On Thursday April 4, 2013, at the Museum of Arts and Design, Derek Cianfrance presented his moviemaking work. This event was Act 2 of the series in AIGA/NY Hacking Life: Using Creativity to Break into the System.

In the spirit of Hollywood, AIGA/NY Board Members Eric Adolfsen and Matt Spangler introduced the Hacking Life series and Derek Cianfrance with a “cold read” of a script they had co-written. “Tonight’s speaker fits perfectly in with the hacking concept,“ Spangler explained. “[Cianfrance's] experience taught him that even after you start shooting, sometimes the script should be ignored to find the best performance,” added Adolfsen.

Derek Cianfrance began his presentation by telling the audience, “As I was a kid growing up, my house was filled with these pictures of people smiling. But I always felt it was a little weird, because in my house we weren’t all smiling all the time.” His family members argued often, and Cianfrance took to recording the disagreements in his house through photographs and videos. “Those were always the things that I was interested in,” he said.

Cianfrance grew to love film by watching VHS tapes at home. He enrolled in the University of Colorado’s film school at 18. There, he studied with Stan Brackage and discovered “film as sculpture, as something plastic, something other than just a means in which to tell a story.” Cianfrance still wanted to make narrative film, so at age 20, he dropped out school to raise money and make his own movie.

That film was Brother Tied, which Cianfrnace described as “a family movie, kind of a ‘Cain and Abel’ story about two brothers and this friendship that comes between their brotherhood.” Cianfrance shared a clip of the film with the audience. “What I had tried to do was make a very aesthetic movie. There’s not a lot of performance, just a lot of shots of people,” he said.

After Brother Tied was shown at Sundance with limited success, Cianfrance began writing Blue Valentine with his partner Joey Curtis. Cianfrance’s parents had divorced a few years earlier. “I wanted to break that cycle that I saw my parents live,” he explained.

In 1998, Cianfrance submitted copies of his script to movie studios. When none responded, he re-wrote the script and submitted it again. “This process went on for 12 years of submitting, re-writing, and getting rejected.” Altogether, he wrote 66 drafts and drew 1224 storyboards.

“I decided I was going to stay pure, as an artist… and not do anything for money, not sell out,” Cianfrance said. But that changed when he had a wife and child to consider, so he started making documentaries for cable channels like MTV, VH1, and BET.

In making these documentaries, Cianfrance explained, he learned to play the role of listener rather than speaker. “I was able to go into this world and…embrace these other stories that weren’t my own,” he said. “Making documentaries was a very humbling experience for me.” He shared clips of two of these films, one about cage fighters, and another about the rapper Sean Combs (aka P. Diddy).

Cianfrance brought what he learned from documentary work into his narrative films, and in 2009 he finally made Blue Valentine. His process became a blend of documentary and fictional storytelling; for example, one of the film’s most iconic scenes wa unscripted. Cianfrance knew that Ryan Gosling played the ukelele and that Michelle Williams could tap dance. He described shooting the well-known scene of the two walking up and down the street: “I told Ryan that when he gets to the bridal store, that’s when he would stop and ask Michelle if she had any secret talents. And what we have is this moment that happens on screen for the first time.”

Lastly, Cianfrance spoke about his newest film, The Place Beyond the Pines. “I wrote it when my wife was pregnant with our second son, and I was thinking about this fire that had been in my family for a long time,” he said. “So I wrote a movie about fatherhood, and about legacy, about passing the torch, passing the fire from generation to generation.”

This film’s process involved another mingling of fiction and reality. The actor Ryan Gosling volunteered to cover himself with tattoos for the film, Cianfrance explained, including a face tattoo of a dagger dripping blood. On the first day of filming, though, Gosling regretted the face tattoo. He wanted to wipe it off and re-shoot what they had done so far. “And I was like no way, this movie’s about consequence, and about having to live with your actions,” Cianfrance told the audience. “And all of a sudden this tattoo became like a mark of shame for him.” This feeling of shame, and of not fitting in, helped Gosling inhabit his character, experiencing visible feelings of mortification and regret while he performed. “That’s ultimately the kind of chemistry that we’ve been trying to develop in the movies — a place where acting ends and behavior begins.”

Additional Information:
Derek Cianfrance
Blue Valentine
The Place Beyond the Pines

Event Details:
Derek Cianfrance: Hacking Life — Act 2

Event Photos:
Click here to view all photos from AIGA/NY Derek Cianfrance: Hacking Life — Act 2 on Flickr. To view additional photos, or to contribute your photos, visit our AIGA New York Flickr group.

Special thanks to guest contributing writer Karen Vanderbilt for the AIGA/NY Derek Cianfrance event recap and photos. Karen can be found at karenvanderbilt.com, and Some of the Parts.