Derek Cianfrance on Blue Valentine

Like(500) Days of Summer and Harold Pinter's play Betrayal, Blue Valentine is the story of a love affair that fractures the time sequence to contrast the idealism of new love with the slow death of a relationship in decline.

Starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, the film has been widely acclaimed for its emotional power and is a hot contender for the Academy Awards. It's the second feature of Derek Cianfrance, a experienced TV documentarian, who spoke to Time Out at the Toronto Film Festival.

You know you bear an uncanny resemblance to your lead actor Ryan Gosling. You could be brothers.
We're brothers from another mother. Everyone says ‘you kind of look like that this actor Ryan Gosling.' Anyways, he's like the movie-star version of me.

What inspired this film?
I started writing the film because when I was a kid I two nightmares. One was nuclear war and the other was that my parents would get a divorce. When I was 20 they did split up. And as a young man trying to move forward in my own relationships I felt like I had to confront those fears that I had as a kid.

The actors were attached to this project for years, is that correct?
I met Michelle [Williams] in 2003 and I met Ryan in 2005. When I first met them they could only have played the youthful part of the movie. They couldn't have played the older part of the movie at that time. So there was a blessing in us waiting. When Ryan first read the script he was like "I love the script but I don't think I can play the older guy." I was like, "Okay, great, no problem. Let's just shoot the past now, and we'll wait six years, and then do the present six years later. We'll do it in real time." He's like, "That's the best idea I've ever heard."

What made you choose Ryan and Michelle?
It wasn't always going to be them. I read other actors. I was close to making it with some other great actors, but I would always pull the plug right before we'd do it because it just wasn't right. I always had the belief that Ryan and Michelle would have that chemistry or that magic together even though I had never seen them together. I just felt like they would probably admire and respect each other and be able to create this really trustful place where they could fall in love and fall out of love, where they could fight and fuck at the same time and make it believable.

There's a great line in the film that Ryan Gosling says that men are more romantic and that women settle for a guy with a good job or something. Do you think men are more romantic?
No, I don't necessarily think that. [Laughs] The movie to me isn't standing on a soapbox trying to give out a message. My message is the question of what happens to love over time and what happens to make people fall in love and out of love. And I made the film because I don't have those answers, but I have the questions.

You don't Hollywoodise the film. There's no huge event that explains everything.
I never wanted to give it a reason because I feel like that disrespects what it is. The story is about the mystery of what happens. It's that there's a million things that are going wrong and then there's a million things that are going right. There's a million reasons to leave and a million reasons to stay. And it's just not that easy and clear in life.

What's next?
Down the road I'd like to make a musical. I'd like to try to make the happiest movie ever made. Gaynor Flynn

Blue Valentine screens from Sun 26 Dec

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