I'm so sick of seeing guns in movies, and all this violence; and if there was going to be violence in Pines, I wanted it to actually be narrative violence. I wasn't interested in fetishizing violence in any way of making it feel cool or slow-motion violence. I wanted it to be just violence that affected the story.
Derek CianfranceThere's something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that's what I'm trying to do in my films-control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life.
Derek CianfranceYou can never maintain just pure happiness. In my life, I want full emotion. I want equal parts happiness and sadness.
Derek CianfranceI love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro Gonzรกlez Iรฑรกrritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down.
Derek Cianfrance