Ryan Gosling took on what is literally a dream role for the 31-year-old Canadian star, re-teaming with his Blue Valentine director, Derek Cianfrance for their latest, The Place Beyond the Pines.
In the movie — released at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7 – he plays a stunt motorcycle rider who robs banks on the side.
In a candid conversation with Celebuzz, the star of The Notebook and The Ides of March revealed why the premise of the film appealed to him so much.
“I’ve always had this fantasy about robbing banks, but I’m scared of jail,” Gosling said.
It was that fantasy that Gosling revealed to Cianfrance in a casual conversation during one day — only to learn that the filmmaker had just written the screenplay for The Place Among the Pines, including that very same scenario.
In order to make the 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 half way into it and looked down and everybody was just smiling,” laughed Gosling.
“We had to do a lot of takes and I had to do a lot of screaming, a lot of carrying on, in order to try and scare all these nice people.”
While a stuntman performed most of Gosling’s riding in the movie, the bank heist required the actor to perform the dangerous sequence himself.
“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,” recalled Cianfrance, to Celebuzz.
“Ryan had to avoid 36 cars in this intersection and it took us 22 takes to get there.”
Though clips haven’t been publicly released for A Place Beyond the Pines beyond its Toronto premiere, watch a trailer for Gosling’s upcoming film Gangster Squad, below:
