CIANFRANCE: Hello, this is Derek Cianfrance,
the director and the screenplay adapter
for The Light Between Oceans, and I'm here
with my professor, the great filmmaker, Phil Solomon.
PHIL SOLOMON: It's such a pleasure for me to sit here with Derek,
watching this beautiful film together,
being back in school, where he is now in front of the classroom,
and he's gonna teach me.
So, it's a wonderful honor to be here, Derek,
and having followed your career, and ending up here,
it's fantastic.
I had been in touch with you about this film for a long time.
CIANFRANCE: Yes.
SOLOMON: And we talked about the possibility of my doing
an opening credit sequence.
CIANFRANCE: That's right.
SOLOMON: I was in touch with your producer, Jeffrey,
and we had a wonderful dialogue back and forth.
I had a really great idea.
And I was very hopeful, and then it didn't end up happening.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: But now that I've seen the film,
I think it's absolutely appropriate that that wasn't used,
that my credit sequence would have been wrong for this film as I see it now.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
Yeah, your credit sequence, if I remember correctly,
was going to be Tom's nightmare of World War I.
SOLOMON: Right. We wanted to give him some backstory,
because you're not gonna show World War I.
How are you going to invoke his... You were studying shell-shock footage.
CIANFRANCE: Yes. SOLOMON: And so I started looking
at shell-shock footage, uh, and I was gonna intermix it with waves,
and with the meiosis of a cell.
And the lighthouse, of course, is in my wheelhouse.
CIANFRANCE: Yes. SOLOMON: So...
CIANFRANCE: It's a cinematic delight.
That's what attracted me to this story in the first place.
It was about a lighthouse keeper and I thought to myself,
"What is a more cinematic subject matter than that?"
Light showing through a lens, projecting...
SOLOMON: Exactly. CIANFRANCE: ...out into the darkness.
SOLOMON: Uh, your teacher, and my colleague,
and my best friend, Stan Brakhage,
was fond of quoting Scotus Eriugena,
who said, "All that is, is light."
MR. COUGHLAN: From there you'll be shipped off to Janus.
SOLOMON: And finally when I saw this movie,
- that's what I felt on my eyes... - CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: ...is the modulation of light throughout the film.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: And then I'll talk about that with you.
One of the questions I have is the way that you light interiors.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: Where the light is almost always bursting...
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - ...through the windows,
as if there's a lighthouse outside the house.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, that's interesting.
My cinematographer, Adam Arkapaw, and I
talked a long time about how we deal
with light and darkness in this movie.
And we wanted the light always to have a natural source.
It was always gonna be a single source,
mostly the sun, or it would be the lighthouse.
And so we tried to under-light the movie.
I mean, in all of these opening scenes here,
you see there is no lighting, there's no movie lighting.
It's like I always try to say,
"God's light coming in and illuminating our world."
SOLOMON: And this is your first time working with all digital?
CIANFRANCE: Well, I shot Blue Valentine,
uh, the present thread of Blue Valentine was all shot on a RED camera,
whereas the past was shot on Super 16.
I did that for aesthetic reasons because...
I had a whole manifesto
about film versus digital in that one, and something,
with digital you can really erode moments,
because you can keep shooting for a long, long time,
whereas film, to me, is more about the urgency of a moment,
because it runs out.
And with this movie, I really did wanna shoot it on film,
because it takes place in the 1920s.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. CIANFRANCE: I felt like this is...
It was the texture of the world.
But we shot in New Zealand and Australia,
- and there was no labs open anymore. - SOLOMON: Hmm.
CIANFRANCE: So, it basically made it an impossibility.
We could have gotten our dailies six days later by going to India.
Um...
And it was gonna cost us another million dollars
or something to shoot on film.
And Adam and I started doing tests on the ALEXA,
and we found these great modern day lenses,
Panavision lenses, that were made for 35 mm,
and we put those on the camera and we realized
that it saw light in this beautifully soft way.
- SOLOMON: Right. - And...
And so, we just did a lot of experiments with that,
and just found the way to see light.
And then I have a great colorist that I use, named Tom Poole, always
- who found a way to make it glow. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And there's a real... He has this double LUT system,
his secret sauce, I guess, that he puts on things,
that he allowed it to glow.
And the light is a real character in the movie.
And I attribute that all to Adam and to Tom Poole.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: Now, you can tell one of the reasons why...
The title sequence couldn't work
in this is that as I started editing the movie,
it was clear to me that it had so many introductions.
SOLOMON: Right. There is an example right there, of the blown-out window.
- CIANFRANCE: Yes. - Was that a practical reason?
CIANFRANCE: No, no, that's sun.
- SOLOMON: Okay, really? - That's just the sunlight, yeah.
- SOLOMON: It wasn't a stage set? - No, no, no.
This was a house that we shot in outside of Dunedin,
on the southern island of New Zealand, uh, and it's a historic house.
- SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. - All the wallpaper in there
is from the late 1800s and all the furniture was...
They allowed us to come into this...
They charged $5 a head to come walk in this house
and they gave us two days to shoot in the house.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And we just embraced the texture of the world in it.
SOLOMON: That fantastic glow that you're talking about.
CIANFRANCE: Part of the idea of finding, when you make a movie,
you can create everything or you can find,
you can make discoveries.
And what I really tried to do, early-on, with this film
was find places that already existed,
without having to build sets, necessarily.
That would be fabrications of the time.
There were textures that actually lived hundred or so years ago.
SOLOMON: And that was part of your location scouting?
CIANFRANCE: Location scouting.
SOLOMON: You went on an extensive hunt.
Yeah.
SOLOMON: For the lighthouse, first and foremost.
CIANFRANCE: Yes, yeah.
SOLOMON: Down to New Zealand, and...
CIANFRANCE: I have to say, when I first...
We were gonna shoot this movie in Australia,
- where the book takes place. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And it became, uh...
We found some great lighthouses down there.
And then the Australian government gave all of their tax credit money
- to Pirates of the Caribbean 5. And so... - (SOLOMON LAUGHS)
CIANFRANCE: And then Johnny Depp went down there with his dog.
SOLOMON: I think you need a Light Between Oceans ride.
- And that would solve the problem. - CIANFRANCE: Uh-huh. Yes, exactly.
Anyway, we had to scramble. We were 12 weeks out of production.
And they pulled the rug from underneath us.
And I understand.
Pirates of the Caribbean brings them a lot more money
- than this movie would. - SOLOMON: Right, right.
CIANFRANCE: So we started searching New Zealand,
and I went all up and down both coasts of New Zealand,
and I had a really hard time
finding a world that was frozen in time.
And, you know, immediately when I got off the plane and was doing my scouts,
DreamWorks, they brought their VFX people along,
and they were talking about where the green screens would go
and I almost lost my mind thinking of shooting this film on green screens,
like it would be the Star Wars prequels or something.
You know what I mean? I didn't wanna shoot in a place that didn't exist.
I wanted to find places that...
- SOLOMON: Beautiful dissolve change. - ...existed.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHING) Sorry. I'm gonna interrupt you
every now and then with that.
CIANFRANCE: Yes. Yes, that is. I don't know if...
Actually I have to give credit on that dissolve to Ron Patane.
SOLOMON: To Ron. Okay. Good.
CIANFRANCE: Ron has been learning a lot about...
- He didn't go to school with you. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: My two editors that I work with all the time,
Jim Helton and Ron Patane.
SOLOMON: Jim went to school during Derek's years,
and was a particularly beautiful editor.
- CIANFRANCE: Yes. - Always has been.
- CIANFRANCE: Great poetic filmmaker. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: So this is your... You found your lighthouse.
CIANFRANCE: We found our lighthouse.
This is a place called Cape Campbell, on the southern island of New Zealand.
It actually isn't an island, it's a peninsula really, or a cape. Um...
I was down to two choices at the end.
There was a squat lighthouse that was about 35 feet tall
on the southern island, on a real island,
but it wasn't quite the masculine lighthouse that we needed.
Um, and we found this place.
This was actually the last place we looked.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHING) Speaking of masculine and lighthouse.
He, Michael Fassbender, evokes for me, Burt Lancaster.
Almost like the Atlantic City Burt Lancaster, with his mustache.
CIANFRANCE: Especially with that mustache.
SOLOMON: Yeah, and that kind of face,
that strong face you could put on Mount Rushmore.
CIANFRANCE: Yes. Yeah, Fassbender is a... It was his idea to have the mustache.
- I had been... - SOLOMON: Mmm?
CIANFRANCE: Once I found this location, I was walking around it
'cause I just spent as much time there as I possibly could
before we shot
and I came across a grave on the island or on this Cape Campbell
and it was a grave of a child, of an infant,
that had died there in 1896.
And I realized there had been a whole history of people
that had lived there, and there had been...
There was memories that were made there.
There was joy and there was sorrow,
and there was heartbreak, and life,
that had happened there before we went there.
And I started researching all the people that lived there,
and there was a light keeper that I saw, that had a mustache.
I sent it to Michael, and he really mirrored the look of his character
and his wardrobe after this guy who was there.
And just as an aside, did you know that Len Lye...
- SOLOMON: Yes, you wrote to me... - ...actually lived on this lighthouse
- when he was a child. - SOLOMON: Fantastic.
- I said to you, that's instant karma. - CIANFRANCE: Yes.
SOLOMON: That one of the great artists of the 20th century...
Well done, Sherbourne.
You look as fit and well after three months
as any keeper I've seen.
SOLOMON: I love how the montage sequences
take care of a lot of business.
And, for me, in lieu of the World War I backstory,
- we have Michael's face. - Mmm-hmm.
SOLOMON: And his face looks spooked.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: And that does a lot of the back work.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. SOLOMON: Um...
And that one train shot
that you had of the wounded vets getting off the train.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - That took care of a lot of it.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. There's also a moment up in the lighthouse,
where he's looking out
and the wind, there's a moment where the sound of the wind
blends in with these kind of...
His history of the war and you hear...
The waves are also explosions
and something my great sound mixer, Tony Volante,
and sound designer, Craig Sutherland, came up with.
SOLOMON: Yeah. CIANFRANCE: Um...
And in the last moments of our mix.
SOLOMON: The sound design was beautiful. Very subtle throughout.
The times you would bring down the wild sound,
very much in the Malick way that he does that.
And I thought it was extremely delicate, especially also with the seagulls,
- which could have been overdone. - Mmm.
SOLOMON: Uh, and then at the end, he does something extraordinary,
which, I think, he just leaves the music on, with no wild sound.
At a very key moment.
So I thought the sound mix was beautiful.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. Tony Volante,
he did Place Beyond the Pines with me, and is just such a key collaborator.
We spent a lot of time on sound with this movie.
That's something you always taught me, that sound is...
I mean, with your own movies, right?
SOLOMON: Yeah. I still think that sound and sound design
is the undiscovered country of cinema, especially subtle sound design.
We're very good at bombastic sound design.
CIANFRANCE: Transformers. SOLOMON: Oh! Uh...
(CHUCKLES) Don't get me started.
CIANFRANCE: I remember seeing Twister in the movie theater,
and it's like, "Whoa! That tornado's in the theater with us."
I understand it, though, you want an experience.
- SOLOMON: Right. - Right, in the cinema.
And I think sound allows you to experience it.
I had a great on-set sound recorder.
It's Richard Flynn, who just owned the sound.
He just hunted the sound like I was hunting images.
SOLOMON: Right.
CIANFRANCE: Uh, he was hunting sound like I would hunt performances,
and it meant everything to him, and...
SOLOMON: Does all of the sound design stem from original recordings?
CIANFRANCE: A lot of it stems from original recording, and then, uh...
Between Craig and Jacob, and Tony, and the Sound Room, and Dan,
they created a whole new world.
I have this guy, Craig Sutherland, who is from Scotland,
and he spent a month in Scotland storming castles,
and recording the sound of birds at 5:00 in the morning.
- SOLOMON: Yeah. - Just to get it specific.
You'll listen to the sound of this, for instance, and my son Cody,
who's obsessed with birds, will say, "Oh, there's a tui there."
- SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. - And this movie is supposed to...
The book takes place in Australia, not New Zealand,
but to me, it's emotion,
- and the sound just helps. - SOLOMON: That's right.
CIANFRANCE: Grounds you in emotion. And much like Malick,
who is a huge influence on everyone who makes films,
especially on this film, um...
- Sound creates nature, it creates... - SOLOMON: Ambience.
CIANFRANCE: The world. It gives it a living world.
- SOLOMON: Air. - And this scene
was an incredibly difficult scene to mix for sound,
because it's Michael and Alicia at 5:00 in the morning
on this place called The Nut, in Australia,
'cause we actually went to shoot one week
in a town called Stanley, in Australia,
because it was the only town
that I could find in that Southern Hemisphere,
that felt untouched by time.
I mean, there was a neon ice cream cone
outside the ice cream shop,
but all we had to do was take that down.
So we had to lose 10% of the town, of the modern attributes to the town,
and we could have this town.
Anyway, we woke up, we got up to this hill early in the morning,
and there was this intimate moment where they're talking to each other.
