Life is only on Earth, and not for long.

in conversation.: if you haven’t read the liner note in the blue valentine soundtrack,...

if you haven’t read the liner note in the blue valentine soundtrack, you should.

pieces:

“making a movie is like making a mix tape. it’s an intimate gift. and it’s all about taste. some of the best gifts i have ever received were mix tapes, and as a giver, i never put more love and thought into a gift than i did when i made someone a mix tape … now days, i’ll get a playlist from a friend, or maybe make someone a mix cd, which they will then shuffle into their music library, and the flow, the mystique, the romance is all but lost. sounds nostalgic, i realize but i miss the days of the mix tape.”

“sometimes on set the actors and i would pile into a car and blast a grizzly bear song to put us in the mood of the movie. it became our cinematic landscape - the sound of the world.

of course, the characters in the movie don’t really listen to grizzly bear. they had to have their own taste in music. their own mix tapes. and so, i let the actors pick some of their own music, just like a friend would. for instance, there was a scene where dean had to give cindy a song - “our own song.” i had a bunch of ideas for what that song could be, but i didn’t feel it was right for me to give ryan a song to give to michelle. and so i gave him a challenge and let him pick out a song for her. ryan has great taste, and the song he picked out was you and me by penny and the quarters. and i thought it was just great. so i told ryan to keep the song as a secret, and never share it with michelle until we were shooting. so the day came to shoot the scene, ryan had the song in his back pocket, and we captured the real moment where one person gives another person the gift of music. the gift, because it came from ryan, was personal. michelle was touched, deeply, by it. what happens on the screen is a real, living and breathing, intimate moment.”

- derek cianfrance

(via phloxkavalier-deactivated201201)