‘Blue Valentine’ Production Was ‘Cursed,’ Says Derek Cianfrance

The intensely poetic dark passion behind “Blue Valentine” seeped into even its road to the big screen, according to writer/director Derek Cianfrance.

During IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” live at the New Directors/New Films festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, Cianfrance told podcast co-hosts Ryan Lattanzio and Anne Thompson that he believed the project itself was “cursed” for more than a decade due to its stalled production process. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams eventually were cast as an ill-fated married couple struggling to maintain their love across years together.

Cianfrance began writing the script for the Oscar-nominated feature while at Sundance 1998 after the premiere of his debut film “Brother Tied.” It took him 12 years and 66 script drafts until “Blue Valentine” was finally released in 2010.

“For ‘Blue Valentine,’ I spent so many years [on it]. People said, ‘Just make the movie,’” Cianfrance said. “For me on that movie, I had to shoot it half on film and half of that movie digitally because that was part of what I was dealing with in that film. It was a duet between love and hate, between husband and wife, and it was also between film and digital. So I needed a certain budget to shoot film on that.”

Cianfrance first believed that he would go into production on “Blue Valentine” immediately following his Sundance debut. Yet he quickly learned about the “