And of course the first thing you hear from sound people is,
- they need to talk louder. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: But actually they don't, because they can hear each other,
but the question is,
"How do you make the audience hear?"
And so, there's a few little moments...
So the first question comes up, "Do you ADR. the whole scene?"
But then if you ADR. the whole scene,
all of a sudden, their performances are ruined.
- SOLOMON: Disembodied. - Disembodied, yeah.
So we tried to embrace the windiness of this location.
And let it be okay that maybe sometimes,
you don't hear every word that they're saying.
It also goes in line with how I shoot this scene, which is,
over the back of the shoulders.
SOLOMON: I love the way you have your characters look away.
- Michael often will look off into space. - CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: A certain kind of shyness, but it's another way of not doing,
- I look, you look, I talk, you talk. - Yes.
To me this all comes... I've done this in a lot of my movies,
shoot dialogue scenes behind shoulders, 'cause to me,
it reminds me of when I was a kid and I'd sit in the backseat
and hear my parents talk to each other, or not talk to each other.
- Right. - And this is the child's view, I think.
SOLOMON: Beautiful.
CIANFRANCE: And I'm always thinking of my parents,
who were the example for me of a relationship, my whole life.
SOLOMON: And look how they move together in the 'Scope frame.
Now, this is the first time you've used CinemaScope?
CIANFRANCE: No, no, no.
Well, Place Beyond the Pines, we shot on 2.35 aspect ratio,
but it was 2-perf.
- SOLOMON: Okay. - So it was spherical lenses.
This is the first time I've shot a movie with anamorphic lenses.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And again, that's one of the elements of digital video, uh...
Shooting on the ALEXA.
To me, the downside to digital photography
- is that everything is so clean. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And so, I'm trying to do anything I can to break up
the foreground and background, right.
To soften the image in any way I can.
'Cause everything is always so sharp in digital.
- SOLOMON: Right. Right, now 4K, 8K. - Yeah.
- SOLOMON: 20K. - Yeah. I mean, I like MiniDV.
- SOLOMON: Right. Sure. - I like SD. I don't like HD.
- SOLOMON: Right. Ambiguity, texture. - Mystery. What you don't see.
SOLOMON: That's right.
CIANFRANCE: And so again, this is a beautiful example of a soft,
soft background
with a sharp foreground. So we're...
I'm always trying to shoot at the most wide open f-stop
I can possibly shoot at.
And digital gives you this great ability to just shoot.
You can just shoot. We could...
We shot 209 hours of footage for this film.
- SOLOMON: Wow. - Of life, and...
And then editing. You think of...
That's like 1%.
1% of everything we did, we used.
SOLOMON: Beautiful lingering on the pen, over the dissolve.
It kind of classically references letter-writing montages.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, it was something in the book, that M.L. Stedman had done.
She had really worked with their letters,
and letters, beautiful way,
from Taxi Driver onward of people writing their thoughts.
SOLOMON: It also mimics the lighthouse turning.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm-hmm. - This beautiful mirrors and glass.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - And prisms, and...
TOM: ...for so long, that it has made me numb.
I suppose that's why I came to Janus...
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, all of this footage, we shot in the first three days
I was on that island with Michael.
One of the things I ask my actors to do is,
uh, I try to give them an experience.
When you're dealing with a great, trained actor like Michael,
sometimes he would say, "Well, do we really need to do that?"
Michael would get it in one or two takes.
- SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. - But for me, what I'm trying to do is
not find the perfection in Michael, I'm trying to find the flaws in Michael.
I'm trying to find where he is maybe uncomfortable, where he isn't perfect.
You said he reminds you of Burt Lancaster.
He kind of reminds me of Laurence Olivier.
- SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. - I feel like he is just the finest actor,
but what I really wanted to find with him was his heart.
And so, the first three days I shot the movie,
I had him come out to this lighthouse,
and I asked him if he would live there with me.
Because it was an hour and a half to drive back to town and...
- SOLOMON: This is classic Cianfrance. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: You sign up and you get basic training.
- CIANFRANCE: Experience. - (LAUGHS) Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: Anyway, so we lived there and the first day, he had to...
The first thing he did
was go up to the top of the lighthouse and clean the lens.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And then he had to go downstairs and cook himself breakfast.
Then he went to his garden and picked some carrots,
and then he went and milked the goat.
And at the end of the third day,
I remember, he asked my costume designer,
he said, "What have we been doing? Have we been shooting the movie?
"Like, is this rehearsal? What's going on here?"
And this shot right here, of him watering.
That's the very first day of Michael watering his garden.
Just simply because Tom had to do that,
and there's a lot of freedom in those first days
for these actors to explore who they are
and just figure out how they live in that world.
Because they are actually, in fact, living.
SOLOMON: Right.
CIANFRANCE: They're cooking their own food, they're doing their own dishes,
they're cleaning the lens that...
They're sleeping there.
SOLOMON: And this goes back to method and all of that, right?
Getting the muscle, the memory in the muscle.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. Yeah.
SOLOMON: So they'll feel freer to be automatic, to be themselves.
- A lighthouse keeper. - CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
Making the bed. Michael did such...
I couldn't include it all there,
but I had a 30-minute scene of him making a bed.
And he had, as part of his preparation for the movie,
he learned how to make a bed off of YouTube,
how an army guy would make the bed.
It was tight, you could bounce a quarter off of it.
And he did that and he wasn't satisfied till he made it super, super-tight,
and that's fine.
I'll give an actor all the space they need
for that in a movie because it helps them own it.
SOLOMON: So, we haven't talked about casting.
When you read the book,
is this how you envisioned Tom and Isabel?
CIANFRANCE: Yes. Yeah, I mean, I always thought of Michael
when I was reading the book for the first time,
and then especially adapting the screenplay,
because I felt that Tom had this interesting dilemma
- between his brain and his heart. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And I thought Michael is such a smart actor,
- he's like a mental giant. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: It's no surprise to me that he plays Magneto.
The guy who can crush metal with his brain, or Steve Jobs.
But what I was really interested in was his heart,
and so I knew Michael had that head. What I wanted to find...
And so when I met with him for the first time,
I found out what his heart was all about,
and I thought he would be a perfect guy to cast as this man, Tom,
who has this conflict between his brain, between duty,
- between right and wrong and love. - SOLOMON: Right.
- Which she is opening up in him. - Yes.
SOLOMON: She's bringing him back, as he says, "From the dead."
"I should have died a long time ago."
CIANFRANCE: Yes. Yes, she brings him back to life and life is...
- SOLOMON: And that's in her face, too. - Unwieldy.
And dangerous.
And I had no idea who I was gonna cast as Isabel.
I told my casting director I wanted Gena Rowlands
- from Woman Under the Influence. - (SOLOMON LAUGHS)
CIANFRANCE: Or I wanted Vivien Leigh from Gone with the Wind.
Or I wanted Emily Watson from Breaking the Waves.
Which are my three favorite performances of all time.
SOLOMON: I'm with you.
CIANFRANCE: And my casting director says "Alicia Vikander."
And I said, "Who?"
This was before Danish Girl, and Ex Machina, and...
I met with her, she came in for an audition with me,
and she was completely...
- She let it all out for me, right? - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: It was four hours, and I'm not gonna say...
I normally don't like to audition actors,
because I feel like if an actor is really good in the room,
I can't trust it.
Because I don't...
All it really is telling me is that they're a good faker.
If they can really get to an emotional place in a room like this.
- I mean, it's... - SOLOMON: Instant turn-on.
CIANFRANCE: Instant turn-on. Yeah. I don't trust it.
But what she did in this audition was,
she failed for me.
She went for it so far,
that I couldn't help but just be inspired by her courage, really,
and her willingness to go that far,
and that's what I loved about Gena Rowlands,
- and Vivien Leigh, and Emily Watson. - SOLOMON: I was gonna say that.
- That's right. - They all go past the safe point.
And she did that in the audition and I thought to myself,
"Here I got, like, the heavyweight champ
"in Michael Fassbender.
"And then, all of a sudden I got this thoroughbred in Alicia."
So it was like Muhammad Ali versus Seabiscuit.
(SOLOMON LAUGHING)
CIANFRANCE: And then what happened on-set,
Michael, who can get it in two takes,
all of a sudden had to go up against Seabiscuit.
So Ali is used to knocking you out in the second round,
but Seabiscuit is still running on the 31st take.
And she picked him up and challenged him.
And also, he challenged her, because he's the best.
And so I had this instant connection between these two great actors
that were not only catching each other when they fell,
but they were also raising the bar for each other constantly.
SOLOMON: And like everyone else on a Cianfrance film, they fell in love.
(SOLOMON LAUGHING)
Sign up for the movie.
That's beautiful. I mean, how could they help it?
- How could they help it? - CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
They were... I will say this, they were...
Yeah, I don't know how that all happened,
but they had a connection that was clear, and I felt like they,
from meeting her and knowing him, that they would fit together.
And, uh...
SOLOMON: And you're watching it. You're watching it happen.
- CIANFRANCE: I'm watching it happen. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: This scene, sex scenes are always difficult.
But they're not really.
All you have to do is just be open and talk to the actors
about what's gonna happen, and this was clear.
Tom hasn't been alive or been with anyone for so long, so he has...
He has to be kinda frozen in this room.
And she's never been with anyone, so it was just a very gentle scene.
- Very tender scene. - SOLOMON: Yeah, and beautiful.
CIANFRANCE: And I'm not telling them, "Do this or do that."
Just let the actors go from there.
SOLOMON: So, right there, that cut.
That happens a lot in the film,
where your eyes are adjusted to an interior
and your pupils are opened and then you cut to a bright landscape.
And this tonal shifts throughout the film,
you kind of learn them musically, you feel them musically.
You feel them physically, on the eye.
And the 'Scope frame, for me,
keeps everything tight, keeps everything together.
- Keeps it pictorial. - Mmm.
SOLOMON: So, yet I'm having an experience on my eyes
that's not abstract.
That's pictorial.
And, of course, always goes back to the sunset.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm-hmm.
The sun. The Light Between Oceans.
There's that light and dark working on the eye
if I'm gonna bring up a movie reference for that,
it's All the President's Men by Pakula. Because...
SOLOMON: Interesting choice.
CIANFRANCE: And I remember Jim Palmer,
here at the University of Colorado, used to,
when he first showed me that movie, he was talking about these cuts
that Pakula would do from these underground parking garages
where Deep Throat is telling you the secrets,
and then you cut to these bright, fluorescent-lit newsrooms.
And he was talking about truth and darkness,
and how it affected your eyes, and it's true,
that movie really had a physical effect on me, and...
And so, we were thinking about light and dark
in this film quite a bit.
SOLOMON: And we came back to the bedroom almost the same
reverse-angle,
- but now it's lighter in the room. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: It's like, things are lightening up and...
CIANFRANCE: And time is folding on itself.
A lot of this movie takes place in memory. Uh...
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: A lot of our montages are folding great swaths of time
in two or three minutes of montage, and I have to say, if...
That's another huge influence of Malick on this film.
SOLOMON: That's right. I was gonna say...
And damping down the wild sound.
Leaving it in there, with his delicate score.
And that's very Tree of Life.
You and I both love that middle section of Tree of Life.
TOM: Torn between two ways of seeing things.
January looks forward to the new year
and back to the old.
SOLOMON: Okay, now, I have to tell you.
This beautiful theme that becomes your main love theme.
(CHUCKLES) I have such a crazily great ear for melody
that I recognized something very similar,
which is from another CU graduate, Trey Parker,
from Cannibal! The Musical, my only acting experience.
If you listen to the Shpadoinkle Day, it has a very similar theme.
So I kind of cracked up to myself when I watched it in the theater.
It's a very beautiful variation on Shpadoinkle.
(LAUGHING)
Though obviously just a coincidence, but I gotta chuckle to myself.
Something like that, like a little magical moment of connection.
Look at this. Ah, what a classic image.
CIANFRANCE: Yes.
Cut to black.
We talked a lot about Ross McElwee and his use of cadence and black...
- SOLOMON: From Sherman's March. - From Sherman's March
and from Time Indefinite.
SOLOMON: Ah, yeah.
- Is that the only time that you used it? - CIANFRANCE: No, no.
- There's three periods in the movie. - Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.
So, Michael and the goat, you cut the scene, according to what I saw.
CIANFRANCE: Oh, yeah, Michael and the goat. Yeah, he milked the goat.
He was not too happy about it on the first day of shooting.
He said, you should get someone, a hand double on here
that knows how to do this.
He was getting very frustrated, he was kicking the milk pail over,
'cause it's hard to milk a goat, and I was laughing behind the camera.
I thought it was great comedy.
SOLOMON: Now, this is all natural light?
CIANFRANCE: Natural light.
This is at the end of the day, and actually my DP, Adam,
was getting very uncomfortable right here.
He kept telling me "We're out, we're out."
And I just kept pushing it a little bit further.
And when we got the dailies back, uh,
it was his favorite stuff, and my favorite stuff,
because these digital cameras, you can really push it, and it...
To me, it looks so beautiful, that glow.
(FOOTSTEPS ECHOING)
- SOLOMON: All these sounds. - Yeah.
