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After making his narrative debut with the acclaimed indie Blue Valentine, director Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up, The Place Beyond the Pines, is just as emotionally intimate, yet with an epic scope. In fact, it was almost too epic to even be financed. “I had a 158 page script for this film, and my financier said if I get it down to 120 pages you can have the $10.5 million, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that,” said Cianfrance during a roundtable interview to talk up his latest work, “so I found the shrink font button and extended the margins and no one caught it.”

Cianfrance’s creativeness is not only seen in his screenplay’s margins. Ryan Gosling, playing a carnival motorcycle stunt rider, and Bradley Cooper, as a police officer with bigger aspirations in the corrupt force, co-star in the film but do not share the screen. Placing the legacy of fathers and sons into an extraordinary light through a triptych arrangement with three distinct arcs (and a 15 year jump into the future), The Place Beyond the Pines manages to surprise even in its chronological format.

Writing over 37 drafts, Cianfrance’s controlled on-set improv expanded the story even further. During the roundtable Cianfrance touches on a myriad of topics from his on-set style, his documentarian background, and the intimacy of his films.

Cianfrance on making the extras just as convincing as the lead actors

Derek Cianfrance: I’m always trying to find this collision between real life and fantasy, fiction and nonfiction. I’m always trying to take actors and kind of drop them in this aquarium and see how they swim. There are real cops in this movie alongside Bradley Cooper. Real judges are up on the stand. I can’t teach someone how to be a judge, but they can teach me. The abortion doctor in Blue Valentine is a real abortion doctor. I come from a documentary background so I look for the real world to inform my movies. I’m trying to find that collision.

…My concept was that I would put all real tellers who had been robbed before [in the bank heist scenes]. So we shoot the first take of this and Ryan Gosling comes in and no one was scared. Everyone was just relieved that it was Ryan Gosling robbing them instead of a real guy (laughs). Normally you go into a place with a gun, people are going to freak out, but they are just taking pictures with their phones.

So all of a sudden, my whole process and concept of making movies is failing, it’s backfiring on us. So I told Ryan, “You'd better work harder. If the gun isn’t scaring them, you'd better scare them.” So for every take; all 15 takes we did, Ryan had to ratchet it up more and more until finally he was just so desperate to scare these people that it came off as being terrified and desperate and full of anxiety, his voice started cracking. Again, the process didn’t go as how I thought it was going to happen, but his performance I thought got so much more interesting because of the desperation of the real situation of him as an actor trying to get these people to be scared.

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