Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams lived together for Blue Valentine ( Photo Credit – Prime Video )
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Director Derek Cianfrance took it to the next level, telling Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling to move in together for a month in the same house where their characters lived. Yeah, you heard that right. They spent a whole month playing house, doing the everyday stuff—except it wasn’t just pretend. It was about making their broken marriage feel as accurate as possible.
The movie charts the rise and fall of a relationship, and Cianfrance split the shoot into three parts. First, the love. Then came the chaos. And in between, he told Williams and Gosling to move in together (with the young actress who played their daughter). The catch? They had to live in the same house where their characters lived. During the day, they played house—shopping for groceries, decorating for fake holidays, and even baking birthday cakes. At night, though, Williams would head home to her daughter, Matilda. But during those long, intimate days, they had to tear down the love they had built.
“It was hard,” Gosling said, “We spent so much time building up their love story, then we had to tear it down.” Cianfrance even had them destroy their characters’ wedding photos to bring their marriage’s collapse to life. They dunked them in kerosene and set them on fire. Talk about method acting.
But it wasn’t just about the drama. “We fought all day, and then we’d have to take [our character’s daughter] Faith to the family fun park,” Gosling explained. “We did whatever we could to create real memories so when it came time to shoot the final scenes, they’d feel authentic.”
Blue Valentine was a unique project. Gosling described it as the first movie in which he had forgotten that he was even acting. “It was so easy to get lost in it,” he said. Unlike most films, where you’re constantly reminded of the set, lights, and booms, Blue Valentine felt like life happening in front of the camera.
The difference between shooting the past and present portions of the film was clear. The love scenes were filmed on film—in a single take, with no do-overs, giving everything that magical, romantic energy. When the couple was no longer in love, it was all about digital. The clinical, surveillance-like feel of digital made the tension even more palpable, and they were shot in single frames, sometimes doing 50 takes of a scene. One scene took two days to film—all in a shower. Talk about exposure.
The movie’s raw, realistic approach even got it into hot water with the MPAA, who initially rated it NC-17 due to an explicit scene. Gosling couldn’t help but point out the double standard: “There are movies with men receiving oral sex, and they get an R rating… it just seemed like a double standard.”
As if Blue Valentine wasn’t enough of an emotional rollercoaster, Gosling’s past in The Mickey Mouse Club added an interesting twist to his career journey. He shared that while the other kids, like Christina Aguilera, were destined for stardom, he realized his true calling wasn’t on the stage. But the time spent in Disney World left an impression on him. “I wanted to be someone who believed in their ideas that much,” he reflected.
And with Blue Valentine, that belief was apparent: a love story so real, it needed to be lived before it could be captured.
