I 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 CianfranceSidney Lumet is one of my favorite filmmakers. I feel like his approach to filmmaking was always so human. He was always making movies about the people. He wasn't about the tricks, you know what I mean? From 12 Angry Men on. Another film of his which I really, really love is Prince of the City, with Treat Williams, which is kind of a lost classic. Lumet is one of those film heroes that changed movies for everyone.
Derek CianfranceI'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 CianfranceI've had to cut my mom out of a movie before - it's ruthless, editing. But it's also so necessary; because once you start taking away, it's like sculpture, you can really start feeling the shape of the whole.
Derek Cianfrance