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| Posted: Ryan Gosling on what it was like going to The Place Beyond The Pines. It got a little out of control," Ryan Gosling says about the abundant tattooage he's sporting in The Place Beyond The Pines. A top hat, a Bible, an owl, twin boxers, a snake, a three-masted schooner, letters on his knuckles: H-A-N-D on one hand, S-O-M-E on the other. And on his face, just beneath his left eye, a dagger with a drop of blood. "The idea was to create this portrait of someone that was basically like a melting pot of masculine cliches," says the actor, whose character, Luke, is a stunt motorcyclist in a travelling carnival. He rolls into Schenectady, New York, and discovers that he's fathered a child with a diner waitress (Eva Mendes) he'd met the previous year, and then decides he's going to be a real dad, settle down, raise the kid. Which requires money. Which requires robbing banks. "Tattoos, motorcycles, muscles, knives, guns – he's this surface idea of what a man is," Gosling explains. "And then, when he's presented with his child, it's like a mirror is held up to him, and he realises that he's not a man at all." The Place Beyond The Pines, an epic undertaking in three parts – Bradley Cooper takes the baton from Gosling for the middle section – is directed by Derek Cianfrance, who guided Gosling and Michelle Williams through the romantic crash-up Blue Valentine. In Pines, Gosling, his hair peroxide blonde, rides a motorcycle like a demon. He trained with Rick Miller, the Hollywood stunt cyclist. "He's the best motorcycle man in the business," the actor says. "You know, when Batman rides a motorcycle, it's Rick Miller in the suit." But when Luke rides a motorcycle in Pines, it's Gosling in the torn T-shirt and jeans. One drive-up/stick-up/getaway sequence was filmed 22 times, with Gosling revving his custom machine down main streets and back alleys, weaving between trucks and cars. "Derek has very unrealistic expectations of what is humanly possible," Gosling, on the phone from New York, says with a laugh. "He thought, 'Oh, we'll shoot these bank robberies in one take.' Which I guess sounds easy, but then you realise that that means that someone is going to have to ride a motorcycle for four blocks, pull up in front of the bank, get off, run inside, rob the bank, come out and then have an effective getaway with all these elaborately choreographed near-misses with oncoming traffic – all in one seven-minute take. "It's amazing, because when you watch the film, it just feels like you're watching Cops. ... And yet, the work that Derek had to put in in order to make it feel that effortless was just so extreme ... "To me, this film is like the directorial equivalent of robbing a bank." Gosling, 32, has been performing for the better part of his life – Disney's Mickey Mouse Club when he was 12, Goosebumps and Young Hercules when he was a teen, and then, in his early 20s, a complete 180° – a jolting turn as an Orthodox Jew turned neo-Nazi in True Believer. The megahit, mega-mush romance The Notebook followed – Gosling and fellow Canadian Rachel McAdams tapping the sap like maple trees. And then Half Nelson, in which he played a blazing-smart and blazingly messed-up junior high history teacher and crackhead. That one got him a Best Actor Oscar nomination. In Lars And The Real Girl, he's got the title role – a guy who falls in love with a life-size sex doll. Since making The Place Beyond The Pines, Gosling has re-teamed with his Driver director, Nicolas Winding Refn, for a Thai boxing crime pic, Only God Forgives. There's also an untitled Terrence Malick project that Gosling shot with the suddenly prolific Texas auteur. Christian Bale, Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara also star. – The Philadelphia Inquirer/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
| Posted: Gravity gets lift at Comic Con as director Alfonso Cuaron leaps into space. Among the monster movies and fantasy films showcased at last week's San Diego Comic Con, the space thriller Gravity stood out from the field with its different setting and two-person cast, as Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron took a leap into space with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Cuaron, 51, teamed up with son Jonas Cuaron, 30, to construct a nail-biter set in space, as two astronauts played by Bullock and Clooney become trapped in a space station after debris rips through their vessel. "The whole film becomes a metaphor for something very grounded on Earth, so you don't need to be an astronaut to identify with that. The big villain in the film is space debris, and that space debris becomes a metaphor for adversities," Cuaron told Reuters. In a Gravity clip shown exclusively to the Comic Con audience, Clooney and Bullock are seen on a space walk with Earth in the background. Suddenly, they lose contact with ground control and are forced to try to take cover from high-velocity space debris. The Warner Bros film opens in US theatres on Oct 4. Cuaron said he and his son were inspired by the Kessler syndrome, which predicts that a chain reaction of space junk hitting each other would produce so much orbiting debris that space flight would become too risky. Jonas co-wrote the script with his father, who built a career outside Mexico with films like Children Of Men and Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. "I think if anybody sees my other films and then sees Gravity, it's a big leap," said Alfonso Cuaron, who said Jonas convinced him to rely less on dialogue and more on emotion and action. "That was very refreshing for me, it's connecting with a younger, fresher sensibility," the director added. Bullock goes for androgyny The biggest challenge, Jonas said, was creating the illusion of dealing with zero gravity and they were eager to stay true to real-life scenarios. "Space was a great setting, because in space, we as humans are definitely not meant to be there," Jonas said. "There's no oxygen, there's no air pressure, temperatures fluctuate, so it's a situation where at any moment, anything could go wrong." At a Warner Bros panel at the convention, Bullock gave the audience of 6,000 a glimpse of how she prepared to play astronaut Dr Ryan Stone. "I wanted her to look almost androgynous in a way, because she had experienced such loss in life ... I wanted her to have a body of someone who didn't want to remind herself of what she lost, almost like a robot," the actress said. Cuaron said this is one of Bullock's most "raw and emotionally honest" performances, and that audiences more familiar with her comedy roles in films such as Miss Congeniality and last month's The Heat would be surprised. "Sandra knew she was going to be so exposed being alone for such long periods of time in the film, that she would be emotionally so exposed. I found that she was very courageous about it," the director said. — Reuters |
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