An interview with Drive star Ryan Gosling

This interview appears in the September 2011 issue of Empire magazine...

Ryan Gosling, wearing a grey, striped wife-beater in the full glare of the Cannes sun, traces some of the myriad inky blobs on his left arm. “That's my mother and my sister,” he drawls, “that's a werewolf dropping a bloody heart and that's a ghost lady visiting her own skeleton.” It's hard to believe that almost 20 years ago, this pumped, tattooed, very much in-demand Canadian-born actor was a wholesome Mouseketeer, singing and dancing for the Disney show that once featured soon-to-be-teen idols Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, JC Chasez (whoever that is) and Justin Timberlake. He still has that innocent spark, but, as his performance in the blood-soaked LA noir Drive so vividly shows, Gosling has a dark side; darker than anything he's chosen to show us so far.

Which is certainly saying something. In his ten-year reign as an indie superstar, the 30-year-old has played a Jewish neo-Nazi (The Believer, 2001), a crack-addicted high-school teacher (Half Nelson, 2005) and a man in love with a blow-up sex doll (Lars And The Real Girl, 2006). But in Nicolas Winding Refn's brutal, brilliant pulp thriller, he plays a taciturn avenger – stuntman by day and getaway driver by night – who falls for his pretty neighbour (Carey Mulligan) and is moved to protect her when her jailbird husband gets out of chokey, bringing trouble with him. Shotguns blast into torsos and faces; hammers, knives (and forks) make mincemeat of quivering flesh; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a human head is kicked to a bloody, squishy pulp, making this perhaps one that certain fans of Gosling's from the 2004 chick-flick The Notebook may prefer to sit out.

It's an interesting choice for an actor who, until now, has tended to alternate intimate, auteur pieces with more commercial genre fare. “But after making Drive,” he says, “I realise they're not mutually exclusive.” Originally planned as a vehicle for Hugh Jackman, to be directed by Britain's Neil Marshall, the script for Drive, based on James Sallis' taut novel, landed in his lap with an assurance from producer Marc Platt that he had carte blanche to recruit his helmer. “This is the first time I was ever given a script and told, 'You can pick your director,'” Gosling marvels. And his somewhat leftfield choice was Denmark's Refn, whose violent, tripnotic Viking saga Valhalla Rising the actor had recently seen. “So I met him in a restaurant – and he ignored me for two hours.”

What Gosling didn't then know was that Refn had the flu. “He was acting bored and disinterested. Just making noises – y'know, like, 'Ummm' – which is not an answer. He didn't eat, he didn't drink, he didn't wanna talk, he just wanted to go home. So I said, 'I'll take you home.' Which was another hour and a half out of my day. I'm thinking, How could I have been so wrong?! It was quiet in the car, so I turned up the radio to kill the silence. Suddenly REO Speedwagon comes on – Can't Fight This Feeling – and Nicolas... I look over and he's crying. And he's singing along, he's banging his knees. And he looks at me and says, 'This is the movie. It's about a man who drives around, listening to pop music at night because it's the only way he can feel.'”

Gosling laughs. “And so the movie became about driving. Not about stunts and not about crashes. It became about the spell that being in a car puts you in. You start somewhere, and then you get to your destination and you don't remember how you got there.”

Intermission.

Drive is a very different beast to the film that had everyone talking about Gosling last year: the intense, talky end-of-a-marriage drama Blue Valentine, directed by Gosling doppelganger Derek Cianfrance and co-starring Michelle Williams. Though it was shot in a month, Blue Valentine took up over ten years of Gosling's life and, much as he loved it, he needed a change of pace, asking Refn if there was any way he could have less to say. “So we took out a lot of the dialogue,” he says, “and it was such a relief. I basically had to put my trust in Nic; I had to trust that he was going to tell the story and I wouldn't have to. All I had to do was drive.”

