Tag Archives: Ryan Gosling

In “Blue Valentine,” Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a couple, and we get to see them at very different stages of their life. We see them meet — cute kids excited by possibility — and then, years later, married, with a kid, worn down by reality. Written and directed by Derek Cianfrance, “Blue Valentine” went through a serious challenge when it initially received an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, meaning it could be seen only by people over 17, a rating that’s a financial death sentence for any movie. That rating was later repealed, but when I spoke with Gosling in December, it wasn’t yet, and the 30-year-old actor had some inside perspective on what that rating meant to his film, and his confusion about why it was there at all.

“Well, I can’t make any sense of it,” he said. “They don’t give you enough information. I only know it’s because of the oral sex scene because I heard from somebody who talked to them. There’s no official statement, and there’s no real reasoning. You just hear it through the grapevine. The hearing takes place in private. It’s not recorded; you can’t really know. I’d love to hear the argument. I feel like we’re being held accountable for what we did, and I think they should be held accountable for what they’re doing. I’m confused.”

Frankly, the ratings board’s decision was confusing — especially when you consider that “Black Swan,” with a drug-fueled similar scene, got an R rating. Not only is it a double-standard, Gosling noted, but he found it hard to explain to people why the rating meant bad things for “Blue Valentine.” “What I think people don’t really understand is they think ‘So what, it’s an NC-17 film. You can’t see the film unless you’re 17. What’s the big deal?’ The reality is that if it gets an NC-17 rating, it can’t play in most major theater chains, and you’re not even allowed to take out ads on television. You’re really stigmatizing the film. In a way, you’re saying not ‘I don’t want kids to see it,’ but ‘I don’t want anyone to see it,’ unless you live in a big city and you have an art house theater. So it’s a very aggressive rating, and I think a lot of people don’t realize that.”

“But it is very much a double standard, it seems, because obviously you could reference other films, plenty of films where guys are receiving oral sex from women and that’s fine, or women in sexual scenarios that are violent, and that’s entertainment, but if they’re complicit or they’re receiving pleasure, or somehow if there’s love involved in the sex, it becomes pornographic. What else is confusing is the idea that it’s a film about, in a way, sexual responsibility. People are having careless sex, and she has a baby. She has to give up on her career plans and her life, and her whole life is affected by her choice. Everyone’s held accountable for their actions, which is pretty rare in terms of sexuality presented in film. Worst-case scenario, your kid sneaks in and sees that. What’s so bad — that a kid would see a man and a woman making love, or that there’s consequences for your actions?”

–From my article at The Rundown

“Blue Valentine” wasn’t shot like a conventional film, nor was the script written in stone. Instead, Ryan Gosling and co-star Michelle Williams pretty much moved into the house where much of the film was shot, with director Derek Cianfrance constantly rolling the camera and letting his actors live like a married couple. As Gosling explained, “We thought every detail we could think of, and we did everything we could do. We had Christmas and birthdays, made birthday cakes, wrapped presents, got family pictures at Sears, cooked, cleaned, fought, made up, bought clothes, gave old stuff away to the Goodwill, mowed the lawn, got in trouble for not mowing the lawn. We did as much as we could in that month so that we would have actual memories to refer to in the film.”

And Gosling and Williams didn’t get a lot of opportunities to decompress: “(Cianfrance) never really called ‘cut.’ He never really said ‘action.’ I don’t know how to explain it, but it wasn’t like that. The thing that blows my mind is that Michelle somehow would do what you saw in the film and then she would go home at night and be a mom. She’s an athlete. … I felt like Scottie Pippen, and she was Michael Jordan. I felt like every time I’d pass her the ball, she slam-dunked it.” And what, I asked, did Gosling learn from that? “That I’m not as good as Michelle Williams.” I suggested he was being modest, and he demurred: “No, that’s true.” I asked if there was, in fact, anything else he learned, and Gosling laughed: “That Michelle Williams is better than me.”

Gosling may be more than willing to praise Williams, but it’s not as if his own performance is going unnoticed. Gosling is getting more than a little Oscar talk for his work in “Blue Valentine,” and not without cause. He explained how, to him, the Oscar process isn’t really something he thinks about, even as he plays along. “Well, there’s nothing you can do at that point. There’s nothing you can do. You do more interviews and go to more screenings, or something like that. There’s things you can do. But you can’t change your performance, and you can’t change how it’s going to resonate with people. You can’t change the criteria how these things are judged. All that stuff is out of your control. You’re not aware that you’re in some kind of competition when you’re doing it. When you’re making a movie, at the end of the year it’s treated like some kind of a race, but when you’re doing it, you don’t even know. You’re just in a competition with yourself.”

Gosling, of course, was nominated for “Half Nelson” in 2006. Does he feel like that experience would prepare him for another nomination? “I really have no idea,” he said. “You can’t really predict those things. I’m just excited that people are talking about the movie. We have a big hurdle now with this rating, and all of this helps. Anything to raise awareness for the film. This film took 12 years to make this movie. We worked on this for years. Right in the home stretch, to be handicapped with a rating like this, it’s unfortunate. We’ll make it. Movies have a life way after these three months they’re being promoted. People will find — I didn’t see ‘Blue Velvet’ until I was 14. It was probably 10 years after it was made, but it changed my life. People will find this movie when they’re supposed to find it, and it’s the best movie I’ve made. That’s reward enough for me.”

–From my article at The Rundown

A few days later, talking by phone with Ryan Gosling‘s “Blue Valentine” co-star Michelle Williams, I could hear her children in the background as she came on the line. After some placating and guidance, she came to the conversation, and I asked, only half-kiddingly, if this is just part of the pleasure of being Michelle Williams, that she goes through the tough balancing act of having it all? Williams, whose personal life has occasionally overshadowed her superb body of work, laughed: “I have never once looked at it as a case of trying to have it all. No, I think that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh in equal measure. Although I actually don’t think that’s true. I think he takes and takes and takes. Sometimes I feel like you’re like running through time shedding. There’s this quote in this book that I love, ‘Rich in Love’: ‘When you’ve truly lost everything, then you can at least become rich in love.’ And I feel like I’m rolling in it. And then there are these small pleasures and large pleasures along the way that help you — or that, I (just) don’t know.”

And, like Gosling, she’s also trying to keep her head in the hubbub of awards season: “I mean, it gives my heart a little — what would I call it? — a little start, a little … if I say ‘a hug,’ I’m going to be embarrassed for all time. I mean a little jump start, a little kick of energy or something. It’s lovely, because I think — maybe more in keeping with what I was trying to say before — is that there are so many things, there are so many reasons to not celebrate. So when something comes along, it’s like learning how to take a compliment. You know what else it is? Appreciate when things are going well, because as soon as things are going well, it means that it’s going to change.”

Williams doesn’t seem to take the roles other young actresses do — I noted that she’s never been the plucky journalist with a new job in the big city, or the tough-as-nails cop with bangs and a gun. Do her agents and advisers, I asked, ever suggest a part like that in the name of building a paycheck along with a career? “Yes, I hear that from time to time,” she said. “I am interested in not repeating myself, obviously. That would be boring for me and for everyone else. So I have my eye on that, but at the same time, staying true to what is my nature, what are my beliefs, and how I want to spend my time, how I want to spend the time that I have in this lifetime, which is never enough. And also, my work takes me away from my daughter. She comes with me, obviously, but it is time spent away from her, so for me, to justify that decision, you couldn’t pay me to spend time away from her. I don’t do this for money. I do it to support us, sure, but it’s not the motivating factor. So my time away from her has to mean something almost on a spiritual level. Like I don’t have a choice; I must do this.”

–From my article at The Rundown