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Blue Valentine: *Non Spoiler* Everything You Ever Wanted to Know…

Posted on | January 6, 2011 | 3 Comments

I saw this film on Sunday.  I have been looking forward to it since seeing its trailer in October.  To summarize, Blue Valentine explores the relationship arc of Dean and Cindy, played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, a contemporary married couple raising their six-year-old daughter.  As we watch them dangle on the precipice of divorce, director Derek Cianfrance flashes us back to the two’s happier days, showing how drastically the pendulum can swing between love and indifference. Much like my reaction to Black Swan, I returned home to research the shit out of this film.

[Actually that's a lie: I really returned home to cry every time I thought of the movie. It touched me so eerily on a personal level: I related to both characters and their dynamic reminded me of one of my best former relationships.  If Cindy and Dean can't make it, I sobbed, who can? The definitive couple of our generation, love sucks and then you die, etc.]

Ahead of its expanded release nationwide tomorrow (and greater expansion on the 14th), I’m passing my trivia onto you.  Please note that I have broken up this ‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Know’ into two parts. Much like my Black Swan one (and to prevent this from becoming the longest post EVER), this post does not include spoilers. I will, however, be posting a follow-up on Monday with trivia that may contain spoilers.

This gives you three days to do your homework in between. Do it!

  • This film famously took 12 years to make.
  • It premiered at Sundance and also screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
  • This film also famously had a NC-17 rating for its sexually explicit content.
  • Ryan took his mom to see this film at Sundance.  He used his ipod and covered her eyes during the sex scenes.
  • After the Weinstein Company acquired the film, Harvey Weinstein personally campaigned the MPA to change its rating to R without any cinematic edits to the original product.
  • In early December, the MPA unanimously agreed to overturn its initial decision on a 14-0 vote.
  • Derek Cianfrance storyboarded 1224 shots, 66 drafts, and 1 ‘rules of engagement’ manifesto prior to Blue Valentine’s actual production.
  • Blue Valentine was inspired by Cianfrance’s great childhood fear that his parents would get divorced.  When he was 20, they did.
  • Another inspiration for Blue Valentine was Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.  Cianfrance notes, “Mostly because I felt like it’s the love tragedy that’s out there and it gets replayed time and time again; where two young people at the peak of their love end up dying in each other’s arms, and their love is preserved for all time.”  He continued, “that’s the story that’s been taught to all of us, but I haven’t ever met anyone who’s had that good romantic fortune to die at the peak of their love, when everything’s great. But I know a lot of people that death doesn’t come in and betray their love, time [does...] I wanted to make the version that I could actually relate to; that my parents [and] my friends could relate to, of what actually can happen. And in that idea of time, there [are] no answers. There [are] questions; there’s a mystery to it. So I wanted to make this mystery film about where love comes from and where it goes.”
  • He began working on Blue Valentine after the debut of his first feature “Brother Tied.” He was 23.
  • Derek has stated that all the documentaries, commercials, etc. he shot all in between contributed to the final product of Blue Valentine. (Even a genital warts commercial.)
  • The two other film co-writers, Joey Curtis and Cali Delavigne, contributed to the film are also children of divorce.
  • …As are leads Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.
  • Although Ryan and Michelle did not co-write the script, Cianfrance would frequently rewrite sections inspired by their meetings and conversations.
  • Of this phenomenon, Cienfrance said, “to me it’s really the child’s perspective in the movie. The movie isn’t about my parents, at all, it’s about me, and people of my generation who are trying to deal [by] not repeating what we saw our parents do. It’s about us trying to avoid our destiny.”
  • Michelle first expressed interest in the script in 2003 (6 years prior to filming). To her first meeting with Derek, she brought a CD and a book of poetry.
  • Ryan signed on as Dean in 2005 (4 years prior to filming).
  • Since there is a six year gap between when Cindy and Dean first meet and their current marriage, the director initially wanted to shoot the past and present sequences in reality six years apart.  Unfortunately, no producer would finance this idea.
  • Instead, Blue Valentine was made for under $10 million and filmed in 28 days in 2009.
  • In 2006, the screenplay won the Chrysler Film Project contest. It won $1 million of funding, courtesy of the Chrysler Brand and production company Silverwood Films.
  • Preproduction was plagued with many starts and stops with financing, cast and crew schedules, etc. Finally, everything came into place in 2009 to film in the script’s original Morro Bay, CA location. Unfortunately, Michelle had to decline since she promised her daughter Matilda that she would be home before bed every night that year.
  • After briefly considering casting another actress, Derek instead moved the location an hour from Michelle’s Brooklyn home.  He shot past scenes in New York, and present day scenes outside Scranton and in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
  • Derek shot the film in chronological order: first shooting the ‘past’ in 14 days and then ‘present day’ in 12.
  • The past scenes were shot on 16 mm film with one 25 mm lens; the present scenes were shot on digital video HD RED.
