Director Derek Cianfrance on writing the father son relationship in The Place Beyond the Pines
Derek Cianfrance talks about his new film with Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper and Eva Mendes, called The Place Beyond the Pines.
Derek Cianfrance: Yeah, this film to me is about legacy. I started writing it in 2007 when my wife was pregnant with our second son. And I was thinking about everything that I was born with and everything that I was gonna pass on to my child. And just really wanting him to be put into this world clean, you know. Be able to carve his own path. Make his own decisions. And, you know, twenty years prior to that I had seen Abel Gance' Napoleon, which ends in this great triptych, you know. An amazing movie. The last bit of it is this great triptych. So I always wanted make a triptych movie. I wanted to make a movie that had these kind of baton passes in it. And then I'd seen Psycho about 20 years ago too. And I'd always known that there was this shower scene in Psycho. I just never knew that you had to spent 45 minutes with Janet Leigh before she went into the shower. So I was thinking structurally for like twenty years. And then I had these kids of my own and I started thinking about that baton pass from my father's fire to me. My fire to my kids. It then all became clear pretty quickly what the movie was.