(RAIN PATTERING)
CIANFRANCE: This was a real turning point,
in the edit of the movie, because up until this point, it's...
I don't wanna say happy times, but it's just...
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. Now we start the turn.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, this is the turn,
and this was an incredibly difficult scene...
SOLOMON: Oh, my God, I cannot imagine.
CIANFRANCE: ...to do. For Alicia.
This is when I met her in that first audition
and I saw how far she would go for me in the audition,
I knew that she could be...
She would be brave enough, courageous enough, to do this scene,
alone in a kitchen.
And one of the things we really wanted to do
by showing these miscarriages in the movie was,
embrace the horror that they are, but not exploit them.
SOLOMON: Right.
I mean, it's really an unseen... It's...
How do you show a miscarriage on-screen?
It's all through her performance here
and I thought she just did an amazing and courageous job.
SOLOMON: With the sound and the music.
CIANFRANCE: The sound.
SOLOMON: And the blues against the yellows.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm-hmm. - And you're cutting across the windows.
Oh. Fantastic.
ISABEL: (QUIVERING) Tom.
SOLOMON: The distance between them,
and the shift of sound there.
- CIANFRANCE: Yep. - He has no idea.
(RAIN PATTERING)
CIANFRANCE: When we were first prepping this scene,
there was a lot of discussion about the budget.
"How are we gonna do this major storm scene
"out in the middle of nowhere in this lighthouse?"
And my first thought was, "We just do it in darkness."
Just let the whole storm happen in black.
- SOLOMON: Right. - And let there just be sound.
Sound to take you away.
And I couldn't quite sell that through to the higher-ups.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: Mostly Adam. Adam wanted to see something.
And I think he lit this scene...
Just so beautiful,
and the special effects guys couldn't stand me,
because I just wanted so much.
We were pumping so much water in the air, and this rain
and Alicia is walking out in the middle of this torrential downpour
that we created and...
SOLOMON: That's such a classic gothic image.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
Yeah, you had said early on about how this was a gothic love story.
What was it? Eye of the Needle?
What was the Donald Sutherland film that you referenced to me?
- SOLOMON: Oh! Eye of the Needle. - Eye of the Needle, yeah.
- SOLOMON: Also, Ryan's Daughter. - Ryan's Daughter.
Another big one for me was, Michael Powell's Edge of the World.
SOLOMON: Edge of the World, that's the one. Okay.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: And then Breaking the Waves,
of course, comes to mind a lot.
ISABEL: Tom!
Tom!
CIANFRANCE: Axial cut? SOLOMON: Mmm!
(SOLOMON LAUGHING)
- SOLOMON: I know the reference. - You know the reference.
SOLOMON: Ah! See, there it is again. It's like this shift in tone.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - On a cut that's, uh...
CIANFRANCE: I hadn't done much of that before.
I had always been so obsessed with flow in my movies.
How one thing would transition into the next, musically.
And with this movie I was...
Jim, and Ron, and I were really focusing on those hard cuts.
SOLOMON: You're out of your wheelhouse
in every respect, it seems to me.
You took an enormous risk to make this film,
and yet it's in keeping with the themes, the major themes of your work.
Um, to go back to this kind of old school, like David Lean.
It's classical compositions.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. What, the thing, to me, I always thought about with this is like,
and this came from the book, is that it was incredibly intimate,
- but it took place on this epic scale. - SOLOMON: Right.
And so you're using a 'Scope, which is the least intimate frame,
in a certain way, and you're using it to study faces.
- CIANFRANCE: Yes. - And landscape. Within landscapes.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, well, as John Ford said,
"The human face is the most interesting landscape there is."
SOLOMON: And 1.33 is so perfectly suited.
CIANFRANCE: It is.
SOLOMON: But you've managed to make this an intimate film
with a horizon line.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I used to tell the crew early on,
it's like a Cassavetes movie in a David Lean landscape.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHS) There you go, perfect description.
- You got it. That's the tagline. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: That's the new tagline.
Love demands everything, Cassavetes within Lean.
(BOTH CHUCKLING)
CIANFRANCE: This is one of those moments
where their intimacy of their performance was so quiet,
you could literally not hear them,
and it was okay.
I could not hear them on-set,
but they were full of emotion while doing the scene
that I couldn't change it.
SOLOMON: If I had a remote control, I would freeze-frame that dissolve.
- CIANFRANCE: It's a beautiful one. - Beautiful.
CIANFRANCE: And I love this cut here to the reflection of the window,
then the transition.
- SOLOMON: With a rack focus. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: Yeah, now the sound design gives us
a sense of the wind, a sense of air.
CIANFRANCE: A sense of reality all of a sudden, right?
- We go from internal spaces to... - Right.
CIANFRANCE: Real spaces.
And then back to the internal space again,
later on in this scene, when she starts thinking
that she's hearing sounds of the piano on the wind...
SOLOMON: Mmm. CIANFRANCE: ...that turn out
to then be real. So we're constantly going
from non-diegetic to diegetic, back to non-diegetic.
And also the Cannibal! The Musical theme,
that you're saying Desplat ripped off,
- which I don't think it was. - SOLOMON: No,
- I didn't think you ripped it off. - Okay.
- SOLOMON: No, it's a magical... - You kind of said that, but it's okay.
- SOLOMON: No, he did not rip it off. - You kind of suggested it, but it's okay.
- SOLOMON: It's a coincidence. Yeah. - It's a coincidence.
SOLOMON: I'm sorry. The reason that...
CIANFRANCE: (LAUGHING) No, no, no.
No, but that was one of my first...
I had talked to him
about doing the score for A Place Beyond the Pines,
but he was unavailable
and when I had an opportunity to do this,
I sent him the script and he said yes, thankfully.
And the first thing I asked him to do was, I said,
"Can you compose a piece of music for the movie?"
Because I want Alicia to be able to learn something to play on-set.
So that way we, uh, can have the non-diegetic sound
turn into diegetic sound. Like Once Upon a Time in the West,
or John Woo's The Killer, where the harmonica comes in.
And so, he wrote this next piano piece, which Alicia then learned,
and that became the theme for the rest of the movie.
SOLOMON: There are so many aspects to the score.
The sweeping strings, the delicate piano.
CIANFRANCE: Working with him was...
It was one of the just, most pleasant, enjoyable, inspirational experiences
I've ever had with a collaborative partner.
SOLOMON: (STAMMERS) How did it work?
Did he send you musical pieces?
CIANFRANCE: So he sent me this. I was shooting,
I was on my second week of shooting,
and he sent me this piece
that will start playing right here, on piano,
- with him playing it, and... - Oh, and it's like piano tuning, also.
He's alternating between the same notes.
CIANFRANCE: This piano tuner is actually the real piano tuner.
Hey, hey. Come here.
CIANFRANCE: I just think this piece of music was so beautiful,
and it became a North Star, an emotional North Star for us on-set.
I would play this piano theme on-set,
and Michael and Alicia would hear it, and they were in the world.
So the script inspired the theme, the theme inspired the life
that we captured, and then I cut the movie together
and gave it back to Alexander,
- and he was able to then... - Elaborate.
CIANFRANCE: Elaborate on it.
SOLOMON: And then you went in with an 80-piece orchestra.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - Must have been fantastic.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, it was a dream come true, to work with him.
He understands character, and story, and cinema.
SOLOMON: His Benjamin Button score
is one of my absolute favorite soundtracks.
I thought he did a magnificent job on this film.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, I love this score, too.
SOLOMON: And so much. It's almost wall-to-wall music.
CIANFRANCE: He did a lot of music, yes.
(PIANO PLAYING)
CIANFRANCE: So right there, actually, we have her playing the score, but...
In the edit, we couldn't linger on it.
Here's another just...
This is like the worst day to go to work,
is the day when you have to do a miscarriage scene.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And Michael and Alicia do this scene, for six hours,
until they're completely and utterly exhausted.
Again, it's the combination of the casting of the two of them
that allowed for it.
Um, that allowed for me to shoot it.
SOLOMON: And meanwhile, the light is pushing into the room like a...
CIANFRANCE: And a lot of that push is also from, we have sheers on the windows,
which again, Cassavetes, one of my favorite movies, uh,
Minnie and Moskowitz, I always remember
he had these yellow sheers on the window,
and Gena Rowlands is in the room, and there's this glow in the room.
And so we tried to put sheers on everything,
'cause we knew it was about how light would enter these places.
- Breathe. Breathe. - (BREATHES DEEPLY)
Breathe. That's it. That's it.
It's too early.
It's okay. It's all right. It's all right.
What do I... (SOBBING)
CIANFRANCE: This is an example of these actors, though, just being...
What do you want me to do?
CIANFRANCE: Just being there for each other.
SOLOMON: And that's a line from another one of your films.
- CIANFRANCE: What's that? - "What do you want me to do?
"What can I say? What do you want me to say?"
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - The helpless man.
What should I do? Let me get you...
SOLOMON: And she hits the piano key.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
(ISABEL CRYING)
CIANFRANCE: This is a just...
SOLOMON: And you cut away from the most intense part.
ISABEL: You have to save her.
CIANFRANCE: Again, I was trying not to exploit it.
But pulling back again, the intimate to the epic.
SOLOMON: Right.
CIANFRANCE: And then right back to the intimate again.
And time passes.
And you realize that there's no...
That that story didn't end well. And I had that whole entire scene.
- Do you know what I mean? - Mmm-hmm. Yes.
CIANFRANCE: I had the baby, and I had Tom washing the blood off the floor,
and all of these moments that I capture with the actors,
that allow them to be devastated.
SOLOMON: That's all we need. Otherwise it would be torturous.
- CIANFRANCE: It's torturous. - Yeah.
And then this finishes the narrative for you,
- that there's two crosses up there. - Right.
SOLOMON: I think you also had to reach this age,
and be a father yourself, of two boys.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: To reach this kind of understanding of what this means.
What all this means.
This is not a film a young man could make,
a younger man could make.
CIANFRANCE: My wife, Shannon, and I were talking about it the other night.
I don't think I would have made any movies,
- had I not had children. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: I think my children inspired and allowed
Blue Valentine, Pines, and this movie to happen.
(STAMMERS) I really don't believe
I would be making films, without my children.
When I read the book... That's taken straight from the book.
I thought M.L. Stedman had written such cinematic moments,
and Isabel, when she first hears the cries.
When she's lying down by the grave, that she thinks for a moment
it could be coming from the grave itself, and they buried the baby too soon.
And just thought that she really wrote sound into her book.
And I really wanted to pay tribute to that experience that I had
while reading the book the first time, on-screen.
Without simply filming the book.
SOLOMON: And that's how you came to this project, right?
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm-hmm. - You picked up the book,
you were inspired by just...
CIANFRANCE: I had had a meeting at DreamWorks, 'cause Spielberg...
Steven Spielberg had loved Blue Valentine.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And, uh, I went there and they gave me
a pile of stuff that they were working on
and Light Between Oceans was there.
And I said, "Oh, it's a lighthouse keeper, that's cinematic."
And I started reading it,
and very quickly I just felt like I was born to make it.
Felt like it was dealing with the same themes I had been dealing with
in my movies.
I'm not trying to repeat myself. It had enough different.
It took place in a different time, and a different continent
and a different world than I had ever worked with.
SOLOMON: And doing an adaptation
must have been so, in a way, revitalizing for you.
- CIANFRANCE: Absolutely. - After struggling with those scripts.
- CIANFRANCE: Absolutely. - Valentine took, what, 12 years?
- And what... - CIANFRANCE: Pines was five years, and...
I love the depth in this scene, again,
the depth between their two perspectives.
Between her up on the ridge, and...
- SOLOMON: Music. I'm sorry. - The music, yeah.
SOLOMON: It's conveying excitement,
optimism, and fraught with a little bit of tension.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah, danger. - Mmm-hmm.
TOM: There's a man!
There's a body!
SOLOMON: There. There's the danger right there.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: Like, almost a Bernard Herrmann.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
(BABY CRYING)
I'm here. I'm here, baby.
CIANFRANCE: Again, this is, to me, such a difficult scene.
It's like you can write it in a book, but then, to execute it was...
I couldn't imagine how you were gonna do it.
When I read the book.
(BABY CONTINUES CRYING)
SOLOMON: And then it's done in broad daylight and not a cloudy day.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - Or a rainy day. That's interesting.
CIANFRANCE: Once we started shooting it, once you get over all of the obstacles.
Like, one of the obstacles is, you can't put a baby in a rowboat
out in the middle of the ocean. The current could come up and...
That's right. (CHUCKLES)
That's an actual functional thing, but at the same time,
the baby has to be in the boat,
and she has to run up to it and reveal the baby for the first time.
And it, to me, it's better to do that in a longer take
than cut it up into a bunch of little pieces.
This baby's fantastic, by the way.
CIANFRANCE: Yep.
- SOLOMON: That was a beautiful smile. - Yes. Yeah.
- SOLOMON: All of your Lucys. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: There's a good title for a book. "All of your Lucys."
- And Lucy meaning, bringer of light. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: That's fantastic.
I'll send a signal, get them to send a boat for the body...
