Blue Valentine

I've long awaited the release of this movie. Undoubtedly one of if not the most raw, emotional, untypical love stories to be released this year,  Blue Valentine chronicles the demise of a relationship (between Ryan Gosling & Michelle Williams) rather than the other way around. 

The article below from Elle.com details the breakdown behind how they were able to make this movie feel real and legitimate -- some scenes, like the one from the preview where Ryan Gosling is playing the ukelele while Michelle Williams is tap dancing was not written into the script and completely improved by the two actors -- maybe a tad long but SOOO worth the read. 

'In most movies, when the happy couple gets together it’s time for the credits to roll, but in Blue Valentine, opening this Friday, that’s just where things get going. Inter-cutting scenes of the luminous Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling falling in love and then six years later falling apart, the film breaks your heart right along with theirs.

Conceived by director Derek Cianfrance over twelve years ago, the film spent ten years languishing in development purgatory before being released, only to be smacked with an NC-17 rating.   Gosling, whose frustration was palpable, remarked “Why is sex by way of violence considered entertainment, but sex by way of love is considered pornographic?” Thankfully the rating was overturned the day after these interviews, fitting for a film that’s more about nuances of the heart than flashing skin.

Filming was split into two sections to show the couple at two very different points in their relationship. Cianfrance filmed the scenes of the young couple in love first—allowing only one take per scene, but it was the decade spent fine tuning his script that worried Cianfrance.

“I was so nervous it was going to be flat, because it was too thought out. So I asked Ryan and Michelle ‘Please surprise me’… I want to find living breathing moments,” he said. In the most memorable scene, Williams and Gosling discover each other’s hidden talents—tap dancing and playing the ukulele respectively and it reflects real life, since Cianfrance had asked each of them to reveal their talent for the first time on camera. The result is a scene more beautifully spontaneous than any other this year. Remarked Williams, “We were liberated. We were really doing things for the first time—everything was new. It’s like life, when you say something for the first time, when you’re discovering it. It’s a thrill.”

In order to shoot the happy couple in the throes of a breakdown six years later, Cianfrance fought to get a month break in the middle of shooting. Instead of sending the actors on vacation, he put them to work—there was a contest to see who could gain more weight, and they had to find a way to start fighting in their rented a house in Pennsylvania, where Williams and Gosling pretended to live a married life complete with budgets, dishes, fights, and playtime with their onscreen daughter. Gosling, who had to act as surrogate parent, recalled “I’ve never had that experience where reality and fantasy was so blurred.” For Williams it was a fight to get to the breaking point in the relationship. “I would rather live in the past. I actually petitioned ‘Let’s not make the rest of the movie. Let’s just make a movie and call itValentine.”

The film’s acknowledgment of the complicated nature of relationships is almost heroic—Gosling and Williams fall in love so beautifully and simply, it’s hard to understand the break-up. As Gosling put it, “We tried to treat the film like a whodunit. You [try to] see who shot down this beautiful couple’s love in cold blood. For the rest of the film, you’re retracing the steps trying to figure out who did it. There is no real answer—only to you.”'