Hearts of darkness

‘Blue Valentine’ is currently playing in Philadelphia and New York. Info: www.bluevalentinemovie.com

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling are the stars of the intense love/hate story “Blue Valentine,” but the third character in the drama is Northeastern Pa., the setting for some of the movie’s most lovely and devastatingly sad moments.

Told in scenes from the past and the present, “Blue Valentine” maps a love affair from its enchanted beginning to its bitter end. Williams plays Cindy, a Scranton nursing student who is in the last throes of a relationship with her high-school boyfriend (Mike Vogel) when she crosses paths with the Brooklyn-based Dean (Gosling).

Sparks fly and love is kindled. But director Derek Cianfrance juxtaposes playful scenes of the couple’s courtship with glimpses of Dean and Cindy six years later, when their now-broken relationship seems beyond repair.

Although shooting in Scranton and surrounding areas was a last-minute decision on Cianfrance’s part, he has no regrets about setting so much of the action in Northeastern Pa.

“Scranton is one of my favorite places,” he says. “It’s an intensely cinematic city. So warm and welcoming. And the town has so much soul. There were a lot of ghosts, a lot of history. Shooting there was one of the best decisions I made.”

Cianfrance hatched the idea for “Blue Valentine” more than a decade ago. Six years into the writing process, the screenplay landed on Williams’ desk just as she was finishing up her run as bad girl Jen Lindley on “Dawson’s Creek.”

Instantly, the actress was intrigued by the story, which she deemed less a portrait of a marriage on the rocks than a whodunit that sets out to solve the mystery of love found and lost.

“At the beginning, somebody’s murdered this couple’s love,” muses Williams. “Who’s to blame? There’s all these clues in the movie. Is it him? Is it her? Is it their kid? Is it their parents? Is it economics?

“Remember The Supremes’ song, ‘Where Did Our Love Go’? That’s the question of this movie. So, you have to try and play detective in order to put the pieces together and solve the mystery.”

So enthusiastic was Williams about the screenplay that she began preparing for her first meeting with Cianfrance by listening to Iron and Wine CDs and poring over poetry by Galway Kinnell.

Cianfrance was impressed by Williams’ commitment as well as her insights into the script. “We had an instantaneous dialogue about the movie,” he recalls. “She brought me these CDs and a book of poems, and I knew she had a passion for ‘Blue Valentine.’”

But, unfortunately for Cianfrance, it was 2003, a few years before Williams’ breakthrough in “Brokeback Mountain.” The filmmaker couldn’t raise financing for “Blue Valentine” on Williams’ name alone. “I met with other actors,” he recalls. “But they paled in comparison to Michelle. … She contributed so much to the screenplay, I think of her as a collaborator.”

Finally, six years later, with Williams and costar Gosling on board, “Blue Valentine” went before the cameras in Brooklyn, Scranton and King of Prussia (the latter for a lengthy hotel room sequence).

A LABOR OF LOVE

Last January, the movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it netted positive buzz and sold to the Weinstein Company for $1 million dollars. Initially, the film was assigned an NC-17 rating (apparently for an explicit though hardly pornographic oral sex scene). But, after an appeal, the rating was changed to the more box-office friendly R.

In limited release, “Blue Valentine” has earned mostly positive reviews and garnered Best Actor and Best Actress Golden Globe nominations for its stars. The film did not win during Sunday night’s ceremony.

Williams ranks the film (which doesn’t yet have a run date in Northeastern Pa.) among the most challenging of her career thanks to Cianfrance’s freewheeling attitude toward his screenplay.

“It’s funny, because I’d been wanting to make this movie since I read it six years ago because I loved the script,” says Williams, 30. “I loved the words and the story.

“And then I show up to set for the first day of work, and Derek says to me, ‘I wrote that script 12 years ago, that script is dead, and if you say any of those words you’re going to bore me, so go out there and surprise me,’ I was aghast. I was, like, ‘But I’m here because of the script.’

“I do not like to improvise. I’ve never improvised before. I’ve been secretly terrified of it my whole life, having done everything I could to avoid it. So here I found myself in the situation where I had absolutely no choice but to go forward bravely.”

Even though Williams and Gosling hadn’t known each other before the film began shooting, they developed a bond almost instantly.

“I’ve never had this kind of a connection with another actor before,” says Gosling. “I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I knew Michelle was onboard and preparing for the role for six years, and I was preparing for my role for four and Derek had been trying to make this film for 12 years. … We proved ourselves to each other before we even started.”

Cianfrance set out to keep things fresh for his actors by constantly asking them to shock each other. For one of the movie’s most lovely, falling-in-love scenes (shot on Main Street in Honesdale), Gosling takes out a ukulele and croons a tune for Williams. She reciprocates with an impromptu tap dance. Neither actor knew what the other had planned for the moment.

“It was such a relief (to work this way),” says Gosling. “You’re always trying to pretend you don’t know what’s going to happen next when you’re an actor. This was nice.”

Cianfrance credits Honesdale merchants with helping the crucial scene come alive. “We couldn’t afford a lighting truck, so every store owner on that block turned on their lights for us,” notes the filmmaker. “I couldn’t have done it without them.”

A METHOD TO THE MOVIE

At Cianfrance’s urging, “Blue Valentine” followed a unique shooting schedule. The courtship scenes were shot first, and then the director asked his cast to hole up together in a house in Carbondale for a month. When 30 days had elapsed — and his cast members had gained 10 pounds — he was ready to shoot the gritty, falling-out-of-love scenes.

Williams says the raw, emotionally charged fight scenes were the most difficult to shoot. “When you’re discovering love, that’s a thrill,” she says. “That certainly felt better than hating each other, fighting, getting everything wrong, not being able to say the right thing, having the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you see the person enter the room.

“To be honest, I didn’t want to make the present parts of the movie. I think I actually legitimately petitioned Derek and said, ‘Can we please not? We have a lot of footage here. Lets just make a movie and call it ‘Valentine.’

“I just wanted to stay in the happy part of the movie because (my character) is so happy and free and liberated. I didn’t want to burn it down. I didn’t want to go there because I know there. I know there. I’ve been there. I don’t want to go there.”

Williams refuses to specify which relationship she’s talking about, but before the movie began shooting, she’d split up with partner Heath Ledger, with whom she has a 5-year-old daughter named Matilda. In fact, it was Ledger’s sudden death in 2008 which prompted Cainfrance to move the film’s location to Scranton (within driving distance of Williams’ New York home) rather than Morro Bay, Calif.

“I took a compass and … literally put one point of the compass on her house, and I drew a circle, an hour diameter around her house, and it just touched Scranton, Pennsylvania,” recalls Cianfrance. “So the next day I drove to Scranton … and we said, ‘We’re shooting here.’”

Over the course of the month Gosling and Williams spent in Pennsylvania, they made a home together, only to destroy it.

“Derek drove us up to the house (in Carbondale) and told us it was a blank canvas,” she says. “He told us to make it a home, decorate it, take care of it, do the dishes, grocery shop, take out the trash. … So we made a house a home.

“But that house was also where we learned how to fight, to hate each other. We learned how to disintegrate and destroy. We did in a month what it took these characters six years to do.

“I’m just thinking about that house now and … I feel like it’s a place that I’ve lived. I would include that in my stops through life, like, ‘Oh, yeah, I lived outside of Scranton for a couple of months.’”

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