CIANFRANCE: When you shoot with a baby, too,
the first thing you'll hear is, like, "Oh, man, the baby's crying,
"it's ruining the takes."
Like Donald Trump said today, "Get that baby outta here."
- Right? - (SOLOMON LAUGHING)
CIANFRANCE: And when a baby cries on-set, for me, it's an opportunity.
Right now, for the actor to calm the baby down.
Now, this is all Alicia's instinct that kicks in right here.
This is not in the script and that's what I love.
I love shooting with babies, dogs, animals, anything.
Nature, weather, anything that throws you off your game,
and forces you to embrace life.
So, here Alicia has to do this scene,
but she's gotta soothe this baby,
who's not crazy about being in the scene.
SOLOMON: And the sorrow... The sorrow is still in her face.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm. - She's worn.
Uh, so the transition that she's going through is still there.
Like, she still has one foot in the sadness.
- CIANFRANCE: Yes. - She's not just luminous yet.
CIANFRANCE: But there's hope bleeding through.
CIANFRANCE: And that was actually something with the book
that I really wanted to focus on,
and I talked with Alicia about so much was,
I had friends that read the book that hated Isabel.
- SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. - And I loved her so much.
- SOLOMON: Because of the choices. - Because of her...
Yeah. They hated her, 'cause they thought she was a villain.
- SOLOMON: Selfish. - Selfish.
To me, she's just alive, and...
SOLOMON: No, you were right,
what you said about there are no villains here.
- CIANFRANCE: No. - Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: No. There's no good guys, there's no bad guys,
- there's just people. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: They don't always make the right decisions,
but you understand why they're making the decisions.
SOLOMON: 'Cause she felt she had a miracle.
It's a miracle coincidence, and that this was meant to be.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - And this is fiction.
(SOLOMON LAUGHS)
CIANFRANCE: There's this thing that goes around in Hollywood,
- the likeability of characters. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And sometimes people will confuse liking a movie,
or whether they think that a movie is worthy,
judging on whether or not the characters are likeable or not.
And, for me, the people I love most in my life aren't always likeable.
(SOLOMON CHUCKLES)
CIANFRANCE: You're not always likeable, Phil. Most of the time you are.
You're above 60%, so that's enough for me.
SOLOMON: Well, I used to be. (CHUCKLES)
ISABEL: Tom?
Where are you going?
TOM: To send a signal.
ISABEL: It can't just be a coincidence that she showed up so soon after...
TOM: Careful now.
SOLOMON: But it's also, can you identify with them?
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
And part of what you're identifying with here is tragedy.
No one will know she's not ours.
SOLOMON: These essential questions of what it is to be human.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. Loss. - Loss, which is the human condition.
Virtually all my work is about that.
It's what we're given, right from the start.
- We start to lose. - Mmm!
- SOLOMON: There's Burt Lancaster. - Yeah.
We've done nothing wrong except give shelter to a helpless baby.
SOLOMON: Did you, more or less, shoot in sequence?
- CIANFRANCE: No, not at all. - Mmm.
Every movie I've ever made,
I've thought that I should shoot in sequence.
I remember on Blue Valentine...
The very first scene I ever had with Ryan and Michelle together
was basically a love scene.
And I railed against it because I thought,
"This is impossible, this is not gonna work.
"They have to know each other before they do the love scene."
But it came out so great, this love scene,
and I realized that what it did was,
it took away the hardest scene right up front, and so it allowed them...
If I would have done it in chronological order,
they would have had this albatross waiting for them for weeks.
And it could have just messed their brains up the whole time,
'cause they were thinking about the love scene
and how nervous they were,
and they would have reasons to get out of it.
But you do it on the first day, it's like going swimming.
You just jump in the deep end and swim.
And so on A Place Beyond the Pines, I had a choice.
I did the love scene with Ryan and Eva on the very first day.
And I did the love scene with these guys
on one of the very first days.
And so there's a way you can chart your schedule of shooting,
which I work with the same AD, Mariela Comitini, on every film
and she really understands this process.
And we're developing a process of scheduling that.
SOLOMON: So your scheduling is not just about practical issues,
or actors' schedules, but it's also about the arc of the acting.
CIANFRANCE: Arc of the acting and the arc of the moment.
SOLOMON: Wonderful.
CIANFRANCE: Like, for instance, you can't, at the end of this scene,
at the end of this day,
when Michael and Alicia are actually feeling all of these emotions
- that they're feeling here... - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: ...you can't go straight into happy times for the next.
You could shoot the scene
where she's rescuing the baby in the kitchen next,
because she's gonna come into that scene
devastated from the scene
- that she did before. - SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: Even though, this has all of the hope in it. Anyway...
You can strategize your schedule
based on what you think will make sense.
SOLOMON: I love this moment with him.
CIANFRANCE: Me too.
Again, it's the heart and the brain that Michael is fighting here.
- SOLOMON: Was that rehearsed? - No.
SOLOMON: Okay, so Adam caught it.
Right in the corner of the frame. It's so amazing.
CIANFRANCE: Adam said to me
about three quarters of the way through shooting,
that he had never been so exhausted shooting a film.
Because, he said, normally the camera would tell the story,
in the films he would make,
in this movie, the actors were telling the story.
And it created...
What he had to do was engage.
- SOLOMON: Right. - At all times, with the actors.
SOLOMON: Which is what we learn from Cassavetes.
- CIANFRANCE: Yes. - From watching faces.
- Like having someone live on the set. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: Filming it.
CIANFRANCE: Yes, and there's something, that we talked about the earlier scene
where the camera's behind them. I like following the actors,
rather than leading them.
- SOLOMON: Right. - Do you know what I mean?
- Or following characters on-screen. - Let them take the lead.
CIANFRANCE: And let them appear to take the lead,
also, in the shooting.
So you're following them.
So this is Michael, pull this boat back into the water and grab the...
You're gonna find this thing as you pull it back in.
So, however you wanna do it, there's not a wrong way to do it.
SOLOMON: So that you are on equal footing with them.
And you know no more about it than they do.
Whereas often directors are...
They know in advance
and they telegraph in advance, what to feel, what to think.
And here, your guess is as good as theirs.
CIANFRANCE: Well, this is, yeah, like this moment here is,
this actually came from Adam Arkapaw, my DP.
He said, he thought this would be a good scene, Michael...
This was not in the book,
him disposing of one of the crosses up on the hillside.
SOLOMON: Right.
CIANFRANCE: And, uh, it's a scene you go into with no expectations
and it's a windy day, and the sun is setting,
and Michael's been through the wringer already,
of shooting a full day,
and he has to go up there and pull this cross.
And then that's up to Michael.
It's his private world of
what that means to him, what he brings into that moment.
And we live it together then,
- and he trusts me enough to go there. - Right.
CIANFRANCE: It's all trust, I think, with actors.
SOLOMON: Sure. They're so vulnerable.
RALPH: Well, well, well! BLUEY: Well done.
Thanks, Bluey.
BLUEY: Good on you both. RALPH: Can't you just tell?
CIANFRANCE: This guy who plays Ralph is
one of the great Australian film heroes, Jack Thompson.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. How did you find him?
CIANFRANCE: I asked my friend, Ben Mendelsohn.
SOLOMON: Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: I said, "Who should I cast as Ralph?"
He says, "Oh, you gotta cast Jack Thompson."
- Ben, who was Robin in Pines... - Sure.
CIANFRANCE: ...who couldn't make it.
Anyway, Jack Thompson...
- SOLOMON: A great face. - He's planning on living to be 700.
He's one of the most vital people I've ever met in my life.
I asked him what his secret to his vitality was.
He says he takes a cold shower every morning.
SOLOMON: Okay. So I'll give it a shot. (LAUGHING)
CIANFRANCE: Try it. He says, "You take it so cold that when you walk out
"into the bathroom afterwards,
"you don't need a towel, 'cause the air is hot."
SOLOMON: Paul Newman used to put his face
in buckets of ice to keep his skin taut, I think.
Already you see Alicia looks different here.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: She's more... There's more light. She's luminous.
She's not just absorbing the light.
- CIANFRANCE: And she's becoming a mother. - Mmm.
You're a lucky one, aren't you?
BLUEY: Look at this. Hey! Getting a fancy rattle.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHING) The baby cooperated beautifully there.
CIANFRANCE: Oh, yeah, until he threw it out of this frame.
- "Get that rattle away from me." - (SOLOMON LAUGHS)
CIANFRANCE: A lot of these pastoral shots that we have, uh...
My friend Davi Russo who is also the set still photographer...
- SOLOMON: Yes. - On set, I would...
He had one of the hardest jobs.
We would just send him up mountains in the dark,
and he would have to shoot the sunrises and the sunsets
and then get back down to set and take the stills of the movie stars.
And he's really the unsung hero in this movie
because he's finding all of that nature for us.
SOLOMON: And Ron and Jim can just look to him
whenever they need perspective.
- CIANFRANCE: Yes. - Mmm-hmm.
(BABY COOING)
(ISABEL LAUGHS)
CIANFRANCE: And there's an emotion
and a narrative in all of his photography, too.
There's a freedom in those birds, the flock of birds.
SOLOMON: This is very Stan to me, Stan Brakhage.
CIANFRANCE: How so?
SOLOMON: Oh, just something about the movie Anticipation of the Night.
The way he films the child in the grass.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm. Mmm.
SOLOMON: "How many colors are there in a field of grass
"before you learn the word 'green'?"
CIANFRANCE: Mmm. Yes, I remember that.
SOLOMON: And this is very, also, Tree of Life.
Oh, I love the steam that comes out of the trains and the boats.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
Well, it creates...
SOLOMON: Are you in a helicopter here?
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, a helicopter.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: We had a couple hours one morning in the helicopter, and...
Yeah.
We were able to give it scale.
These two actors, Jane Menelaus and Garry McDonald,
are real, real gems.
Garry, he was like Borat before there was Borat.
He had this character in Australian television
called Norman Gunston.
He was this guy with a comb-over, with all these paper cuts on his face,
and he would interview American actors
when they would go on their Australian press tours.
And they had no idea that they were being put on by this guy.
(SOLOMON LAUGHING)
CIANFRANCE: Um, and so he's a great comedian.
SOLOMON: Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: He's like a Robin Williams.
And like all great comedians, I think,
he's just such a wonderful serious actor.
He's got a Richard Libertini kind of kindness.
I don't know if you know him, another comic actor.
But he's memorable. You know who he is.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: And, um, just from his image and his face.
We don't have much time to get to know these characters.
CIANFRANCE: No. I mean...
SOLOMON: So this is overcast. Was it overcast quite a bit?
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. When it's overcast, it's overcast.
Now, if this was a sunny day...
We have to shoot.
RALPH: Blue, son, run over to the Vicar's.
Tell him he's got a christening and he's running late.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, with Mother Nature, you're play...
- It's rain or shine. - SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
But this is perfect weather.
- CIANFRANCE: It's perfect. It is. - At this moment. Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: You know, and it's...
(STAMMERS) It's a...
I always look at sports for analogies.
You know, it's... You've got to just play.
- SOLOMON: Yeah. - You've got to play with...
And you've got to give it up.
You have to give it up sometimes to God,
and Mother Nature,
and what they're gonna give you.
SOLOMON: This sequence is almost exactly as I pictured it
when reading the book, or your screenplay.
I think this is so beautifully done,
and, again, now I've heard about your conversations with Rachel Weisz,
- this great actress... - Mmm.
SOLOMON: ...and how you had these talks,
and developed the character, and...
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - Look at how beautiful that is.
The moving camera and countermovement.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
Yeah, I think it's...
I think Stedman wrote this thing so clearly.
You know, there's always a difference between
what you see in your head and then what you get on-screen.
And you have to be open enough to get surprises.
- SOLOMON: Right. - And mistakes.
But also...
Willful enough...
To force...
To force it into reality.
That's always the dance,
making a movie, for me, is chaos and control,
how to balance the two of them.
When we get to this scene with Michael,
I remember on the very second day of shooting,
he's praying in his woodshop and he starts to cry,
and I remember thinking to myself,
"Yes, Michael... He cried on my set." You know?
- SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. - This is day 40,
and I remember talking to Michael before the scene.
Saying, "Whatever you do, don't cry."
He was like, "Oh, man, I don't wanna cry anymore.
- "No more crying." - Right.
CIANFRANCE: But he couldn't control himself because it's so, uh...
It's just such a loaded moment.
And for this whole movie, we spent 45 days shooting it.
Everyone was crying the whole time, because it was...
It was just so damn emotional the whole time.
SOLOMON: Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: And we used to try to stop ourselves from crying.
SOLOMON: That's how it was watching it, I'll tell you.
Now, of course this is John Taverner.
With the funeral canticles that we've heard in Tree of Life.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - But I think that
it kind of works as an invocation.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
Yeah, uh, with Desplat,
I asked him early on, I said, "How do you like to work?
"What's your ideal way to collaborate with someone?"
And I said, "How do you wanna see the movie?"
I said, "I have source music all over the movie.
"Would you... Is that helpful to you?"
And he says, "Look, everyone shows me
- "their movie with source music." - Right.
