M.L. Stedman’s best-selling novel, “The Light Between Oceans,” sat atop a pile of prospective projects at the DreamWorks offices where director Derek Cianfrance was taking a meeting. The still young but distinctive writer-director had been searching for a follow-up to “The Place Beyond the Pines.” His brooding triptych of a drama starred Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper as men whose tragic intersection left complicated legacies for their sons, who meet when they are teens.
Gosling, looking a bit like Cianfrance’s doppleganger, had starred alongside Michelle Williams in the filmmaker’s 2010’s breakout, falling-out-of-love story about a crumbling marriage, “Blue Valentine.”
“By the time I finished ‘A Place Beyond the Pines,’ I was — honestly — sick of myself, sick of my own ideas. I was looking to do something, to adapt something,” Cianfrance said on the phone.
“’The Light Between Oceans,’ I thought, ’Well, this is kind of cinematic-sounding,’ ” said Cianfrance. “Itap about a lighthouse keeper. Whatap more cinematic than light being projected through a lens out into the darkness?’ ” I thought, ‘Let me read this one.’ ”
And so he did, avidly.
“I was on the C train going home to Brooklyn one night reading and I was crying on the subway,” he recalls. Born and raised in Lakewood, Cianfrance lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his filmmaker wife, Shannon Plumb, and their two sons. “Itap so embarrassing to cry in public. But I thought, ‘If anyone on that train was reading what I was reading, they’d be doing the same thing.’ I closed the book. I finished it. I went on the offensive to get the right to do it.”
“The Light Between Oceans” opens Friday nationwide. Michael Fassbender plays Tom Sherbourne, the World War I veteran who’s prepared to take on utter solitude as the temporary lighthouse keeper on a rocky, remote Australian island. The fictional Janus Rock lies between the Great Southern Sea and the Indian Ocean. His plans are scuttled when he meets Isabel Graysmark, who lives in Partageuse, the nearest town by boat.
War has touched her family, too. She lost two brothers. And a beautiful minuet of recognition and healing possibility begins. But a series of miscarriages rob them of their hoped-for bliss. Then, a dingy floats into view, carrying a dead man and a very-much-alive baby girl.
Recent Oscar winner Alicia Vikander is Isabel, whose dimming flame is reignited when the baby washes ashore. Itap hard to blame her loving husband for succumbing to her joy. (Who wouldn’t twist the rules to make her happy?) The impossibly gifted Rachel Weisz takes on the grief and later the righteousness of Hannah, widow and mother of the infant.
If “The Light Between Oceans” sounds old-fashioned, like a weepie from Hollywood’s Golden Era — complete with swelling score and glimmering stars — it is and it isn’t.
“As I read it, I had this experience that never happens. With every page I turned, I hoped it would continue to be true to me. I felt like it was dealing with all the same themes I was dealing with in my movies. Itap all about family and relationship and legacy and paternity and secrets,” he said. “Most important, it takes place on an island. As a kid, I always thought people lived on islands, that families were islands.”
Cianfrance, 42, grew up in Lakewood, attended Green Mountain High School and went to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he studied under two experimental film gurus, Phil Solomon and the late Stan Brakhage. Cianfrance’s parents, Gary and Janice, live in Colorado, as do older brother Jason and younger sister Megan.
“When people would come visit us, I thought we would act differently. We’d act like the charming versions of ourselves. And when people left, we’d go back to being real again. And I felt that when I went to friends’ houses, it was the same deal. That kind of feeling made me want to make movies about families, because I always thought families were places where great secrets were kept. And families were so intimate and cinematic and that was kind of my mission, my life’s mission as a filmmaker, to put families up on screen.”
Of course, no family is an island, and when Tom, Isabel and baby Lucy travel to town and Tom sees Hannah, things get complicated in a hurry. How could they not?
“These characters felt like people I’d known in my life,” says Cianfance of Stedman’s entangled trio. “And I’d always tried to make movies about people who aren’t necessarily good or bad. They’re just people, and they make bad decisions sometimes. And those decisions are usually made with good intentions. And sometimes those good intentions hurt other people.”
“The Light Between Oceans” is shot through with questions about doing the right thing and honoring love, both marital and parental. When Tom agrees with Isabel not to notify the authorities about the dingy, and they begin raising the baby girl as their own, the die is cast. There is no way (contrary to our hopes) this decision won’t become heart-wrenching at some point.
Cianfrance admits he remains obsessed with choices and consequences. “What I love about Stedman’s writing was she never judged anybody. And then I come to find out Margot (Stedman) was a lawyer. It made perfect sense to me that a lawyer was able to empathize with all sides, or all sides of a situation. Those things became the points of truth for me when I was writing.”
Still, he says, once he’s on the location, he wants even the surest writing to give way to something differently true.
“Once I get to the set and start to work with my actors, I’m still disappointed when they say the lines on the page. There’s nothing I hate worse than watching a movie and seeing the script. What was really important to me was this kind of quest for truth everyday we were shooting, this need to find where the story stops and life begins, where acting stops and being begins.”
Small wonder, perhaps, that “A Place Beyond the Pines” and now this latest film have led to two couples falling in love: Gosling and co-star Eva Mendes and Fassbender and Vikander.
Early in the shoot, while Fassbender, Vikander, Cianfrance and the crew made their makeshift home on the rugged peninsula standing in for Janus Rock, Fassbender found himself cleaning the lights of the lighthouse, rustling his own breakfast, even milking goats.
“After the third day of shooting, Michael asked my costume designer, ‘What have we been doing? When are we going to start making the movie?,’ ” Cianfrance laughs.
“Eventually he came to find out, thatap how we make the movies. We live them.”