  • In the past scenes, Derek shot long takes, trying always to get Cindy and Dean to share the frame.
  • To break them up visually in the present-day scenes, Derek always put Cindy and Dean in different corners with separate close-ups.
  • Prior to shooting, Ryan and Michelle did not spend a lot of time together.  Instead, they met and got to know each other in character while filming.  Cianfrance wanted to capture how they “explored and surprised each other on camera.”
  • In fact, there was little rehearsal prior to shooting. Cianfrance felt that “in rehearsal, you lose the magic moments.”
  • Instead, Cianfrance said, “I was worried that [Blue Valentine] was going to be stale. I asked Ryan and Michelle on the first day, “Guys, please surprise me. We can always trust the script because it’s strong, but if all you do is lines from the page I’m going to be so bored. Let’s go out there and make this thing alive – I want to make living, breathing cinema. I want it to be about expectations, let’s go out there and break it with new things.”
  • As part of their preparation, however, the cast remembered “we collected a lot of photographs, actually, photographs that we thought were snapshots of people’s lives, of couples that were together that weren’t staged, that were just private photographs of people that were trying to get that kind of an intimacy.”
  • Prior to shooting the present day scenes, Cianfrance had Ryan and Michelle live in their characters’ house outside Scranton, PA.  Stocked by production designer Inbal Weinberg, the on-screen couple lived there for almost a month before the second half of shooting. (Williams returned home to Matilda in Brooklyn each night.)
  • To afford giving his actors this time, Cianfrance sacrificed the lighting truck budget.
  • Ryan and Michelle needed this time to break down their relationship and learn how to fight.  After shooting the first half, the cast were reluctant to make the transition. “We were like, ‘Maybe we could just call this movie “Valentine.” Let’s not shoot “Blue,”‘ Ryan said. “But we knew we had to do it. It was hard.”
  • Cianfrance started the process with a Dean and Cindy wedding picture burning ceremony.
  • There were also fireworks involved.
  • But “the picture wouldn’t melt all the way,” the director remembers. “Their faces wouldn’t melt … where their lips were kissing wouldn’t melt and the frame melted into like, a black-shaped heart around their mouths.”
  • For that month, the cast made a budget for how house painter (Dean) and nurse (Cindy) would make, how much mortgage and car payments would cost, etc. This left them $200 every two weeks off which they lived.
  • During this month, Ryan and Michelle wrapped presents, had Christmas, a birthday party for their daughter (who came for half-days), got family portraits at Sears, and did Jane Fonda workouts amongst other things. “We had days when we were just supposed to fight all day, then take our daughter to the park and pretend like everything was okay,” Ryan remembered.
  • To also learn how to be a father, Ryan did activities just with Faith Wladyka, who plays daughter Frankie, like fishing.
  • Blue Valentine was the first film Faith ever auditioned for.  She was chosen for the role because she was a not a “perfect little actress, but a true kid.” In her audition, she tried to show director Cianfrance how she could make both her pigtails spin in circles at the same time.
  • To prepare to play a husband and father, Ryan “talked to my friends who were married with kids, and I said to them, tell me your biggest problem with him and then you tell me your biggest problem with her. [...] She was like, “Well, he fucking never washes the sponge. And every time I go to grab the sponge, it’s cold and full of food and I’m just going to kill him. And then he always parks as far away as he can and he never gets the spot that I want him…” and she had a whole list. And then I said to him, “What’s your problem with her?” And he was like, “Pretty much that she’s got those problems with me.” This couple is now divorced.
  • For the record, Michelle Williams did not do the dishes that month.  Feeling bad that she would also be doing them in her Brooklyn home, Ryan opted to the dishes in Pennsylvania.
  • In 2007, Cianfrance approached Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear to do the soundtrack. Unfortunately when film scoring was finally underway in 2009, the band was on tour promoting their third album.  As a compromise, Grizzly Bear simply gave Cianfrance all the instrumentals from their last two records to “do as he pleased.”
  • Some of the tracks which made the film include “Dory,” “I Live With You,” “Easier,” “Lullaby” and “Alligator” from their “Friend” EP.

Congratulations. Phew. You made it to the end.  As a bonus, I also offer Derek Cianfrance’s advice to filmmakers:

You have to be stubborn. You have to believe. You have to build up. Create an energy that makes the movie attractive to people, make people fight for it and believe in it as much as you. I think film is a collaboration. You have to humble yourself to that collaboration. I think at least me, with my style of filmmaking. A lot is said of the idea of independent film, how you make an independent film. I’m very dependent. I’m not an independent filmmaker, I’m a dependent filmmaker. I need people.

If you’re going to make a film, get people to believe in it. Bring people around and make them get to a place where they love the film more than you do. Where they’ll fight for it and that’s exactly what started happening in Blue Valentine over those twelve years of venturing. I had people that it was as much their film as it was my film. Be dependent. Be dependent on other people.

See you Monday!

Incomprehensive list of resources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 (may contain spoilers)

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Category: On Cinema: Film, TV, Etc.

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