Ryan Gosling in “The Place Beyond the Pines.”
Ryan Gosling Rides Hard to Get to The Place Beyond the Pines
by Jay S. Jacobs
Even though Ryan Gosling is now one of the faces of young Hollywood, don’t tell him that. The guy doesn’t take stardom or gossip columns or “sexiest guy alive” stories seriously, he’s just an artist practicing his craft.
And a damned fine one, we’ve got to say. In the past decade Gosling has catapulted out of nowhere to film stardom. (Okay, not from nowhere, but I hardly think that he considers his time on the New Mickey Mouse Club with Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera as an important part of his résumé anymore.)
Instead, Gosling has shown uncanny taste in choosing films and a wonderful opportunity to balance quirky independent films like Half Nelson, Blue Valentine, Drive and Lars & the Real Girl with Hollywood studio fare like Crazy Stupid Love, The Ides of March and The Notebook.
Gosling’s latest reunites him with Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance. In The Place Beyond the Pines, Gosling plays Luke, a carny stunt motorcyclist. When passing through Schenectady, NY with his carnival, Luke runs into Romina (Eva Mendes), a gorgeous young waitress with whom he’d had a fling the year before.
When Luke finds out that their one-nighter has produced a baby named Jason, he decides to settle down and try to become a good father and boyfriend. However, stunt riding is not a very in-demand skill and in a desperate attempt to earn money to care for his new family, Luke makes an ill-conceived decision to try robbing banks.
A couple of weeks before The Place Beyond the Pines was released, Gosling met with PopEntertainment.com and a few other media outlets at the famous Waldorf-Astoria in New York to tell us about his experience on the film and fill us in a little on his career.
Had you ridden motorcycles before like you did in the movie?
Yes.
Are you used to it? Did they have to train you for stunt work?
Yeah. I did get a lot of training, because it was in the nature of the way Derek wanted to shoot the film. A lot of things were in one take. Especially, the bank robberies – he wanted them all to be shot all in one take. That meant riding from down the street in front of the bank, running in, robbing it and then the getaway. So I had to do more than I probably would have to do on a regular film. But the really cool stuff was done by Rick Miller. When Batman gets on a motorcycle, it is Rick in the bat-suit.
Were there any stunts that worried you while you were doing them?
Yeah. There were a couple. I wasn’t worried because I was working with a great stunt team and they had planned and choreographed everything very carefully. [But] there was one where I had to ride from like four blocks away, park in front of the bank, run in, rob it, get out, get on my bike and then drive into oncoming traffic and dodge a bunch of oncoming cars. That was quite something.
Click here to read the rest of the interview!
