Ryan Gosling took on what is literally a dream role for The Place Among the Pines.
In the new film, he plays a stunt motorcycle rider who robs banks on the side.
“I’ve always had this fantasy about robbing banks, but I’m scared of jail so I won’t do it,” Gosling confessed to Celebuzz.
The actor says he’d imagined himself executing the crimes on the back of a motorcycle, as he does in the movie, then escaping into the back of a U-Haul and driving off undetected. His fantasy isn’t unheard of: “It turned out there’s this Israeli guy that did it and and got away with like 50 bank robberies,” Gosling said.
That’s not the only coincidence surrounding Gosling and The Place Among the Pines…
When the actor revealed his fantasy during a casual conversation with Derek Gianfrance — the director he’d worked with on Blue Valentine – he learned that the filmmaker had just written the screenplay for The Place Among the Pines, and it included that very same scenario.
In order to make the bank robbery sequence more realistic, the production used civilians and real-life bank employees — but the effect was lost once they realized they were being jacked by a movie star.
“We thought they would be scared, and we got halfway into it and looked down and everybody was just smiling,” laughed Gosling. “So we had to do a lot of takes, and I had to do a lot of screaming and a lot of carrying on in order to try and scare all these nice people.”
While a stuntman performed most of Gosling’s motorcycle riding in the movie, the bank heist required the actor to perform the dangerous sequence himself.
Recalled Gianfrance: “He had to leave the bank and get on a motorcycle in one shot, drive into traffic, be pursued by a police officer, narrowly avoiding traffic in the intersection. So Ryan had to avoid 36 cars in this intersection, and it took us 22 takes to get there.”
So it’s understandable that the director might have been a little leery of letting his star perform the stunt. While Gosling (no stranger to high speed chases after last year’s Drive) wasn’t nervous about the shot, Gianfrance is still rattled by the experience.
Confessed the director: “When I watch the movie, I feel like he’s going to get hit, because it’s death-defying.”