Gosling was asked to choose his wheels, and, knowing nothing about cars, picked a '73 Chevy Malibu that cost $2,000 from a junkyard. “And I rebuilt it.” he grins. “I did everything on the car except the transmission.” Then there was the stunt training. “That was the best time ever. You show up at a church parking lot that's abandoned and there's a brand new Camara and a brand-new Mustang sitting there. And you get in your car and you drive it until it won't drive any more – till it's smoking or it's on fire. Then you get out and a tow-truck takes it away.”

Stunt training started with learning how to do a 90, which involves slamming on the brakes, locking the back wheels and swinging the steering wheel so that the car swings to a dramatic halt at 90 degrees to its original trajectory. “The driving part was so much fun,” he recalls, somewhat wistfully, “and such a a bad habit to get into – because you can't do it anywhere!!!”

Is this kind of attention to detail important? Did he really need to rebuild a car from scratch? Or, in the case of Blue Valentine, spend ten years waiting to be a drunken blue-collar husband?

“It is,” he replies, “but it depends on the film. For instance, I don't know how much preparation actually makes its ways in obvious ways into a film. Fuck, I mean, someone else could have built a '73 Chevy Malibu and you'd never know the difference. My character never has to talk about cars or do anything underneath a car, so it doesn't really matter. But it felt important to me. And with every character you play, you have to find a way in. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes you can't really find the thing you need. But it's important to me.”

Does that explain the toothpick that the driver always has in the corner of his mouth as he drives through the neon-drenched streets of LA? “It was an amalgamation of things, really. He felt to me like a guy who'd seen too many movies and done stunts for all these action heroes. In reality, he's the hero, he's the one doing the stunts, so he's a product of all the movies he's seen.”

Gosling delivers this with a smile, in a bass-rich growl that barely raises itself about the sound of the sea lapping on the sand nearby. He's certainly serious but nowhere near as intimidating as his reputation might suggest, leading Empire to ask him if he's found that directors are scared of him. “I have encountered that,” he nods. “But I think that's why I'm interested in working with some of the same people, working with Derek and working with Nic. We get each other. It's hard when you don't know a director. You spend half the movie just trying to develop a dialogue with them, and you lose a lot of opportunities to make something great because there's a miscommunication between you, or something's off. I'd be happy just to make movies with Nic and Derek.”

The next planned collaboration with Refn is on a Warner Bros-backed remake of kitsch 70s sci-fi classic Logan's Run, a dystopian-future thriller in which human life must end at 30. “Yeah,” says Gosling, “we're working on it. It's like the reverse of Drive in many ways.” He smiles enigmatically. “He has a vision of it. I'd never seen the film when he first mentioned it, but we were talking about some of the ideas and... Well, I don't know how it's gonna work out, because it's still so early in the process. But it will be interesting to see him working with a big studio.”

Logan's Run isn't likely to materialise much before 2014, since Refn, almost exactly ten years Gosling's senior, is about to head to Thailand to make the crime drama Only God Forgives. But, after a period of working very sparingly, Gosling has a whole slew of different movies in the pipeline. Does he like to work a lot? Or does prefer to take his time? “I used to,” he muses, “but then I made a lot of movies recently. I guess I hit 30. I did a comedy with Steve Carell called Crazy Stupid Love and The Ides Of March, with George Clooney, Phil Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright – lots of great actors. I'm going to do A Place Behind The Pines, which is with Derek, and that's a movie about a bank robbery... And after that I'm going to do a gangster picture called The Gangster Squad, in which Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen.”

Though he has no immediate plans to do so, Gosling says that directing a film himself is definitely on the cards (“For me, it just feels like it's the right time”), so does he set himself goals? “Not really. I think now that I'm 30 I'm more comfortable. Maybe it's because I'm playing characters that are older, so it's easier to find good material. But I also have more control, I think.”

And how about becoming an action star? “It's funny, the first thing Nicolas ever said to me is, 'Violence is art,'” he says. “At the time, I wasn't really watching a lot of violent films, but I've started now.” He laughs. “I've realised that I like blood.”