed to be and what they're supposed to be doing -- and the same goes for a few of the other kids. I realized that my destiny wasn't that. I could make it and do enough to get by on the show, but it wasn't my calling. So I was depressed by that, but I was also encouraged to go out and find what [my calling] was. As a result of not being as talented as the other kids, I didn't work a lot, so I spent a lot of time in Disney World, riding the rides and walking around. And this made a big impression on me. I was very impressed by Walt Disney and the idea that you could have a dream and you could realize it to the point where people could walk around within it. ... It still resonates with me. I wanted to be somebody who believed in their ideas that much."

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Ryan Gosling: Fully Immersed In 'Blue Valentine'

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The actor stars opposite Michelle Williams in a new drama about a couple whose relationship has soured. He tells Terry Gross it wasn't the average film shoot: Among other things, he moved in for a month with Williams and their onscreen child.

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Ryan Gosling, king of waking up in real time for documentaries

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Ryan Gosling, king of waking up in real time for documentaries

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You have to have a little fun with the story if its based off of real events

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You have to have a little fun with the story if its based off of real events

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According to everyone on the Panels you should always use locals

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According to everyone on the Panels you should always use locals

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Now that they mention it, Pixar really hasn't made a bad movie.

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Now that they mention it, Pixar really hasn't made a bad movie.

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Respect to Pixar for keeping staff on hand, I always liked that with old studios.

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Respect to Pixar for keeping staff on hand, I always liked that with old studios.

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A litte more in depth to the process of "The Tree of Life"

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A litte more in depth to the process of "The Tree of Life"

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If there's one label that would never fit Terrence Malick as a director, it's 'conventional'. From a 20-year wait for a new film between 1978's Days of Heaven and 1998's The Thin Red Line, to not giving lead actor Christian Bale a script for his latest effort, Knight of Cups, Malick is one of the few filmmakers whose behind-the-scenes stories have nearly as much mystique as what ends up onscreen. The Tree of Life was no exception - according to producer Grant Hill, the first draft he saw of the screenplay was less a script than a vision board, filled with photos, paintings, and references to classical music.

The looseness of Malick's writing transferred to the Tree of Life set in a big way. Many scenes were almost entirely improvised, with the children (Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, and Tye Sheridan) only scripted 40% of the time. Some of the film's most memorable moments, such as the physical struggle between Mr and Mrs O'Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) in the kitchen, and Chastain dancing in midair, were unplanned. The butterfly landing on Mrs O'Brien was by all accounts just a happy accident.

Immersion into character was vital for every actor - in this case, because cameras could roll at any minute if Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki felt that something interesting was happening. Joerg Widmer, camera operator and the DoP for the sections shot in Italy, said that if it weren't for the physical limitations of film, Malick "would have shot forever". In order to achieve the specific family dynamic that we see in the finished product, Pitt and Chastain spent very little time together when they weren't shooting, but Chastain had hung out with the three boys for two weeks before production started. Therefore, the actors could slot into their roles of distant father and attentive mother easily whenever called upon to do so. They even spent time bonding with the family dog, Dexter, who Malick would release into any scene that he felt needed a jolt of energy.

Plenty of credit for the film's atmosphere has to go to the location scouts, who scoured Texas to find a perfect small town in which to shoot. Eventually, they settled on Smithville, which barely needed any set-dressing to convincingly look like a town from the 1950s. Residents were asked to park their cars out of the sightline of the cameras, and some outdoor appliances had to be removed, but few other actions were required. Smithville's population was also more than happy to help on the film, even going so far as to pass a local temporary law forbidding paparazzi from entering the town. Some residents stayed, helping out if they could or just watching the filmmaking process. The ones who packed up for the duration of the filming then rented their houses to the cast and crew, who lived and worked in these homes.

There were no trailers for the stars; everyone just lived in Smithville, which brought the entire crew closer together as its own mini-community. One house stored props and costumes while another was used for hair and makeup. The O'Brien homestead itself was the biggest challenge for the designers and set builders - it had to be altered to accommodate the cameras and make sure natural light (the only light Lubezki wanted to shoot in) was available all around the house.

Malick's experimentation was not just limited to the on-set filming. He allowed other units to construct parts of the film without his direct oversight, believing that the world he had envisaged and explained was enough guidance to allow the film to come together naturally. Even when the cameras weren't rolling, the film proved to be an equally unusual experience, especially for Chastain. Instead of going in for a typical line-reading at her audition, she was instead assigned "behavioural tasks", like putting a baby to bed and "looking at someone with love and respect". After the actual filming was finished, Chastain then spent a good couple of years recording a series of voiceovers; just one example of the immense amount of post-production needed for this film.

Not only did Malick's editing team have to sift through tonnes of footage to put together the final cut, the VFX team creating the magnificent birth-of-the-universe sequence had both a difficult and exhilarating task. Malick does not particularly like using pre-viz or storyboards, so these scenes had to include the kind of spontaneity one doesn't usually associate with effects shots. To achieve this, the team, led by the legendary Douglas Trumbull ( 2001, Close Encounters, Blade Runner), largely eschewed CGI, instead using a series of paints, flares, smoke, and, most strikingly, milk to create the primordial cosmos. As a film, The Tree of Life thrives on this exact sort of hands-on creative thinking, ensuring that it's both believable and quite unlike anything else out there.
Sources'Making 'Tree of Life': Inside the Malick Method', by Steve Pond'Tree of Life Visualizes the Cosmos Without CGI', by Hugh Hart Rehearsing the Unexpected, by Carlo Hintemann and Daniele Villa

Douglas Trumbull emmanuel lubezki Feature Jessica Chastain stories from the set Terrence Malick Texas The Tree of Life

About The Author

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Stories From The Set: The Tree of Life - One Room With A View

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If there's one label that would never fit Terrence Malick as a director, it's 'conventional'. From a 20-year wait for a new film between 1978's Days of Heaven and 1998's The Thin Red Line, to not giving lead actor Christian Bale a script for his latest effort, Knight of Cups, Malick is one of the few filmmakers whose behind-the-scenes stories have nearly as much mystique as what ends up onscreen.

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According to Letty Aronson, you dont want european investors because they will take the producer title from you.

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According to Letty Aronson, you dont want european investors because they will take the producer title from you.

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So far it sounds like being a producer is great in theory but not as fun in practice.

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So far it sounds like being a producer is great in theory but not as fun in practice.

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Im still impressed with the fact that Woody Allens investors were never apart of the process.

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Im still impressed with the fact that Woody Allens investors were never apart of the process.

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Visuals of some of the things they discussed on the panel

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Visuals of some of the things they discussed on the panel

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Behind the scenes of "Midnight in Paris"

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Behind the scenes of "Midnight in Paris"

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One of the many days of working late into the night.

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Your film is either green lit instantly or in ten years.

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Your film is either green lit instantly or in ten years.

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A weird amount of  big decisions made on there movie sets are made on the spot.

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A weird amount of  big decisions made on there movie sets are made on the spot.

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Woody Allen is so famous that he can get a whole lot of money first then start writing the movie 

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Woody Allen is so famous that he can get a whole lot of money first then start writing the movie 