Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world. You're just trying to make a love letter, a gift.
Derek CianfranceIt happens sometimes that when someone has a camera, they change; sometimes they change for the better.
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 CianfranceYeah as the director I consider myself to be the coach, and my actors are my players. So I have to show them how committed I am, but I also want to lead by example. I think whenever you make a film, you start out alone, and then slowly start - you have to be a magnet. You have to attract people to you, to the project.
Derek CianfranceI feel like the job in editing is to let the movie tell you what it is. It's like sculpture. You just start taking away, you add a nose here, you cut off like the side of the cheek over here in the crease and you have a face. But it really reveals to you what it means to be over time, and if you have enough time.
Derek CianfranceI tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.
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 Cianfrance