Interview with Derek Cianfrance
When Derek Cianfrance went to film school at the University of Colorado and studied under legendary experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Brakhage was an intense filmmaker and theorist, searching for new forms of expression on screen and wary of the mechanics of filmmaking. “Brakhage taught my film history course and would do the craziest things,” says Cianfrance. “When he showed us Ivan The Terrible, he would have the projectionist rack the film completely out of focus so we could only see the shadow and light play on the screen. You could tell how Eisenstein [the famous Russian director of the film] was interested in the idea of a collision in editing. It was the only way to see that every cut was a clash on the screen.”
Cianfrance, whose new film Blue Valentine is about to be released, was not entirely seduced by the experimental form, despite the influence of his teachers. “I had such a narrative background and upbringing and I always wanted to tell stories,” he says, “but I had no idea about experimental or avant-garde cinema. I had my eyes opened to a whole new way of seeing film – seeing the aesthetics of cinema, the plasticity of the medium and the sculptural opportunities for film. And I also learned the idea of making sensitive and personal stories based on things that were very intimate to the artist. That’s what inspired me, and I tried to use those lessons and apply them to my narrative filmmaking.”
Cianfrance’s first film Brother Tied (what he labels a “student feature”) was clearly influenced by his mentors with its experimental style. Despite screening successfully at Sundance and winning international awards, Cianfrance seems to now see through it. “It was all about the tricks and the aesthetic that I learnt from those guys,” he says, “and when Phil Solomon saw the film he reminded me that form must only illuminate content. In my film it was the opposite way around, so I felt I had penance to do. That’s when I wrote Blue Valentine.”
Tipped to pick up Academy Award nominations for its stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine tells the two sides of the love story of Cindy and Dean. We witness in intimate detail their first meeting and how they fall in love, but these scenes are intercut with the couple’s more troubled married life six years later when their relationship is disintegrating. They have become two individuals constrained by each other and their shared situation of child, mortgage and daily domestic commitments.
It took Cianfrance twelve years to get the film produced, and while he was writing and re-writing the sixty-six drafts of the film he worked through, he turned to making documentaries for television – most portraits of individual musicians. Cianfrance agrees that this work also changed the way he approached narrative screen storytelling. “With the documentary form, I learned to be more of a humble filmmaker and more of a listener,” he says. “You don’t get a second take making documentaries and so you have to be sharp. Ultimately I think that both my background in avant-garde film and my experience in documentaries show up in Blue Valentine. I always wanted to make narrative film but this is very intimate and personal and has an experimental structure, and the way I pulled it off was more like making a documentary. And above all –remembering Phil Solomon’s advice - I tried not to make it showy.”
As we speak it becomes clear just how important to Cianfrance is the idea that a film be drawn from a deep personal experience. The words ‘intimate’ and personal’ keep reoccurring in the conversation, and there seems to be much of Cianfrance in the story of Blue Valentine and in its characters. I ask him about this – and the reports I have read that it was his parents’ separation that triggered the idea for the film. “It is the responsibility of the artist to be honest and confront the things that scare them the most,” he acknowledges. “They must expose both the lightness and the darkness they know and, yes, Blue Valentine is intensely personal in many ways. It’s a duet about a man and a woman, about the past and the present, happiness and sadness, love and hate and I feel like I know all those sides of my life. I wanted to put them up there as honestly as possible.” As Cianfrance is talking you can feel the emotion in his voice – that sense that comes when someone is sharing something important and difficult and complicated. It’s much like the film itself.
We talk at length about love stories on screen, how the memorable ones end with lovers adrift, and of Cianfrance’s influences – Cassevetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (“I watched it 25 times”) Carol Reed’s The Third Man (“the final shot was an inspiration for Blue Valentine”) and Gone With The Wind, with its famous last words from a lover “I don’t give a damn.’ But Cianfrance isn’t really a fan of mainstream Hollywood fare. “I love movies as much as anyone can,” he insists, “but I feel so many movies are almost arrogant – they put characters up on screen that aren’t human but godly – they are perfect. They speak perfect sentences, they know what they want, they have inciting incidents in their life, and there are morals to their stories. And when I watch one of these movies I have exactly the same experience as the person next to me. I wanted to make something more human, something not made in the image of God but man. I tried to put all my fears and flaws into Blue Valentine and make a film that people could really relate to.”
Judging by the feedback from audiences Cianfrance has definitely achieved that aim, and the film often provokes heated discussion about whether it’s the very human Cindy or Dean who is to blame for what happens in the story. Cianfrance is clear in his own mind. “I definitely relate to Cindy,” he says with absolute confidence, “she is melancholy, and that is one of my functioning realties. And that’s where the title comes in – I love the blues.”
