Written Interview: Derek Cianfrance

An excellent Q&A conducted by Indiewire’s Anne Thompson with writer-director Derek Cianfrance about his latest movie The Place Beyond the Pines.

Anne Thompson: You employ an unusual screenplay structure; like Alfred Hitchcock you kill off main characters. You seem to be ignoring the rules.

Derek Cianfrance: You have to be taught the rules in order to break them. In terms of screenwriting I never took classes, never learned how to write. I became a writer out of necessity. I wanted to tell stories on film. My only guiding principle was to tell things that feel personal, exposing, almost like a diary. That was the only way. My starting point as screenwriter is to go to places that scare me. I came up with the idea about becoming a parent, which is very personal for me, after becoming a father for the second time. All my fears of being a parent went into this movie.

Why the three parts?

I always dreamed of making a triptych movie. I knew about “Psycho” with its shower scene midway, but it seemed like you had to wait 45 minutes to follow Janet Leigh until the baton pass to Tony Perkins. That stuck with me. I remember watching Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” at 19 or 20 with its ending triptych. I wanted to make a tryptych movie, I had this structural baton pass playing in my head, but I never had a story to tell until my wife was pregnant with our second son. I was thinking a lot about pregnancy and legacy, passing on, the consequences of the whole movie became clear to me. I didn’t question it, I went with my instincts on it. I didn’t ask permission.

I wanted to see if I could do it or not. I met with Ben Coccio who had done “Zero Dark Thirty,” he was turned on by it. We were both huge fans of “The Wire” at the time. We looked at adaptations of books to movies. They usually don’t work because it’s impossible to fit that much into a movie. Short stories are better, like “Brokeback Mountain,” that works. The beautiful thing about TV and “The Wire” is it felt like a novel, it had huge scope. I wanted to figure out a way to make a movie that had that kind of scope. The original script was 160 pages long, written with an intermission, and a title card “15 years later.” The idea would be to go out for popcorn, go to the bathroom, get a drink and come back and 15 years would have passed. Of course we couldn’t in the marketplace.

I was an audience member before I’m a filmmaker. All I’ve tried to do as a filmmaker was to make movies I want to see. I had this burning desire to make a three part triptych movie, because I wanted to see it.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

Comment Archive