CIANFRANCE: He said, "There's only one other filmmaker that takes it off, "
- and he says, "That's Roman Polanski." - (SOLOMON CHUCKLES)
CIANFRANCE: And I said, "Well, then, I'm gonna take it off, too."
So I showed him a completely naked version of the movie,
except for this piece,
because it just felt like it, uh...
I remember The Tree of Life, seeing it in The Tree of Life,
and just immediately being taken down this just...
- Just devastated by it. - SOLOMON: Yeah.
Again, here's another shot-countershot scene,
- but they're not looking at each other. - Mmm-hmm.
SOLOMON: Uh, Michael is looking away.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, I mean, it's like me and you right now.
We're watching something,
and we're not really looking at each other,
but we're still talking, Phil.
SOLOMON: Well, we're doing this for practical reasons, with the microphone.
CIANFRANCE: But still, we...
I just had a date with Shannon the other night, at dinner,
we decided to sit next to each other,
so we could watch the wait staff and the chefs
and, you know what I mean, experience the same vision.
And I think it's so often in movies,
it feels so false to me when people just turn to each other,
and it's just two talking heads yapping at each other.
To me, this moment is really about secrets.
- SOLOMON: Right. - You know?
And so I wanted to...
I wanna hide a little bit of the truth.
SOLOMON: Well, and you're also showing thought.
You're picturing thought. His interiority.
CIANFRANCE: Yes, yeah.
SOLOMON: As he is talking to him, he's somewhere else.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: I love these little push-ins that you do all the time.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - It's constant,
this beautiful rhythm
of wanting to get closer, wanting to get closer.
MAN: You know his weak heart must have given way...
and wind and the current swept him out to sea.
That poor little infant.
Never should have happened.
SOLOMON: How are these done? Is he physically moving, or is...
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, yeah, we have a camera
on two counter-dollies that are moving in.
We shoot them with one camera, so one at a time, and then the other.
And the other reason I shot from that side
was also because it was Isabel's point of view.
- She's kept out of this truth. - Right.
CIANFRANCE: It's a moment when Tom and Isabel don't face each other,
and this was a big adaptation for me, from the book.
In the book, Tom and Isabel find out about
the truth about Lucy's real mother at the same moment.
And then there's something like 12 arguments they have
over whether or not to give the baby back.
And I thought, on-screen, it would just be exhausting.
And I also thought that on-screen, in cinema,
I like to use secrets.
That's the whole reason I'm making family movies in the first place,
is because they embrace...
Uh, to me, families are places where secrets are kept.
- SOLOMON: Right. - Homes are places
where secrets are kept.
When I was a kid, I used to think people lived on islands.
- (SOLOMON CHUCKLES) Right. - I used to think that
every house was its own island with its own...
Because when I'd go...
When people'd come over to my house when I was a kid,
we would change, you know?
We would become the most charming, best versions of ourselves.
And then when people would leave, we would get real again,
or truthful again.
And we loved each other. We were a great family, but...
- SOLOMON: These are facades. - Yes.
SOLOMON: Like in front flats of a Hollywood set.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: Again, his delicacy of his keyboard...
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - ...here is so beautiful.
CIANFRANCE: The pianist's name is Yava, she was...
SOLOMON: It's hard to believe you actually saw this being played.
CIANFRANCE: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
SOLOMON: Now, her face,
Rachel Weisz already comes in so broken.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm-hmm. - And there needs to be no backstory.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. Yeah.
SOLOMON: It's all there in her face.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. That was the moment right there
when Rachel and I really connected...
- Uh, as partners in this movie. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: I remember I just asked her to, uh...
We were shooting for about 20 minutes by this gravesite,
and I asked her
if she would feel the stone of the gravestone,
and tell me if it was cold.
And she felt it.
And, I think, when she felt the actual...
How cold that was, how cold the ground was,
it just opened her up,
and it was a surprise for both of us that that happened.
WOMAN: Read it.
SOLOMON: The evolution in your work
from your very first films, your student films,
through Brother Tied
of wanting to show every trick you had in the book
and speaking stylistically, to now
- being devoted to the truth in acting. - Mmm.
SOLOMON: I think it's profoundly moving to me as a...
What I look for in cinema.
- I could care less about flash anymore. - Me, too.
SOLOMON: When I was young, of course, I did, but now flash is cheap.
It's easy. And truth and delicacy and depth is very difficult.
We have no time for it.
So, to me, your...
This is one giant leap in your evolution
toward the truth of acting, the truth of drama.
And yet your cinema
is completely in the service of the performance.
Everything is in the service of the performance,
the light, the texture, the composition, music,
the, uh, sound design.
I don't think of them as separate things.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. It's one. - Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: That's the ultimate goal with filmmaking, I think,
is the amalgamation of all these arts you want to all be in service of...
SOLOMON: Actors always lose these days.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: To...
What's the word I'm looking for?
- The fireworks. The pyrotechnics. - Mmm. Mmm.
SOLOMON: So I love this old school delicacy.
...but I didn't think you'd be bold enough to rub it in our faces like this.
Please keep the book, Mrs. McPhee.
I'm very sorry if I caused anyone any offense.
Excuse me.
SOLOMON: So now we're in another time?
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. Another time. - Mmm-hmm.
And this is the town of Stanley?
CIANFRANCE: This is actually shot in, uh, just outside of Dunedin.
- In... - Marlborough?
CIANFRANCE: In... Yeah, in New Zealand.
But it's a mix. It's a mix between there and Australia.
- SOLOMON: I love this uphill. - Yeah.
- SOLOMON: Never expected this. - Yeah.
- Again, you find the spot. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: You find the geography of the real location that you're in
and that wind there that came up, that again is a gift from God.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHING) I'm thinking fans.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. I mean it's... - Giant fans.
CIANFRANCE: When it happens, it's...
You realize that that's the blessed take.
You shoot it four, five times, and then that happens.
And the way Rachel runs up the hill, and everything was perfect in it.
SOLOMON: Could you see that on the set or did you have to...
- CIANFRANCE: Absolutely. Yeah. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: You see it
and it registers and you don't talk about it
because you don't want to draw
too much attention to things, with actors...
- SOLOMON: Right, right. - I try not to say...
"I loved how you touched her belly right there.
"Just do that again."
Because then he's gonna become self-conscious.
So you just...
Take the gifts that are given to you and just try to move on.
(LAUGHING)
CIANFRANCE: This actor, Leon Ford, is a really beautiful actor as well,
and this is a newborn baby, nine days old.
SOLOMON: Wow.
CIANFRANCE: And when we were looking at this, all I could think of was 2001.
(SOLOMON CHUCKLES)
CIANFRANCE: Again, just something so small and intimate being so epic
and there was a line in Stedman's book that talked about
how Tom had been this keeper of this lighthouse
and he'd seen rocks
that had been beaten by the ocean for thousands of years,
and they slowly eroded, these rocks,
and how he was surrounded by this expanse of time,
but yet nothing meant...
Nothing was more important than this child to him.
And, to me, that's exactly how I feel with my kids.
And that really led, again, my feeling on shooting all of this.
The purity of just the child and the responsibility of raising a child.
In your house. Get. In.
They're not working.
SOLOMON: How did you direct her? What did you say to her?
- CIANFRANCE: Well... - "Go out and do this or go out and..."
CIANFRANCE: "Go feed the... Go count the chickens.
- "Go help her put the chickens back in." - Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: It's a game at this point with this beautiful little human being,
Florence Clery.
Um, she was actually the first person that I auditioned for the role.
I went and looked at 500 kids after I saw her 'cause I didn't...
I thought, "No way could it be that easy."
That the first kid I look at is gonna be the one.
But she was the one,
and she had just such a ripe imagination.
Here you go. This is not written in the script.
SOLOMON: And so important about their bonding,
these scenes that establish his love for her.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. So here's what we do.
It's like, "Yeah, okay, Michael and Flo, go on a walk...
"For two hours.
- "We're gonna come with you." - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And Florence, she'll create...
She's a great director.
So here, she's gonna draw a snake in the ground
and he's gonna say, "What's that? A snake."
And then she says, "Let's step on it."
I can't ever write that, but...
SOLOMON: How did you put that into a shooting schedule?
- What... - CIANFRANCE: Because you just...
You have to block it out.
You have to just... I always just try to fight for that time.
You have the script that you have to get,
but that was one of the things about the book
that inspired me so much, was the opportunities to capture life.
- SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm. - Like for this moment too.
That's a moment that's written into the script,
- but their reaction to it is alive. - Right.
And I'm always... Again, chaos and control.
- SOLOMON: Mmm. The shadow? - The shadow.
Yeah, if I'm gonna be critical, it could have been a little...
Brighter, sunnier day,
and that shadow would have been a little richer.
And we tried to crush it as much as we could,
but there comes a time when it just isn't gonna...
The shadow's not gonna get any darker.
SOLOMON: Yeah. And beautiful dissolve, using the 'Scope composition.
I love this scene too in terms of the light.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: Just like a footlight coming from the stage.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. Well, now this is lit,
because we have to shoot this for so many...
We shot this scene over two days in this little town hall.
You have to have the light consistent outside.
Thank you!
SOLOMON: I love how the camera picks her up before he does.
And today, we have the honor of having...
three of our last five lightkeepers here with us.
Including our current keeper Mr. Thomas Sherbourne...
SOLOMON: You have light on him? You have an eye light on him?
CIANFRANCE: No. No. It's all from the window.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: Again, I try to never allow lights inside rooms.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: So the lights can be outside the windows.
I remember, Rachel actually, later on in this scene she was telling...
This is one of her early scenes,
she was like, "I can't see Michael. I can't see his eyes."
And I remember being in your class thinking of, like...
You did one lecture to us about the eye light.
- SOLOMON: Eye light, right. - And I was thinking to myself,
"Well, the fact that you can't see his eyes,
"just use that, Rachel. Try to see his eyes."
And so it gave her something for her performance, again.
SOLOMON: See there's footlight, a little bit of footlight.
- CIANFRANCE: It's just a bounce. - Yeah. Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: It's a bounce from the light coming through the windows.
And a DP like Adam who's brave enough
can let a scene play without controlling every aspect of it.
And it's beautiful.
SOLOMON: And was that a real background that was there?
- CIANFRANCE: That was there. - Oh, fantastic.
CIANFRANCE: We were gonna paint it to look like The Nut of Stanley,
- but we kind of ran out of money, so... - SOLOMON: Hmm.
And there's a miniature lighthouse there.
CIANFRANCE: Miniature lighthouse we had built. Yeah.
SOLOMON: Did you get to keep it?
CIANFRANCE: I don't know where it is. I was just thinking.
- I should have it. - Yeah. You have to.
CIANFRANCE: My thought when I was shooting is like,
"Really, where am I gonna put that in my house?"
SOLOMON: I'm sorry. You got to find a place for it.
I don't know what right to be given life while it is taken from others.
SOLOMON: Wonderful scene. CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
It always reminded me,
there was a great scene in Alexander Payne's About Schmidt...
- SOLOMON: I love that film. Yeah. - Yeah.
Where Nicholson is giving his...
The speech to his daughter, the wedding speech,
and you know exactly what he needs to say,
but he doesn't say it, and I just...
It's just such brilliant writing and this...
I was always trying to get to that, to the level of that Payne movie.
SOLOMON: So now we have a kind of turning point in the film
where I call it "Beaver backs out of the driveway."
(SOLOMON LAUGHS)
When you're watching Leave It To Beaver,
and you know he's gonna get in trouble,
and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
And every time you watch it, they're gonna get in trouble,
and there's nothing you can do, and it's just...
You have to live through it. So...
CIANFRANCE: And you can't look away from it.
SOLOMON: And you can't look away.
Hello. I know who you are.
- Nice to meet you. Isabel. - This is my sister, Hannah.
- Nice to meet you. - Hello. Very nice to meet you.
Hello.
SOLOMON: Everything is in her face.
- CIANFRANCE: Rachel? - Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: We were shooting this right around the time
when that Malaysian flight disappeared.
And that's what Rachel and I talked about.
That was our North Star.
We were just watching these news reports of these poor families
that were being told
that there was no way their family could have survived,
but yet, they were holding on to hope because there was no proof.
And so Rachel and I just talked about hope,
and trying to approach Hannah,
not with just devastation, but with hope.
- This is Tom, my husband. - Hello.
We secretly pick a flower...
SOLOMON: And her generosity of spirit comes through...
- CIANFRANCE: Yes. - ...when she comes to the doorway.
- That's when my heart broke in two. - Mmm.
SOLOMON: When she comes to see Hannah...
- CIANFRANCE: Isabel. - Uh, to see Isabel
and then at the doorway.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. I will tell Rachel you said that.
SOLOMON: There's a vibrato in her voice.
She looks like she's just sobbed forever.
...ask you something, Mr. Sherbourne?
SOLOMON: And look at him. He's just...
All of it is... All of the thought is in his eyes.
And the camera always pushing in now. I just...
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, isolating the two of them in this space
because they have this connection.
Isabel and the sister, Gwen, aren't...
Aren't in on this moment that Tom is in on.
