Ryan Gosling Fulfilled His Dream Robbing a Bank in ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’
Ryan Gosling‘s dream didn’t only include becoming a rich and famous actor. He once opened up about a fantasy he had about robbing banks. This 2013 feature gave him the opportunity to make this dream a reality.
Ryan Gosling’s bank heist in ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ didn’t go the way he thought
Gosling might’ve never thought he’d actually be able to rob a bank until Place Beyond the Pines came along. The 2012 feature saw the actor playing a criminal going on a spree of harrowing bank robberies. But he first heard about the project when he and his Pines director, Derek Cianfrance, were doing another film together.
“We were making Blue Valentine, and we were just talking one day, and I had this cockamamie plan for how I could rob a bank and get away with it, but I’m too afraid of jail, but I was pretty sure it would work, and then Derek said ‘That’s crazy, I just wrote a script about that.’ We didn’t talk about it again for years, and then he finished the script,” Gosling once told IndieWire.
However, robbing the bank in a movie didn’t exactly offer the same thrills as robbing a bank in real life might have.
“I’ll tell you what soured the deal about bank robberies though. I’m finally doing it. I’m on the counter, and I’m doing it, and I turn around, and everyone’s smiling at me and filming me with their cell phones, and I realize it’s not like how I thought it would be,” Gosling remembered. “And then Derek got mad at me, ‘They’re having a good time! You’re not being scary enough!’ So he made me do 22 takes trying to scare [the people playing the tellers].”
Ryan Gosling called filming his bank heist the most complicated thing he ever did
Gosling may have made robbing a bank look easy in Pines, but he asserted that the robbery was far from smooth. Cianfrance had a particular way he needed to shoot the bank heist to add some authenticity to the sequence.
“Because of the nature of the way that Derek wanted to shoot, he wanted to shoot a lot of the bank heists in one take, which involved riding up and riding the bank and then escaping. So it was required of me to do more than I would normally be asked to do in a film,” Gosling said.
The Barbie star described how much choreography and precision had been required to execute the bank scenes properly.
“They were very complicated, maybe the most complicated thing I’ve ever been a part of because it required getting to the bank, getting in, having the heist go off without a hitch, and then in one case in the escape, there was all of these elaborate stunts organized, choreographed so that I would drive into oncoming traffic and have all of these near misses with these cars so going into the bank,” he continued. “I knew that 7 minutes from now after I’ve robbed this bank, I still have to drive into traffic. So there was a lot to keep track of, but I’m sure that there’s a lot to keep track of when you’re robbing a bank. So it sets up an environment for you where although it’s not easy, you’re not really required to act very much.”
Why Ryan Gosling felt ashamed playing his ‘Place Beyond the Pines’ character
Gosling’s dream of robbing banks came with a price. As fascinating as he might’ve found his character, it wasn’t a person he might’ve enjoyed hanging out with if he was real.
“The idea is that he’s a melting pot of masculine clichés. Muscles, tattoos, motorcycles, guns, knives, he’s in some kind of motorcycle boy band in the early ’90s traveling around with this low-rent carnival circuit – it doesn’t get any worse. He’s presented with this child that he didn’t know he had – and it’s like a mirror – and he realizes that none of these things mean that he’s a man. And that he’s really not a man at all. He’s a surface, superficial person with no depth,” Gosling said.
The real issue that came with playing a character like that, however, was the face tattoo he had to sport for the film. Gosling was so against the marking that he couldn’t help but present his grievances to Cianfrance. However, the disappointment in his tattoo only further helped Gosling’s performance.
“So I went to Derek and I said, ‘I can’t do this, this is ridiculous.’ And he said, ‘Well, this movie is about consequences, so now you have to pay for what you’ve done, and you have to have it for the whole movie.’ And I was so ashamed,” he recalled. “I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror, and I couldn’t look at dailies, and I just felt embarrassed, and I think that was something I couldn’t have acted. And it became a very important part of the character: of shame, of regret.”
