It was no la la land.
For Michelle Williams, living with Ryan Gosling while filming the 2010 drama “Blue Valentine” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“We shot the first part where they’re young and in love and everything is going really well and then we took a two-week break and we lived together. Office hours, baby, like, 9 to 5. Professional situation,” the actress, 44, said on Monday’s episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast.
“So we did these improvisations during the day to, honestly, find out ways to annoy each other and to destroy this thing that we had made.”
Williams revealed production didn’t want a break from filming but she and Gosling, 44, were “having such a hard time letting go of the thing we loved.”
The film’s director, Derek Cianfrance, would pop into the shared living space and leave them with a “scenario” in hopes of Williams and Gosling furthering their estrangement.
Williams reminisced on when Cianfrance, 51, would come back and say: “After you’ve had this frustrating day, now you’re going to go take your daughter to the amusement park and try and have a good time.”
As she put it, “It was fun.”
“Try selling that to a producer,” Williams teased about the freedom she and Gosling had to build out their characters and relationship.
The pair went as far as to burn their characters’ wedding photos.
“We learned how to annoy each other. It was horrible,” the “Dying for Sex” star recalled. “I don’t want to give you reasons to hate me. We were having such a good time. The party has to be over so soon?”
“You don’t have to hate me, because now I hate me,” she stated about how the tables turned during filming. “I’m annoying. We [were] calling forth all our worst qualities!”
“Blue Valentine” followed Cindy (Williams) and Dean (Gosling) as a couple whose relationship goes downhill after falling in love in their 20s.
Williams earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her portrayal of Cindy but ultimately lost to Natalie Portman in “Black Swan.”
Gosling, meanwhile, got candid about being fully immersed in the role back in 2010 while talking to NPR.
“During the month, we tried to dismantle this thing that we had been building,” the “Barbie” alum told “Fresh Air” contributor Dave Davies at the time. “[Originally,] we all worked really hard to create this love story portion, when they’re falling in love. We wanted it to feel genuine and real and true. And we spent all of this time building it up, and then we had to tear it down.”
Touching on just how realistic the actors got, Gosling confessed, “We also celebrated fake Christmas and put up Christmas trees, and baked birthday cakes and bought birthday presents, and went to Sears.”
“We fought all day, and then we’d have to take [our characters’ daughter] Faith to the family fun park … whatever we could do to create real memories, so when it came time to shoot the [last] part of the film, we were drawing on real memories.”
For “The Fall Guy” actor, making “Blue Valentine” was the first time he forgot he was in the middle of creating art.
“Most movies, you have to try and forget you’re making a movie, because there are trailers and booms and lights and marks, and it’s everywhere,” said Gosling. “And with this, you’re trying to remember that it is a movie, because it’s so easy to get lost in it.”
Although the film was muddled with controversy as it received an NC-17 rating at first – something that confused the Hollywood vet. The NC-17 means a movie is deemed too mature for children under 17 years old and is only suitable for adult audiences.
“I was very confused. It seems like I don’t really understand this rating system,” Gosling shared at the time. “I was told it’s because my character performs oral sex on his wife, and I thought, ‘There’s plenty of movies with men receiving oral sex from women with R ratings.’ It seemed like a double standard. On top of that, it seemed like there are horror movies that are like torture-porn that are R rated. What a lot of people don’t understand about the NC-17, which I didn’t understand, is that you can’t show it in major theater chains — and you can’t even air spots for your film on television. It really stigmatizes the movie.”
