Sundance 2010 Interview: Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine)

If you asked me at different times throughout the year what the highlight of 2010 was in cinema, for about eleven consecutive months I’d come back to the same answer. You see, since its premiere at the Eccles Theatre in Park City back in January of this year, Derek Cianfrance’s melancholic, hopeful and deeply affecting portrait and deconstruction of couple-hood carries my label as the most important film of 2010. We’ve waited almost an entire twelve months for Blue Valentine to receive its theatrical release, but that’s nothing compared to the twelve years Cianfrance put into this project.

We can credit Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams for bringing their A game and amplifying the swoon-like bliss and major discomforts by “living” and not “acting” the part, but it’s Cianfrance’s informed curiosity for the human condition and his psychoanalytic rhetoric in detailing the most mundane acts between members of the opposite sex that allow the pathos to grab hold of any viewer. In the interview below, you’ll grasp the filmmaker’s atypical work method and after having seen the film, you’ll have an idea of how a background in docu and commercial filmmaking might have contributed to a process that allowed for an implosion of the emotions that ring more true than any film in recent memory, and ultimately rendered a genderless POV. Simply put, we end the year with the best of the year.

The Weinstein Co. released Blue Valentine in theaters on December 29th, look for it over the coming weeks as it opens into several markets.