Greg In Hollywood chats with director Derek Cianfrance whose “Blue Valentine” is out on DVD this week

When I met Derek Cianfrance, the writer-director of the acclaimed film Blue Valentine, I remarked that he resembled Ryan Gosling who stars in the film opposite Michelle Williams.

“Ryan thinks I look cool, he’s always trying to look like me – except he’s a little bigger,” Cianfrance said. “He’s like the movie star version of me.”

The film was released last year and is about a young couple that comes together and then falls apart. It hops between the beginning of Dean (Gosling) and Cindy’s (Williams) romance and then six years forward to show how their choices stifle their marriage.

Gosling and Williams were both nominated for Golden Globe Awards for their performances in Blue Valentine and Williams earned an Oscar nomination for best actress.

The film, which is out on DVD Tuesday, had long been a passion project for Cianfrance.

“I spent 12 years trying to get this film made, thinking about it, rewriting 66 drafts of the script, storyboarding 1,224 shots,” he explained. “I wrote a manifesto.”

Because he had poured heart and soul into the film, he was especially gratified that it was so critically acclaimed.

“I think anytime you dream of anything so much, you’re always walking a fine line between delusion and reality,” he said. “So it’s nice right now for me to know I wasn’t crazy, that the movie’s real, that people are buying tickets to go see it, that critics have responded to it for the most part.”

He had feared he might have been too prepared once filming finally began.

“The danger of working 12 years on something and writing 66 drafts is it’s too expected – you get on set the first day and it’s flat, it’s stale, it has no life to it. And I love movies that are living, breathing, that have great mistakes in them, that have stumbles and hiccups and everything of life. Two people can walk out of it and have totally different responses to it. I love a movie that’s alive like that. Just like a person, a being.”

But he had chosen the right stars in Gosling and Williams.

“Michelle and Ryan brought life to the film and they brought their vulnerability, their beauty, their bravery, their magic, their ugliness and they put it all up on that screen for people to see and I’m just in awe,” he sai. “It’s was an honor for me to see it, to be a part of it.”

It was his idea to have the two stars basically live together during part of the production: “Process is very important to me as a filmmaker. I’m interested in the intangibles of movie making. The first scene of Blue Valentine, Ryan wakes up in a Lazy Boy. How do you shoot that scene? The way I think you shoot it is you get Ryan drunk the night before, let him pass out in the Lazy Boy chair, have the camera set up around him and have the girl who’s playing his daughter crawl into the dog door at 5 a.m. and wake him up while the cameras are rolling and you get one take and that’s it. I have an allergy to fake moments in movies so I decided to build everything in Blue Valentine with these intangibles where the acting stops and the being begins.”

The film initially was given an NC-17 rating which would have hurt its commercial prospects. The rating was challenged and eventually changed to R.

“It was shocking,” he said of the NC-17 rating. “It was insulting and it was a compliment too because I felt like it spoke to the power of the film. We didn’t show anything in our film, we weren’t exploiting naked bodies. We got that rating for feelings, for the emotions people felt while watching it. In some ways I think that speaks to the power of the film. And anyway, thankfully I had such a good team behind me with Harvey Weinstein and such great support. I think it was the first time in history that the MPAA unanimously overturned one of their ratings and it started a debate in America: Why is violence okay and why is sex taboo?”