Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Fair warning, much like the movie we're talking about, you're either going to love this interview or hate it. Lost River is a pretty great little slice of bizarre from first time feature director Ryan Gosling and you're either going to join the ride at the beginning and have a great time or you're not and you won't.
I guess that's true of most movies, but there are some that specifically don't fall into an accepted norms and just want to be their own there. Lost River definitely falls into that camp. It's a fairy tale, a romantic drama and a macabre creepfest all at once.
While at SXSW I had the chance to sit down with stars Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones, Hanna, other awesome stuff), Iain De Caestecker (Agents of SHIELD) and director Ryan Gosling (Mouseketeer). To say the interview goes off the rails is a bit of an understatement, but all in a good way, I promise. Lots of tangents, lots of laughter and a general jovial vibe between these three people.
We do talk a lot about the movie, how it was filming in Detroit, the process of the actors and how Gosling himself acclimatized to being behind the camera... but there's a lot of weird stuff in there as well, including a fond reunion between two Lovely Bones co-stars (not so fast, Ryan).
As I hit record on my nifty little digital audio thingamagig, Gosling was saying that he loved Ain't It Cool (I was as surprised as you are, trust me) and then followed that by asking what was up with the spy names. “What are you hiding from,” he asked. That's when the conversation turned towards murder, but I'll let that play out for you below... Enjoy!
Quint: Well, I'd tell you what I was hiding from, but then I'd have to kill you all.
Ryan Gosling: Oh boy!
Saoirse Ronan: Who would you kill first?
Quint: Probably Ryan. I think surprise would be my only chance at taking him down.
Ryan Gosling: (laughs) There can be only one!
Saoirse Ronan: Maybe you're the first to go, Quint!
Quint: That's actually the most likely scenario and I'm fine with it.
Saoirse Ronan: Quint, the spy! That's so cool!
Quint: Saoirse, I don't think you'd remember this, but we've actually shared a scene together...
Ryan Gosling: Yes.
Saoirse Ronan: (To the guys) Oh, you remember that?
Ryan Gosling: Yes.
Iain De Caestecker: Oh, yeah.
Saoirse Ronan: They remember. It was a lot to take in at the time, so I feel like I had to block it out to get on with the rest of my life.
Quint: I understand. It was a blisteringly subtle performance as Man In Trenchcoat Buying Book in Lovely Bones...
Ryan Gosling: Whoa!
Saoirse Ronan: Were you in the bookstore?
Quint: I was. Peter Jackson has been kind enough to throw me in the background of a lot of his movies and that was one of them. I was with you guys in Philadelphia for a couple weeks.
Saoirse Ronan: Oh, cool! And he's in that, like, 7 times.
Ryan Gosling: Is he really?
Saoirse Ronan: Yeah, especially that scene. If you look at it back he appears just as much as Stanley (Tucci) does! Every now and again he's just (mimes looking around). And every cameo he does he's really manic when he comes into the shot.
Quint: My whole background appearance is in the first five seconds of the trailer, so when the trailer came out my boss, Harry, posted an article floating the theory that poor Stanley Tucci was innocent and that creepy guy in the trenchcoat was the real killer.
Ryan Gosling: That's not true, is it?
Quint: No, I have not killed any children. Not yet, anyway.
Ryan Gosling: Okay, good. Great!
Saoirse Ronan: Oh, Jesus! (laughs) Dark, dark turn!
Quint: This interview's going great!
Saoirse Ronan: We're talking about death a lot!
Quint: Let's get away from the child-killing and talk about how much I dug Lost River.
Iain De Caestecker: What a segue that is!
Saoirse Ronan: That's not going to be included in the interview!
Quint: Wanna bet? So, my biggest takeaway from the movie was just how fantastic the look and tone was. The cinematography is just out of this world good and the tone was set with your choice of location. I'm trying not to ask the same old questions about shooting in Detroit, but...
Ryan Gosling: We love Detroit. We love talking about it.
