"Pines" Reaches Beyond the Script

The city of Schenectady, New York tells a tale of inheritance, or inheritance lost. Once the home to the General Electric Company, Schenectady, or in its translation from Mohawk, “the place beyond the pine plains,” is now a sleepy residential area whose peak of growth ended over a century ago. For director Derek Cianfrance of “Blue Valentine” fame, this made it the perfect location for his new feature film, “The Place Beyond The Pines.”

“It was a good place to talk about American legacy and how it doesn’t go away,” Cianfrance said in a press conference in New York City on March 10.

Spanning generations but remaining rooted in the eastern New York city, “Pines,” starring Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, and Ray Liotta, explores the sins handed down from father to son and the lengths to which future generations might go to fulfill or cast off those legacies. Family drama, crime, heist, action, and tragedy—all are incorporated into the three-part film and come together in what Cianfrance called a “Biblical story.”

Counter to what Gosling fans may be expecting, his character, stunt motorcyclist-cum-bank robber Luke Glanton, is only one of a number of pivotal players in the three-part tale, and he remains absent for a large part of the film. Glanton, as the plot’s catalyst, becomes a clear character foil for Cooper’s ambitious rookie cop Avery Cross, who is navigating a corrupt police department and fighting to come to terms with the choices he is forced to make in his job. Both men struggle with the women in their lives as well as with their infant sons. After their paths cross suddenly and violently, both families are altered forever, and the transition to the third part of the film—focused on the now-adolescent sons of Glanton and Cross—is made.

Despite all these heavily dramatic elements, the film is still meant to be realistic, which is why the actors and director truly tried to create an immersive reality for themselves by doing their best to actually become the characters they play in the movie. Cianfrance as well as the cast members cited the welcoming nature of Schenectady as a significant contributor to their ability to craft a believable, visceral reality for “Pines.”

“We wouldn’t have been able to make this movie anywhere else,” Cianfrance said. The city of Schenectady worked with the cast and crew—its police officers allowed actors to ride along with them, police stations and active high schools became set locations, and Gosling, playing Glanton, stormed into actual city banks.

The film’s tripartite structure brought a wide variety of genres into “Pines,” and that allowed Cianfrance to explore the tropes of those forms in a new light. “You have all the conventions of different sorts of movies,” Gosling said at the conference. “But [Cianfrance] has deconstructed them in a way that makes people experience [those conventions] in a different way.”

Cianfrance partially credited his ability to work with multiple genres at once to his own experience with other movies. “Everything I’ve ever seen, even movies I’ve hated, affect how I make movies,” he said. Meanwhile, his history with documentaries fostered his signature realistic style of filmmaking: members of the cast utilized different strategies in order to match that style. Mendes, who plays a struggling mother in “Pines,” worked in a Schenectady diner on her days off, while Gosling underwent an intense period of motorcycle training. Cianfrance was also notorious amongst his cast members for leaving many character decisions to the respective actors. Mendes was allowed to choose the actress who would play her on-screen mother, while Gosling chose the tattoos that would cover Luke Glanton’s body. Immediately regretting the decision to have a facial tattoo, Gosling found that the authentic sense of shame and embarrassment he felt contributed to his portrayal of the hyper-masculine yet tormented Glanton.

“My interpretation of what Derek does is [that] he creates real, visceral environments, just throws us in there, and sees what happens,” Dane DeHaan, who plays Glanton’s son in his teenage years, said. Cianfrance’s allowance for improvisation placed high amounts of pressure on his actors, but that pressure often yielded the best results. He claimed that he only expects two things from his actors. “I want them to surprise me, and I want them to fail,” Cianfrance said. That vulnerability was crucial to what the cast saw as the authenticity and effectiveness of the film, as well as something that helped bring the cast members together in a truly collaborative effort.

“It became a running joke, you know,” Mendes said, referring to Cianfrance’s on-set invocation of the ‘first pancake’ that never turns out well, but is always followed by superior creations. “He’d always say, ‘Okay, guys. Let’s make our first pancake.’”

—Staff writer Natalie T. Chang can be reached at nataliechang@college.harvard.