Tom is the only one who carries the secret here at this moment.
HANNAH: Well, I'm ready to go home.
SOLOMON: The trio of faces that you assembled is a...
Just once in a lifetime.
Bye.
You have a very lovely daughter.
Excuse me.
CIANFRANCE: And Rachel is really able to go there too,
- because she's a mother herself. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: She can...
And great actress, Emily Barclay, here.
WOMAN: Her husband...
CIANFRANCE: And I love Alicia's realization here.
SOLOMON: And she has also a quality of a woman-child.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: She looks so young and yet, she's also worn.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: She's worn out.
CIANFRANCE: This is the moment when Isabel has to keep it in and she can't.
She's not a kind of character that holds things in.
She has no ability to suppress anything.
If she loves you, she's gonna ask you to marry her.
If she, uh, finds a baby at sea, she's gonna raise it as her own.
If she hates you,
she'll punch you in the face and never talk to you again. And...
SOLOMON: And this brings back the miscarriage posture.
CIANFRANCE: Yes. She's back to being lost.
SOLOMON: Right. She's gonna lose another baby.
CIANFRANCE: And this is also the... It's a doubling of those moments.
And with this I just thought what was most important
was how Tom was, where Tom was,
and how the background dialogue didn't really matter.
I didn't want to mix it down. I wanted it to still be present,
but I wanted it to be clear that Tom was not there.
The way of shooting this scene, um,
I often try to find the one spot in the room
which I think is the most truthful spot in the room.
And then I don't cover the scene from multiple angles.
I try to keep it all from the same position
as if you were in there. So this is...
And there's the great Taiwanese filmmaker, Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
- SOLOMON: Yes. - Is that how you say his name?
- SOLOMON: Yes. Hou Hsiao-Hsien. - Yep. Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
I always loved how he would hold that camera in one spot.
And just through a pan, or then cuts, be able to
oscillate between performances and between moments.
In the classical Hollywood way, we would be right on her face there.
- SOLOMON: Exactly. - But I actually...
SOLOMON: No, you're inferring everything from this angle, right?
You can't, if you had...
CIANFRANCE: If you had it flat onto her face, my worry is always
you are showing...
If you notice Rachel Weisz grew armpit...
She thought that the women of that time wouldn't shave their armpits, so...
One of the best moments, I'm sorry, this is an aside...
SOLOMON: Yeah, yeah.
CIANFRANCE: But her and Emily Barclay,
who played Gwen, sisters, both realized on the same day
that they had both let their armpits' hair grow for the movie.
And Rachel was very, very happy
when she saw the first rough cut of the movie and I included...
- SOLOMON: The armpit hair. - I showed her the work,
- the prep work she went in... - That's for the European version.
CIANFRANCE: Exactly. I was wondering
why she kept shooting that scene with her arm over her head.
(CRICKETS CHIRPING)
(OWL HOOTS IN DISTANCE)
CIANFRANCE: Get this subtle, or maybe not so subtle, but the owl outside...
- SOLOMON: Oh, yeah, I heard it, yeah. - Which leads us to the...
SOLOMON: When you're this quiet, the change of ambiance
- is palpable on a cut. Yeah. - CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
And that took me a while to get there on this movie, honestly.
I had started the music earlier,
when she's getting out of bed to start the mystery,
and Desplat was the one who said, "No. You..."
He always would discipline me,
and say that I was starting my music too soon.
- SOLOMON: Interesting. - And he was right. I...
It took a lot of courage to hold off.
SOLOMON: It's wonderful when a composer can teach you that.
CIANFRANCE: Oh, yeah.
And I had a great music supervisor, Suzana Peric,
who also used to just beat that into me.
Just don't show your hand too soon.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: I love this moment with Alicia here.
SOLOMON: And here comes the tragic overtones.
This is now the deep basses and...
And cellos and... Oh! Your P. T. Anderson.
- CIANFRANCE: And the cut. - The Master shot, right.
From The Master and the... The rhyme on the cut?
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
- SOLOMON: Beautiful. That's my boy. - Yeah.
SOLOMON: Those are my students. Graphic matches.
(BOTH CHUCKLE)
SOLOMON: Makes poetry.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah, I was... - It's poetry.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, we were taught. We were watching
uh, the Laurence Olivier cut from blowing out the candle to the...
And no one notices it in here 'cause...
But, did you see it the first time you saw it, Phil?
- SOLOMON: Of course. - That cut? Thank you.
SOLOMON: There's something about cinema.
That's the essential moment of cinema for me,
is the transition between shots and frame.
And because I worked on the frame level between frames.
But I never discovered more about cinema
than when I saw how this is a rhyme. I was looking,
I didn't understand the language of avant-garde film
until someone showed me Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night
and showed how this light on a ball rhymes with the moonlight.
'Cause it was in the same part of the frame.
I didn't understand that that was significant.
That was a great revelation to me.
Ah! Beautiful. None of these are effects shots?
CIANFRANCE: That is an effect shot... SOLOMON: Okay.
CIANFRANCE: But it's about subtraction.
It's about removal.
It's about painting out to make that cape turn into an island.
- SOLOMON: I see. - Right? So again that's what...
That's how I tried to use VFX on this movie.
There's a number of VFX shots,
but it's always to remove, say, an antenna from a hill.
Or remove the rest of the island.
We, instead... Like I...
We aren't animating or... Or the lighthouse.
We're not changing emotion on characters.
We're not creating architecture.
We're just taking away. We're painting out things.
Again, I thought it would be a more um, truthful way to shoot a world
and allow the actors...
Can you imagine these actors
having to do this scene in front of a green screen?
SOLOMON: Right.
CIANFRANCE: Maybe they could do it, but I wouldn't trust it.
So there's something about the wind and the...
SOLOMON: The wind, yeah, it's beautiful.
CIANFRANCE: And the laundry that's embracing them and that, uh...
SOLOMON: These scenes are impossible to direct.
How do you go... How are you gonna do this
without being embarrassed or embarrassing?
And you managed to do it.
CIANFRANCE: Well, it comes from the actors
being courageous enough to go there and to show their ugliness.
SOLOMON: But you also, you kept your distance. It's plain.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - It's not overplayed.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - It's just...
You might... Okay, one might say this is melodrama,
but the cinema is not melodrama.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: It's drama. It's...
CIANFRANCE: Well, I thought a lot about that in this movie.
- There's so many difficult scenes. - Right.
CIANFRANCE: And oftentimes I see films with huge dramatic scenes,
and they feel almost too cool for them.
It's like emotion is not cool.
- SOLOMON: Right. - Drama is not cool.
You can't take things seriously, or you're going to be labeled as...
Um...
- I can't find the word. - Emo. Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, emo, yeah. Emo, yeah.
SOLOMON: Like back in the '90s.
CIANFRANCE: And a reviewer of Blue Valentine said,
"When emo fascists attack."
But, for me, I live in emotion,
and that's what I make my films based on, emotion.
- SOLOMON: Right. - There, it's in a...
And in my real life, I'm... It's filled with feeling,
so I'm trying to make movies, cinema of feelings.
- SOLOMON: Yes. - And it requires the actors to go there.
And there's a fine line, yeah, between exploiting it and...
- SOLOMON: Right. - And turning it into melodrama,
and just being truthful and being heightened.
That's what I'm always trying to
inspire my actors to do, is just be heightened.
Actually commit yourself to it 'cause I feel like as a kid,
that's how... I wasn't a big reader. I was a... I watched movies.
And that's how I understood
the human condition, was through performers.
- SOLOMON: That's right. - Through actors.
SOLOMON: And that's what art is.
It's a heightened reality.
It's a form. Meditation on the form of feeling,
the very form of feeling.
I think, uh, being emotional for young people,
these days, is a very difficult proposition.
- They are so reticent. - CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
Well, I have to say being emotional, it's embarrassing.
When I was reading this book for the first time,
I was on the C train coming home and I was crying.
- SOLOMON: Yeah. - And I was so embarrassed.
- SOLOMON: Yeah. - But I thought to myself,
"If anyone was experiencing what I was experiencing,
"they would be crying too."
- SOLOMON: Right. - And so all of a sudden,
- I had no shame in my tears. - No.
CIANFRANCE: And that again became a North Star for me
with this and with the actors and on-set and then making the movie
and working with Desplat and every element of it
was like, "Let's not be ashamed of the emotion."
- SOLOMON: Right. - "Let's, you know, let's..."
SOLOMON: And by the time we're on this DVD together,
many people around the world
will have shed oceans between the light.
CIANFRANCE: (CHUCKLES) Yeah.
So, Phil, you know that match cut we were talking about earlier?
- SOLOMON: Yeah. - You realize that
when we're in the editing room and we're thinking about...
We're making that cut, we're talking about you.
SOLOMON: (CHUCKLES) Yes. I could hear...
- CIANFRANCE: You realize, Phil... - I could hear it in my head.
CIANFRANCE: Phil is, to me, he's like that angel and the devil on...
He's like the cinematic angel and devil, Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder.
He's always talking to me.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHING) Let your conscience be your guide, Derek.
CIANFRANCE: (CHUCKLES) Yeah.
SOLOMON: Yeah, I know. I always tell you to get me out of there.
I've been staying out mostly, I think. You're on your own there, buddy.
CIANFRANCE: No, you're there though, Phil.
- You're... - No. You're really on your own.
CIANFRANCE: You're my Jiminy Cricket. SOLOMON: Okay.
I will sing you, at the end of this film, When You Wish Upon a Star.
- CIANFRANCE: (CHUCKLES) Okay. - Like Stan did when he was a kid.
See here's a whole other theme that he comes up with.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - How does this man do this?
How do people come up with this out of thin air?
- Such a complex array... - Yeah.
SOLOMON: Array of melodies. The lost art of melody.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - Yeah.
I'm completely enthralled to film composers,
the great ones. Beautiful.
I love that, the way he just used it like grammar.
- Like the end of a sentence. - Yeah.
(DOOR OPENS)
CIANFRANCE: This was, uh,
yeah, by far the most difficult day I've ever had on-set
just because you're dealing with real human emotions,
real fear, and a child and...
ISABEL: Please don't do this.
Please have some pity.
MAN: Appreciate it if you didn't make it any more difficult than it needs to be.
CIANFRANCE: And then Desplat comes in and he...
- Can you hear his music underneath? - Yeah. Yeah.
- CIANFRANCE: You know, the... - Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: The air that he fills the room with and...
SOLOMON: And the hallway, the reverberation in the hallway.
CIANFRANCE: The mix, yeah.
SERGEANT KNUCKEY: Take the child. Take the child, Garstone.
Garstone, take the child!
- (CRYING) - (KID SCREAMS)
CIANFRANCE: I dealt with a similar scene like this at the end of Blue Valentine
when the daughter is trying to get into Ryan Gosling's arms
and he's pulling her away
and forcing her back to Michelle Williams' character
and I always just try to turn those scenes into games
- if I can with the kids so... - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: They, uh... So they don't take it as seriously as the adults do.
SERGEANT KNUCKEY: I said you must have killed a lot of people in your time.
SOLOMON: Tell me about this actor.
CIANFRANCE: Anthony Hayes, um, great Australian actor.
He's won best supporting actor a couple of times out there
and really was brave in this moment.
Again, he was...
I asked Ben Mendelsohn who I should cast in this role
'cause I wanted Ben to originally do this
and Ben couldn't do it.
And Ben said, "Cast Anthony Hayes."
And I guess Anthony used to look up to Ben back in the day,
and Michael is a force of nature and he's not fun to go toe-to-toe with
- because he's so powerful as an actor. - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: And Anthony absolutely could do it. He was up to the task.
SOLOMON: Yeah, Michael seems like a rock.
He's a rock that it... But by the end, the rock melts.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: That last scene is just fantastic in terms of his softening.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
...if she doesn't want to see you for the rest of her life.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, again, that was the goal for me with Michael, is to find his heart.
Now, Anthony Hayes is not gonna find Michael's heart,
but casting of Alicia helps to find his heart.
SERGEANT KNUCKEY: Isabel, the law recognizes
that a wife can be powerless at the hands of her husband.
CIANFRANCE: Now, this again is this moment where,
I really wanted the camera to invade her space.
- SOLOMON: Yeah. - Invade Alicia's space.
So we just got too close to her.
- SOLOMON: Falconetti. - Yes.
- SOLOMON: Yeah. - Yeah and let Anthony go at it.
And Alicia, her character basically refuses to speak
from this moment on in the movie.
And she takes a vow of silence.
SOLOMON: Yeah. There it is, Joan of Arc.
Yes.
SERGEANT KNUCKEY: Is it true?
Isabel.
LUCY: I want my real mama!
CIANFRANCE: And then the actors do the rest of the work.
Anthony breaks through.
HANNAH: It's all right.
(LUCY SCREAMING)
HANNAH: It's all right.
LUCY: Can you take me to my mom?
CIANFRANCE: This transition to Hannah's world with Grace now was...
SOLOMON: Mmm.
Nothing like this shot in the rest of the film, right?
- It's really... - CIANFRANCE: Well, it's...
It's the disembodied character coming to the window,
searching through the house
and seeing what you don't want to see.