Quint: I'm fascinated by the artist choice to make a location integral to the story. An easy example is how Spielberg incorporated the town of Martha's Vineyard in Jaws to help create the personality of the movie. It seems like you did something similar with Detroit. I can't imagine the movie in another city and having it be as effective.
Ryan Gosling: Right. It wouldn't have worked. Also, it was part of the inception of the idea, so they were sort of one and the same... But there is much more to Detroit than just these neighborhoods. What's also exciting about working there, and part of the draw, is there's this big reinvention and rebirth going on there. It's got this fascinating history and an unknown future. There's just an energy there and the people there are just so wonderful. I just had to work there.
[At this point a waiter brings over four bottles of Mexican Coke]
Ryan Gosling: Do you want a bottle of coke?
Quint: Sure!
[Iain, Saoirse and Ryan all slide their bottles in front of me]
Ryan Gosling: You have to finish those before the interview's done.
Saoirse Ronan: Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!
Iain De Caestecker: One question per Coke.
[After some pleading, they finally take their Cokes back]
Quint: I like that you embrace Detroit as it is, though. For a long time people would shoot in places like Louisiana for the tax incentive and try to make it look like some place else and it never looked right.
Saoirse Ronan: Yeah, it's such a cool place as well. You'd think you'd want to take advantage of that place.
Quint: It took people a long time to actually embrace the culture in Louisiana on film, but it seems to me that Detroit is being accepted much faster.
Ryan Gosling: I hope so. We only scratched the surface of what's there. It's such a rich place historically and visually. To me it was very inspiring visually, but half of our movie was also shot at the Masonic Temple. It was a thousand rooms, housed our production offices, it has five theaters, it has secret passageways, a thunder/lightning machine, it has a Pepper's Ghost illusion... and that's just one place! It's just endless there. The crews are incredible. I hope there's a film festival in Detroit soon and I hope more films start to shoot there.
Saoirse Ronan: Remember when we shot in the old theater that's now a carpark? The old theater where we did the dancing. It was amazing, that night. It was so astonishing to go into such a huge space that used to be filled up with seats and a stage and you could still see the door frames on the wall. It was beautiful to be there.
Ryan Gosling: We spent a few nights there. We took Benoit (Debie, cinematographer), myself, the Red and these guys in costume and a friend of mine with a mic and when everyone was in bed we went and shot what ended up being the date sequence in the film. We snuck around and tried to catch some moments of intimacy without the crew around.
Quint: Saoirse, you've talked about how this film is the one you felt you had the most influence on. Was that because of moments like Ryan just described, where you were kind of allowed to relax a little more and be yourself?
Saoirse Ronan: Yeah, it was Ryan's movie and it's very much his heart that was in it and we were lucky enough to be a part of it, but certainly to be so encouraged to incorporate so much of who you are into a story was very new for me. And scary. It's a vulnerable position to put yourself in and you need to have an awful lot of trust in the people you're with to do something like that because you're not only kind of putting yourself out there, but you're working in a different way. It felt like we even acted in a different way. The way we spoke, the way we interacted with each other was very raw, I guess, and fresh because we were coming up with it as we were shooting. I learned a lot from that. I really did.
Ryan Gosling: You did something I was so impressed by... They were able to incorporate people from the neighborhood, strangers from the street, and pulled them into this fantasy, yet still rooted it in reality. That's an incredibly hard thing to do. They're acting without a net and they're writing! They're writing within scenes as they're in character and trying to create a reality where this person could be part of the film. They pulled them out of Detroit and into Lost River. It's incredible and a testament to their talent because that's a very hard thing to do.
Quint: Any actor wants to put their best foot forward and feels a certain degree of pressure, but Iain, you carry so much of this movie with very little dialogue. You don't get to lean on exposition. When we meet your character we follow you around, you don't get to tell us immediately who you are and what you're about. Does that put more pressure on you as an actor or does it free you up?
Iain De Caestecker: I suppose there's this sense... I mean, there's Ryan and he's surrounding himself with an incredibly talented group of people, so you constantly feel like you're the odd one out, but I went out about four weeks before we started filming. I got to know Ryan, got to know the city and that was really invaluable.
