After taking a yearlong hiatus from making movies to spend time with her daughter, it took a film like "Blue Valentine" to get Michelle Williams acting once more.
“Making this movie got me excited again," she said. "It lit a little fire inside of me, and it got my mind turning again, and that hasn’t stopped. And I’ve been very excited to be back at work."
At an event for The New York Times Arts and Leisure Weekend yesterday, Williams revealed that "Blue Valentine" had been on her mind for ten years -- ever since she first talked about it with its director, Derek Cianfrance, during a long walk through lower Manhattan.
“Almost a third of my life has been spent thinking about making this movie, wanting to make this movie, making this movie, talking about making this movie,” she said.
Williams said that she instantly felt a connection to the script.
“I read it and it became the lens that I saw the whole world through,” she said. “I fell for it. I fell in love with it.”
While Williams had long been attached to the relationship drama, her co-star, Ryan Gosling, signed on at a much later stage.
“I ran into him once, and he said, ‘How ‘bout that movie, 'Blue Valentine,'’” she recalled. “[I was shocked] because I thought that I was starting to hallucinate, I thought that 'Blue Valentine' was like, a fantasy world that existed in my head. I’d never had a conversation with anybody else about it. But when he said that to me, I knew that I was onto something, because of the actor that he is and the choices that he’s made.”
Williams recalled being “spoiled” by the “unorthodox approach” that Cianfrance took to making the film. As part of the rehearsal process, she and Gosling spent a month living together in a house in rural Pennsylvania, in order to “make memories” they could draw upon while filming.
“We did everything that a couple with a child does together—except for the nighttime stuff,” she said.