It's setting up what the happy home,
the preparation of what the happy home should look like
and then the reality of what's...
Of what this choice has done to this child.
And I wanted to do it in a way
that was just a single elegant take that would...
- SOLOMON: Right. - That would show that to you
without exploiting that emotion of that child again.
- SOLOMON: Right. - And try to show
that juxtaposition in one constant shot.
And again, it came from Stedman's writing.
She talked about how the house was set up.
How she had made dolls for her
and how she had had a welcome home
and there was a cake and the pictures, the family pictures,
but outside, you could hear the crying of the child.
And it was written so cinematically
that it just, to me, it told that story of that shot.
TOM: She's suffered enough.
CIANFRANCE: And I remember Steven Spielberg had seen raw footage of that
and he had thought that I didn't cover it enough.
And when he... What I told him is, I said,
"I wanted to shoot that scene like a car accident,
"like how you experience a car accident.
"You can be in... You're driving down the highway
"and all of a sudden, traffic slows, and as you approach the accident,
"the thing that you shouldn't be seeing,
"you pan over with your head and you see it for a fraction of a second
"and then the road is open in front of you again
"and you have to go forward.
"And you have to live with that afterimage."
And Spielberg was such a mentor to me on this movie.
When he saw the first cut, the first thing he told me was like,
"You were right about how that shot worked."
- He was... - Oh, great.
- CIANFRANCE: He was a real... - Mensch.
- CIANFRANCE: Yes. Yeah. And just... - (SOLOMON CHUCKLES)
CIANFRANCE: And it was amazing working with him, such a hero filmmaker...
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: ...that was helping guide me through certain elements.
And he had notes on the film that really helped the film and...
- SOLOMON: Wonderful. - Notes on the script and...
I was shooting this
as he was shooting Bridge of Spies and...
SOLOMON: Which is a wonderful film.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. And he... - It's my favorite film of last year.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. And he would write me these beautiful letters about cinema
and how him and I were telling...
Using the cinematic language in different ways to tell these stories.
And he just wrote these beautiful emails to me
about the magic of cinema.
- SOLOMON: Hmm. - And, uh...
- SOLOMON: Oh, great. - It gave, yeah, it gave me so much...
I don't know if confidence is the right word, but faith, I guess.
SOLOMON: Well, he's a man who's also grown up.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm. - In the movies.
His cinema has grown up. To me.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, one thing I was talking to him about... Blue Valentine was...
He loved Blue Valentine and to me, it's because he was...
He's a suburban kid and I'm a suburban kid...
- SOLOMON: Right. - And we were...
We've both made films about the suburban experience.
- His have aliens in them, but... - (SOLOMON CHUCKLES)
SOLOMON: Well, you did vampires when you were a kid.
ISABEL: Lucy.
HANNAH: Look at that pink thread.
LUCY: Mama!
SOLOMON: Oh, this is absolutely heartbreaking. Absolutely.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah... I have to say, Phil... (CHUCKLES)
And I get to this day on-set too, it's just like, "Enough."
I was just, I was, I...
- SOLOMON: But, you know... - I was dreading
waking up in the morning and having to shoot.
That emotion that got me on the train,
on the C train, all of a sudden was forced into my life,
into everyone's, all my actors' and crews' life for months.
And it was...
And my wife Shannon and I...
She's always asking me, "What's the point of drama?"
Right? "Why?
"Isn't there enough heartache and pain in the world?"
But I feel like there's a catharsis in it for me...
- SOLOMON: That's right. - And that's why
you have to go through it.
And you were talking about loss early on.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
Well, I'm gonna go back to the philosopher, Joni Mitchell,
"Don't you know it always seems to go.
"You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm. - Essential truism.
(HORN HONKING)
SOLOMON: Since your student films,
you've been exploring your primal scene of divorce,
- of being the child of divorce. - Mmm.
SOLOMON: Which is the story of so many of your generation
and the generations after.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: It wasn't of mine.
Divorce was very, very rare when I grew up.
It was The Scarlet Letter.
HANNAH: I need to know.
Was it really all your doing?
Yes.
CIANFRANCE: To me this film and Blue Valentine are kind of
cousins or something, 'cause they're both about...
About love, about that relationship,
and Blue Valentine to me ends on a very hopeful way
because it's about the power of the individual...
SOLOMON: Hm! CIANFRANCE: ...um,
in the face of kind of breaking out of this, uh...
This coupledom that can extinguish
any kind of individual characteristics you may have
before you're in a relationship.
But with this film, what I was really interested in was
- how love could survive. - Right.
CIANFRANCE: 'Cause I really do think Tom and Isabel... I think she...
I think they actually do make each other better.
And privately, the idea to me is about how love can survive children.
SOLOMON: Hmm.
CIANFRANCE: So many people, my parents included, they, uh...
They stay around until the kids are out of the house.
And then there's nothing there anymore when the kids leave.
They waited for the kids and the kids take so much of your life
and so much of your energy and so much of your attention
that when they leave,
you see couples sitting at a diner together with nothing to say.
And to me, that's why I wanted to really make this film,
was to test that love and to see
if it could actually survive through children.
SOLOMON: Interesting. Didn't think about that.
CIANFRANCE: Well, it's not really on the surface, what the movie is about.
Grace?
Darling, it's not funny. I want you to come out right now.
Grace?
SOLOMON: Again the wind picks up a little.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
- SOLOMON: And there's the music. - Yep.
Grace, darling, it's not funny. Please, come out.
Grace!
SOLOMON: Oh, beautiful composition. Oh, my God. Just, such confidence.
- It's just, nothing feels insecure to me. - Mmm.
SOLOMON: I have complete assurance when I'm watching this
that I'm in capable hands, that I'm not gonna be played with.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm. - You know.
'Course I haven't got her.
SOLOMON: And that's half the battle.
Most people get out.
It's like you're in the driver's seat and most people are in the...
They just get out at some point of the passenger seat.
SERGEANT KNUCKEY: If you could fetch her please.
CIANFRANCE: It comes from commitment to it and trust with actors, I got to say.
They allow it. They allow this kind of filmmaking.
I couldn't have this kind of filmmaking without strong actors.
SOLOMON: Ah. This is, for me, it was a reminder of The Godfather a little bit.
The last scene in the garden.
CIANFRANCE: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SOLOMON: Nothing interesting about that, but it...
MAN 1: Grace!
MAN 2: Grace!
Grace?
SOLOMON: And they're all yelling "Grace." "Grace" at night.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: In the dark, looking for Grace in the dark.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm. - Beautiful.
Sergeant?
SOLOMON: This is obviously a real space you found?
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. Real, again, you could make it up.
You could make up a jail cell, but then the...
If you made a set of a jail cell, Michael could get out of it.
But on that jail cell, there's actual... You could lock him in.
And he was locked behind that door for a long time
while we took that scene. And there's a...
If you've ever spent a night in a jail cell or...
- Have you? - No. Thankfully.
HANNAH: You saved her once before.
I promise you that I will put her first from now on.
SOLOMON: Now, can I ask you a question?
When you set up this scene,
did you decide on this track a priori?
Before the fact? Um...
- CIANFRANCE: Well, we... - Did you envision it like this?
CIANFRANCE: This is the ultimate moment of the crosscut in the movie.
Between all the different characters so you...
I was thinking about how to reveal, how to go between.
- SOLOMON: Right. - How to go from
planet Hoth to Yoda's Dagobah village.
(BOTH LAUGH)
SOLOMON: Terrible using Star Wars on me.
CIANFRANCE: Sorry.
I know. I'm sorry about that.
Anyway, so it's doors open, we reveal out past blackness.
You hear her voice before they come so, yeah.
That was...
And we were shooting in such a tiny house.
SOLOMON: Right.
CIANFRANCE: I can't tell you how many times the...
My production team tried to talk me out of this house,
but it felt like just Hannah's choice,
going from this mansion to this tiny place.
It had to be so small.
And so there was not...
We basically shot out every kind of, uh...
Piece of cinematic grammar we could, to reveal her and,
Rachel did about 22 takes of that prayer.
And, uh...
And actually we just never wanted to stop.
SOLOMON: Mmm.
CIANFRANCE: I felt like every time I came out of the blackness, she was...
She was transforming and she was making this deal with God.
HANNAH: ...and you are always happy.
CIANFRANCE: Which in the edit, we kind of keep a bit secret as to...
In the full script she says,
"I'll promise you, Lord,
"I'll do what's right by her. I'll give her back."
And it felt like when we watched the movie,
it was, you knew everything that was gonna come next,
whereas now she says, "I promise I'll do the right thing by her."
And you leave it hanging as to what that right thing is.
And it allows you to then have the emotion
as you did when she goes to the door.
SOLOMON: Right.
SOLOMON: And here's this moment of joy on her face for a...
We haven't seen at all.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
Well, that's forgiveness.
And that was also one of the things
that was so beautiful about this movie, was...
This story to me by Stedman was... Was that line that Frank says,
"To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.
"It's exhausting. But to forgive, you do once."
- And... - It's true.
CIANFRANCE: And I have to say, when we were making this film,
despite all of the pain we felt, in these emotional scenes,
I always felt really good about
how positive this film could be in the world.
- You know what I mean? - Sure.
CIANFRANCE: There's no...
To make a film without judgment of people,
without villains
and to make a film that was just about the human heart.
SOLOMON: Right.
CIANFRANCE: And the capacity for forgiveness.
I thought it was a worthwhile adventure for three years.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
Or worse.
I don't think there's much time.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
CIANFRANCE: So sometimes it rains.
- SOLOMON: (LAUGHS) Really? - Yeah.
- What are you gonna do? - No rain machine?
CIANFRANCE: What are you gonna do when it starts raining?
I guess you just, "It's raining."
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
I've come here to say something. Just to say it and then go.
I know that my daughter isn't coming back to me.
After last night I've realized that she can live without me.
Even if I can't without her.
I can't punish her
for what happened and, um...
can't punish you for your husband's decisions.
Grace loves...
Loves you.
And perhaps...
Perhaps, she belongs to you.
So if you testify against your husband
and, soon as he's safely locked away...
I will let Grace come back to you.
SOLOMON: Couldn't even speak during that.
How many times did she do that?
CIANFRANCE: That was her third take that we used.
But Rachel wasn't...
Didn't think she had it. I thought she had it.
I always have a deal with my actors that I'll keep going if they want to.
And conversely that means if they think they've got it
and I don't think they have it, they have to keep going.
So we don't question each other on-set, right?
So I was like, "Rachel, that was, I thought it was it. We can move on."
- She says, "I don't think so." So... - Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: We did it again. And we did it again. And we did it again.
And we actually, so much so that she came back the next day
saying, "I don't think we ever got it."
So I set up another scene for her.
I let her keep going 'cause I thought she had something to express.
But I was always sure that she got it on the third take.
But, um, that's just the deal I have with my actors.
It avoids any kind of, uh...
Judgment on-set, really.
To me there's no right way or wrong way to do it.
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
Um, there's a way that feels true to me and I'm usually good there.
But sometimes... I've had many experiences on movies
where I thought we've got it
and the actors want to do something again
and their idea was better than mine.
- SOLOMON: Right. - And vice versa.
So I try to take the ego out of the equation
when I'm shooting and...
SOLOMON: Well, you're asking them to take all these risks
with their emotional lives, with their careers,
uh, so they have to feel like you've got their back.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: And they can trust you to listen.
- CIANFRANCE: And I do. - Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: And I do and I show them the movie too.
- SOLOMON: Right. - Many times during the edit.
Because I consider them to be such key collaborators.
And I always...
Rachel gave me a lot of great suggestions on scenes
that maybe I had cut out in the first cut of the movie, um,
and that made the movie better.
And I've been doing that since Blue Valentine.
TOM: My time should have been up years ago.
CIANFRANCE: I mean, Ryan hated the first cut of Blue Valentine so much
that he told me he was gonna quit acting.
(SOLOMON LAUGHING)
- SOLOMON: Such drama queens. - Yeah. I told him...
I was like, "Come on, man. This can't be your last movie."
TOM: Which isn't saying much.
You deserved someone a lot better than me.
All I can do is ask God...
CIANFRANCE: But editing is the worst, Phil.
To me, it's so painful to edit these movies,
especially with everything that the actors give.
They're constantly, yeah, making themselves so vulnerable
and sometimes you use that moment of where they may be embarrassed
and that becomes the most human moment.
That becomes what...
Or you use the moment that, uh...
You cut out the moment where they thought they did the best thing,
and that's why it took me over a year to edit this film at the end of the day.
Where?
SOLOMON: There's another case right there
where the light was so bright that it was painful.
It was like the light of day.
We're so used to being inside
and it almost comes as a shock that there's a world going on.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: This is impossible to play.
In my head, when I read the book, just like, "How can you do this part?"
CIANFRANCE: It is an impossible thing to do.
In the book she had written the conclusion in the jail cell,
and I thought for the movie version
I needed to take it dramatically one step further
with the walking of the plank, so to speak.
Um, where she rescues him at the last possible moment.
And I think, how they both play this scene was just...