Ryan Gosling: He worked with a guy who stripped buildings of their copper.
Iain De Caestecker: Yeah, this guy showed me around the city. He sadly passed away recently, but he'd been there for years and had this amazing record collection... thousands of them, old Beatles records... it was just incredible. So, when I got there I found Ryan on a set is someone who is just open and free with doing things.
Ryan Gosling: Yeah, but Iain had been living it for a month, so he knew way more about it than I did, even though I had written it. That's the benefit of working with these people who you admire so much. You don't really direct them. They inform you about what they would or wouldn't do and that's always more interesting than something you could have planned because they're bringing their whole life experience to it.
Quint: All joking aside, I'm not an actor and don't have any ambition to be one. Not that I don't think it's an amazing profession. I just don't think I have it in me, but I would imagine...
Ryan Gosling: I don't know. That scene in The Lovely Bones would suggest otherwise, my friend.
Saoirse Ronan: You rocked that trenchcoat like nobody's business. When you bought that book... I kind of want to watch it now, actually.
Quint: I would have to imagine that as an actor if you have that kind of trust from the director that it spurs you on to try more and more things, like a snowball effect.
Saoirse Ronan: I was going to say that, actually. Ryan set a precedent for all of us to, without sounding cheesy about it, truly be ourselves and relax into that and trust what we'd naturally bring to our characters. Because I think as well the characters drew certain things out of us personally. There were certain things that I responded to in Rat that I maybe wouldn't have explored in my own life, but was there and a part of who I was. That was because Ryan set such a good atmosphere on the set where everything was really calm. I remember even the first day we were like, “I guess we'll shoot now.”
Ryan Gosling: When we were watching that movie?
Saoirse Ronan: Yeah! We were just watching telly for the first couple hours!
Ryan Gosling: I remember I told Saoirse, this was her first day, I said “Don't do anything. Just watch TV.” Just to get started, you know...
Quint: And that didn't freak you out at all? “Is this a test!?!”
Saoirse Ronan: I was like, “Whatchu talkin' 'bout?”
Ryan Gosling: We rolled four or five mags of film on Saoirse watching TV and at a certain point I was like, “Well, maybe do something...” But it was great. We started the film with the family moments that became the opening title sequence. It was just you guys sorta living in the house.
Iain De Caestecker: Yeah, I remember that was really great. We didn't have a script for period. It was just “Live in that house as if you were living there and interact.” We had this great little kid called Landyn (Stewart) who played my brother in the movie.
Ryan Gosling: He's so good in the film.
Iain De Caestecker: I think one thing that became clear right at the start was (Ryan) would put everyone else's agendas or needs before his own, so you felt safe in that environment.
Quint: Landyn's so great in the opening!
Saoirse Ronan: That's great, isn't it? Such a brilliant face.
Iain De Caestecker: We auditioned a lot of little kids. They were all great. Some really special young kids came in and we sat down and did auditions with them and Landyn was this special kid and I didn't see it at first. Because for me I just wanted interaction with a kid at that time and Ryan saw him and knew immediately that he really liked him.
Ryan Gosling: He was this incredibly special kid... but he didn't like the camera, it turned out. We didn't learn that until late in the game. When he saw it he would run the other way. We had to become like nature photographers, you know. If you've ever seen the making of Animal Planet, where they hide in the trees for months to get a shot of a bird coming out of its nest. There were scenes where were hiding under piles of laundry, just trying to get a moment between him and Iain. We had to shoot on long lenses and hide the camera. We really had to change our whole plan for the style of those scenes and the nature of his role, but it was totally worth it.
We joke that he's Marlon Brando. From what I heard about Apocalypse Now... you just wait for Marlon to show up, he comes in, says what he's going to say and he leaves. That's kind of like Landyn, but my God, it was worth everything because he's so special.
Quint: So, you're saying reincarnation might actually be real.
Ryan Gosling: Maybe. See the film and see what you think.
Quint: I always like seeing creative people step outside their comfort zones and I'm always especially interested in seeing actors try their hand at directing. It's always interesting to me to see what they bring with them into another field, going back to the black and white days with people like Charles Laughton...
Ryan Gosling: We watched Night of the Hunter before we started filming.
Quint: Really? Awesome movie. That underwater shot of Shelley Winters still creeps me out. So, Ryan's done it now. Saoirse, Iain, are you tempted to step behind the camera at some point?
Iain De Caestecker: Yeah, of course.
Saoirse Ronan: I'd like to. I've always wanted to. Of course, I wouldn't just want to step into it and think I just know everything. It was cool with Ryan because I think he was very humble... (to Iain) we're being so nice to him now, compared to earlier.
Ryan Gosling: When the cameras were on we were very different.
Saoirse Ronan: Exactly! We were proper mean!
Quint: Well, the TV people probably weren't talking about dead kids either, so...
Ryan Gosling: That's true. You did set an interesting tone.
Saoirse Ronan: (laughs) But yeah, he was very humble and I think he surrounded himself with great people who he trusts and he's known for a long time and has worked with a lot. I would want to do the same thing. I did a film when I was about 9 called “Ed The Baker” and I was such a control freak.
Ryan Gosling: You directed it?
Saoirse Ronan: Yeah.
Ryan Gosling: Amazing.
Saoirse Ronan: It was about this baker that trashed his own bakery for the insurance money.
Ryan Gosling: I auditioned for that.
Saoirse Ronan: You did?
Ryan Gosling: Yeah.
Saoirse Ronan: For the kid or the wife?
Ryan Gosling: I'm still waiting to hear. I had a really good read.
Saoirse Ronan: We're going to do the Whiplash thing, so we did the short and we're going to see where it goes from there. I'll let you know. I'll tweet you.
Ryan Gosling: Thank you.
Saoirse Ronan: I've always really wanted to make a silent film. I don't know if we talked about that before because I went on a real vibe for a while of wanting to play a boy and wanting to be in a movie that doesn't have any dialogue at all. We were talking about this in another interview, that we didn't need to rely on the text necessarily to project what we were trying to say. A lot of it was just interaction with each other and how we all were physically with each other... (laughs) That sounded weird.
Quint: Get your mind outta the gutter!
Saoirse Ronan: You put us there!
Quint: That is my speciality.
Saoirse Ronan: But yeah, it was a good exercise.
Ryan Gosling: I've always admired people who could surf and turf and do both. I think they can inform each other. I definitely feel like it made me a better actor after directing. Or at least it gave me a whole other understanding of what it is and vice versa. You realize how important acting is when you direct.
Saoirse Ronan: Are you more aware now of what you give as an actor and what the director would need? How has that changed?
Ryan Gosling: The world you create doesn't matter unless you have actors that draw you into that world. If a movie's a rabbit hole, we as actors are the rabbits. You need somebody that's going to bring you into that world and only an actor's going to do that, so you realize how important that really is. Especially when you're sitting there editing for a year. You see it in a completely different way. It was really helpful for me to step to the other side to see what it really is in a more objective way.
Iain De Caestecker: Not like you wouldn't have been before, but do you find yourself more sympathetic being an actor now?
Ryan Gosling: To directors?
Iain De Caestecker: Yeah.
Ryan Gosling: Absolutely. I broke some stones. Before... I just didn't know. I thought I knew. I've been doing this since I was 12. I thought I understood, but I really didn't.
Quint: I've taken up way too much of your time. Thank you, guys, for chatting with me today.
Ryan Gosling: No, thank you.
Iain De Caestecker: Thanks, man.
Saoirse Ronan: Lovely to see you again! Reunited, finally!
Ryan Gosling: Alright, Quint. We'll keep our eyes on you!
I'm not exactly sure why Ryan said he'd keep an eye on me as I left, but it probably has to do with me talking about murdering them all at the beginning of the interview. Wild guess.
Anyway, I have no idea how this thing reads, but it was a super relaxed and goofy chat. I adored it and hope some of you guys like it, too.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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