Again, everything we built early on, on Janus,
with these two actors learning to trust each other and protect each other,
it's all here in this moment
where they're both at the same moment
trying to protect each other.
- (CRYING) - Shh.
ISABEL: Tom!
Shh!
- (BREATHING HEAVILY) - Shh.
It's all right. It's all right.
It's not true!
Shh!
It's not true!
Just leave things be.
Isabel...
Frank was dead when the boat washed up. It was my idea.
- Don't say anymore. - I stopped him from reporting the boat.
It's my fault.
I'm sorry.
(INHALES SHARPLY)
It's all right.
Tom...
CIANFRANCE: And then they cut the trailer to the movie.
And they put this at the end of the trailer.
- I was like, "Come on, you're gonna..." - (BOTH CHUCKLE)
CIANFRANCE: The whole CliffsNotes version of the movie comes out.
SOLOMON: I noticed that.
She was a decent girl before she went out on Janus.
Being out on that island didn't do her any good at all.
CIANFRANCE: I don't know, I learned...
I remember in film school we rented
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on LaserDisc,
and for reason, this LaserDisc manufacturer
decided to put the trailer for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
- right before the movie. - (SOLOMON LAUGHS)
CIANFRANCE: And it almost ruined the whole movie.
So I try not to watch trailers in general.
SOLOMON: They show everything, all... You're not the only one.
- Every single movie. - Mmm.
SOLOMON: Right. They just need to get the asses in the seats.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah.
SOLOMON: Yeah, that's another thing, trailers used to be a real art form.
CIANFRANCE: There's amazing editing in them.
The people that cut my trailer...
SOLOMON: Mmm-hmm.
CIANFRANCE: ...it's phenomenal how they cut it.
But it's so fast.
What Jim and Ron and I always talk about in the edit is...
We never want to cut.
We're always trying to hold as long as we possibly can
- before we need to cut. - Mmm.
SOLOMON: Which goes against being in film school,
which, to me, I was trying to cut as much as possible.
SOLOMON: Right. Well, that was in vogue.
You guys came out of the Scorsese school.
But these days long takes are really, not in America necessarily,
but since the advent of digital,
lots of people are exploring long takes.
Here again, the light just feels like a whole different...
You feel you're coming out of this veil of tears.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm!
Yeah, it's healing.
SOLOMON: Nice to see Bryan Brown again.
CIANFRANCE: It is. He was great. Great to work with.
Yeah, I love this character of Septimus
because he's the one who's really the instigator.
If only he would have embraced, uh, his daughter's choice of love,
none of this story would have happened.
So he kind of sets this whole story in motion
and then he's the agent for healing at the end, too.
SOLOMON: Right.
CIANFRANCE: And I think it's just a beautiful,
beautiful arc for a character.
My saving Grace, you are.
I'm not Grace.
And that's how I feel about people.
CIANFRANCE: People that do the worst things, they also have capacity
for great love and humanity as well.
SOLOMON: And that's the work, the films that you love?
Cassavetes' work.
Hi!
We're back!
SOLOMON: Whose decision was it to have her in that position?
CIANFRANCE: Rachel went out there and she was...
She had made her decision and to forgive Isabel and Tom
and she went outside and she laid down in the grass
and I just let her go to sleep there.
SOLOMON: That's beautiful. It's... Again, it doesn't feel directed.
Somehow it just feels like this is what happened.
CIANFRANCE: She got cold.
We had to put a blanket over her
while we waited for Florence to get ready.
Um, but that's where she was comfortable and so the scene...
When I block scenes I don't tell the actors,
"Okay, you start here and you move here and you move here."
I try to, at the beginning of any scene, give no direction, honestly.
SOLOMON: What did you tell Florence here?
CIANFRANCE: Like, "Let's just see what happens."
Well, we knew we wanted to do the daisy chains.
SOLOMON: Ah!
- CIANFRANCE: And that... - (LAUGHS) Look at that.
CIANFRANCE: And that flare, we knew when the sun was setting.
And we had the camera set up
and we knew we could get that at that moment.
With that move. And so that was...
But it's timing. You're rushing timing.
And you got to get Florence out there and you got to get the scene going
and then you have to call the move at just the right moment.
So, what's happening in front of the screen here
is actually truly alive 'cause Florence isn't doing lines.
She's making a daisy chain with Rachel
and then this is all Florence.
Like, "Let's put it on you, a crown on you."
SOLOMON: So, when you watch this that's what you're seeing?
You're not seeing a directed movie, you're seeing...
- CIANFRANCE: Life. Hopefully. - Life. Yeah. Yeah.
CIANFRANCE: In its best form it has nothing to do with me.
TOM: He forgave you a long time ago.
SOLOMON: How difficult was it for you to go to 1950?
CIANFRANCE: Incredibly difficult, 'cause you need to go there,
but at the same time you don't want to
have this old age makeup running your movie.
So I have this guy, Mike Marino, that I've worked with on all my movies,
um, do any kind of fight scene
for Ryan Gosling's broken nose or whatever,
um, and he did just really, really delicate makeup on Michael
because you also have to believe that this time has passed.
SOLOMON: Did you shoot the whole Isabel?
CIANFRANCE: I did shoot the whole Isabel scene and...
SOLOMON: Amazing, and this ends up being that one shot?
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. And the hands. - Right.
CIANFRANCE: With those hands what I wanted...
SOLOMON: That's very brave filmmaking to do that.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah. I mean I had the whole scene,
but just felt like the distillation of the scene was,
"You think God will forgive me for what I've done?"
Again, the movie's about forgiveness.
I'm Lucy.
SOLOMON: I like how underplayed this is, too.
This is no push-in to her on the great reveal.
- We know who she is. Yeah. - Exactly. Exactly.
SOLOMON: And it's very plain. It's lit very plain like a '50s movie.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm. - Like in Sirk or something. Yeah.
At first, I was watching it and I said, "Hmm. I don't know. I'm not feeling it."
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
And, uh, then it happens.
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, again, you talk about a movie with a number of openings
which I struggled with in the edit.
This movie had a number of endings.
SOLOMON: And you had more time to consider.
You told me you went and made a last-minute change.
CIANFRANCE: I did. I realized that this...
That this letter that Isabel writes
was missing Isabel and her memory
and the whole movie was a memory as it was,
of their love and their life together.
And I felt like the movie could have a nostalgic moment like, uh...
Where Tom and Lucy-Grace could kind of remember and celebrate this...
The best part of this memory, actually.
And the precedent in cinema for me was Wild Bunch or Annie Hall.
SOLOMON: (CHUCKLES) Mmm-hmm.
We all need the eggs.
- CIANFRANCE: Uh-huh. - (SOLOMON CHUCKLES)
CIANFRANCE: So when did it start to work for you, Phil?
SOLOMON: Right, here.
And the last shot.
But also, I love the choice of casting for her.
She also has a sadness in her face, a kind of lived-in face.
And, uh...
- CIANFRANCE: Michael's performance is... - He is not tragic any longer.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - He's resigned.
But there's a peace in him.
ISABEL: And it brings me joy...
SOLOMON: And then, yes, this dance...
Which is risky to do. I think it works. I think it works beautifully.
CIANFRANCE: I started doing it in my early edit and I thought to myself,
"No. Cut back. Not gonna do this."
But then I had a movie at the end
which was just sad for the sake of sad, I felt like and...
SOLOMON: And this is the daughter's life.
CIANFRANCE: Yes.
SOLOMON: It's a recap for her.
And also for him. This is what... Yeah. There it is.
- CIANFRANCE: It's his memory actually. - That's right. Right.
But I'm saying, in a flash he sees the whole thing
and that brings the movie home.
- And it is what happens. - CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: Mind screens are what happens to us.
- CIANFRANCE: You live in your past? - Always.
Not always, but a part of me, it's always there.
It's always there and it's triggered by the smallest things.
She would have loved you.
SOLOMON: Things that no one else will remember, including the loved one.
But I think I've always lived my life
with seeing these things like inserts that I remember and they don't.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: Like the distillation of the moment as you're living it.
CIANFRANCE: It's Siddhartha to me, it's the eternity of every moment.
That the river at the top of the mountain and at the base of the mountain
is the same source of water.
And so your whole life is folded upon itself
and it's all happening all at once, all the time.
SOLOMON: Yeah. There's The Godfather, right there.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm-hmm. - (SOLOMON CHUCKLES)
(WAVES CRASHING IN THE DISTANCE)
SOLOMON: And then the ocean mixed with the wind.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
(WIND WHOOSHING)
CIANFRANCE: Yeah, that mind screen moment
allowed Tom here at the end not to be sad.
It gave his life purpose.
SOLOMON: Right. So you feel at the end this ray of hope.
- CIANFRANCE: Mmm. - Which is what life is.
You get to the end and people are gone.
You're by yourself.
CIANFRANCE: Mmm.
SOLOMON: And you hope for your sunset years, it could be a day.
But you just want one moment of peace.
One moment of peace of mind. And you'd give anything for it.
- And I even like these, Derek. - You do?
SOLOMON: It's like I'm going with you at this point.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. Thank you. - (LAUGHING)
SOLOMON: It's borderline.
But that's...
CIANFRANCE: I had to unleash Jim a little bit.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHS) Yes.
This is a reference to the end of Blue Valentine,
when Jimmy did this beautiful postlude
that I thought was a little bit too soon, too self-congratulatory. I wanted black.
- CIANFRANCE: Uh-huh? - I wanted the end of Husbands.
CIANFRANCE: Yes. You wanted to be in black. I remember that.
SOLOMON: Yes. I wanted to be devastated.
CIANFRANCE: Don't you...
Don't think for a second that Jim and I
weren't working on this section of the movie.
(SOLOMON LAUGHING)
CIANFRANCE: And we were, uh, imitating your voice.
Saying, "Oh, Christ. Just let it be black. No. Just let me be in black."
SOLOMON: (LAUGHING) No, no. I've changed.
No, I need the eggs.
(DEREK CHUCKLES)
SOLOMON: Let me just say to you,
the people who are hearing this will never understand this,
but this has just been a great, great privilege
sitting here watching this with you.
Derek used to come over to my studio
and we'd watch his student films together,
shot by shot, just what we just did.
And my life has come full circle here.
I'm... Twenty-five years of teaching
and to be involved with your work like this means the world to me.
- CIANFRANCE: I love you, Phil. - (LAUGHS) I love you too.
I don't care that I'm in their left ear and you're in their right ear.
(BOTH LAUGH)
SOLOMON: This is a love story. CIANFRANCE: Yes.
I think I'm Tom though.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHS) Yeah. I'm definitely Isabel.
Look, I look a little sickly, that kind of thing.
- You have brown eyes. - CIANFRANCE: Yes.
No, I remember when I first came into your office hours.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHING) You're definitely Tom.
CIANFRANCE: You had office hours, I remember, twice a week?
SOLOMON: Could be. I was ambitious back then.
CIANFRANCE: Whatever it was.
Once a week maybe? But I went to every office hour you ever had.
SOLOMON: You did. That's exactly true.
CIANFRANCE: And I remember when I first came in
with the idea for my student film,
I was gonna make a vampire movie called Suck.
And you said, "You cannot make this movie."
And I'm just so thankful to you, Phil.
Without you, um, I would be making all these horror movies called Suck.
SOLOMON: (LAUGHING) Which comes with its own critique.
CIANFRANCE: Uh-huh.
Thank you for guiding me, Phil.
SOLOMON: Ah...
I don't know. Open hearts are open hearts.
I'm so proud of you for making this.
By the time this comes out it will have had its life.
- And we don't know. - Mmm. We don't know.
SOLOMON: And we don't know, but I'm seeing red carpets...
- (DEREK SHUSHES) - (BOTH LAUGH)
SOLOMON: I don't know. Doesn't matter at this point.
I'm just glad to be in, here we are in August
and it hasn't been out in the world yet.
And I feel very privileged.
And I also want to thank your producers
and all the good people
at DreamWorks, and Disney and Jeff
and it's been a wonderful trip to be in on the beginning and the back.
- CIANFRANCE: Yeah. - The back end here.
CIANFRANCE: Now we got to start talking about the Western, Phil.
- SOLOMON: Oh, my God. - I've got to send you the script.
SOLOMON: Okay. We'll talk about that off-camera.
CIANFRANCE: Okay.
SOLOMON: Um, and then I saw my name here and I lost it completely.
- CIANFRANCE: Your name's been on every... - Every one. I know.
It's my claim to fame.
That's why they're gonna give me the star on Hollywood Boulevard.
It's Mr. Thank You.
(LAUGHING)
CIANFRANCE: Your IMDb page, are you on the IMDb with this?
SOLOMON: Somebody better keep it up 'cause I'm certainly not.
- Anyway, Derek, thank you. This was... - Thank you, Phil.
SOLOMON: This flew by. It was a wonderful experience.
- CIANFRANCE: Want to go have dinner now? - Yeah. We'll go have dinner.
- CIANFRANCE: You hungry? - Yes. I'm hungry.
- CIANFRANCE: Okay. - Just been through the wringer here.
Beautiful, beautiful film.
CIANFRANCE: Thank you, Phil.