One of the biggest hits at this year's Toronto fest, "Lars and the Real Girl" is a love story played razor-straight, between a 27-year-old shut-in and the "anatomically correct" life-sized doll he buys off the Internet. As played by Ryan Gosling, Lars is an emotional non-entity, living in a small house next door to his brother and sister-in-law and communicating with no one else except his cubicle-mate at work. The doll's arrival at his door, in a giant wooden crate, knocks something loose and he's soon out in the community, interacting with people like never before. The only catch is that in order to embrace this new Lars, the townsfolk must also accept "Bianca," his half-Brazilian, half-Danish girlfriend who he pushes around in a wheelchair and who never speaks.
I recently sat down with director Craig Gillespie to get some insight into how he went about walking this tightrope between comedy and drama and absurdism, to find out if there was a love scene shot for the film, and to ask why he thinks audiences are responding so well to the story of a man and his sex doll. "Lars and the Real Girl" hits theaters on October 12.
Ryan Stewart: Are you going to push for an Oscar nomination for Bianca?
Craig Gillespie: Wouldn't that be wild? I tell you, it's the most understated, giving performance you could have.
RS: I told one of the publicists earlier they should have wheeled her in for the roundtables, to give us a chance to ask her questions.
CG: [Laughs] She came in for the read-through, when we did the read-through before we started. It was the first time Ryan met her. I had Bianca wheeled in and put next to him.
RS: I noticed earlier that you bristled when someone made some random joke about the sexual element -- you didn't want any part of that. Do you feel that neutering the sexuality is the key to making this project work?
CG: Particularly on the set. I mean, very quickly, when I interviewed a crew member they'd start joking about the doll and I thought we really have to be careful to set an environment for Ryan that he can perform, because this is really sort of a traumatic, emotional journey that he's gone through. It's a real commitment on his part, to be able to get into that space. That was a tricky element there, and we decided to treat her with as much respect as Lars as a character does. So we'd have her change off set, in her own space, and only have her on the set if she was in the scene. She'd never be sitting around. People couldn't really approach her.
RS:Why didn't you include a scene of Lars selecting her and buying her? He overhears about Real Girls from his co-worker, and then we cut right to the big box arriving on his doorstep.
CG: You know, Nancy's script is so well-thought-out, and there are certain things that are better left unsaid and happen off-screen. We don't see his darkest hour, when he orders this doll. It's a six-week process and you start to see him in his decline, but you don't know quite what his intellectual state is at this point, or how delusional he is, or where that moment happens. I think it's a hard thing to portray on film, and this way we're told it happens and so we go with that.
RS:The reason I asked about a buying scene is because if I were you, with this material being so tonally tricky, I would have said, "I'm going to jump on every opportunity to make them laugh, if nothing else."
CG: I was actually the opposite. Ultimately, the goal is to go on this journey with Lars and that, to me, was the most important thing. I actually said to people, in terms of the studio, the producers and actors, I said, "I don't know how funny or not funny this movie's gonna be, but I want to make sure they go on this journey and that they embrace this character." The humor is honestly a by-product, and the great thing about it is, every screening we have, it's different. Sometimes it's so loud you can't hear the dialogue. Other times, it's much quieter. It becomes a very personal choice -- what you find humorous.
RS: Did you see this specifically as a first-love story?
CG: It is, it is. I joked with Ryan that this is probably closest to The Notebook for him. It's really, basically, a love story and the whole way we treated their relationship was like they're a couple. What that couple is going through, and where the friction is, and what they're arguing about, and the give and take within their relationship. That's where all the motivation came from. When he's seeing Kelli at the office and he's noticing her, or she's distracting him, it's not that he's even admiring her, it's that he can't help but keep watching her. He doesn't know where his feelings are coming from, but then he goes home and he takes them out on Bianca, because that's what happens in a relationship, particularly with men.
RS: Ryan has said, about this film, that everyone's first love is all about them anyway, so this is really no different.
CG: I think that's a nice comment. You're in love with the idea of love. This is his learning curve and he's trying things out with her. He says to her, "You look really pretty today" and then he goes to the office and says it to the receptionist, you know? He's learning how to deal with women and with a relationship.
RS: But could he really learn anything about women through his interaction with Bianca? Could it be insulting to suggest that?
CG: Well, he's surrounded by strong women. Karin is a very strong woman and I think a lot of Karin is projected into Bianca. The way that she's dressed and the dark hair and she wears Karin's clothing. He sees that relationship that Karin has with Paul and I think in his relationship with Bianca, the dialogue that we talked about them having, she's a very strong woman. She's really tough on him. She's, in a way, the catalyst that forces him to make these choices. Like a typical relationship, I find that women are, a lot of the times, are the motivators of pushing men into making these tough choices, "When are we gonna get married? What are we doing? Where is this relationship going?" Those kinds of questions came up to us, as he was working through this character.
RS: It's hard to pin down exactly what kind of mental illness Lars is afflicted with. Aside from the delusional aspect, he also finds human contact to be physically painful. Was Ryan comfortable with the character's psychological ambiguity or did he want to pin things down more?
CG: We talked about how specific we'd get about that, and I think what's nice in the way that Nancy deals with psychotherapy is that a lot of the time there's no black and white, clear-cut answer to somebody's issues and problems. There's no magic pill, which is what Gus is looking for. Sometimes they work through stuff and sometimes they don't. People go to therapy for a long time and sometimes they figure things out and they don't even know how. In terms of that, we didn't actually have to know the answers of how these afflictions manifested themselves. Obviously there are the elements of his mother dying in childbirth and Karin is now pregnant, which could be a trigger for what's going on. But what's nice in Nancy's script is that you don't have to have all the answers. Ultimately, he's not aware of looking for these answers He's in a delusion that he's in a relationship. Life is normal to him.
RS: He's also highly functional for someone in such a delusional state. He shows up for work everyday.
CG: Oh yeah. The hard part in the acting was how aware he is of the delusion. There are a couple of key scenes ... it's not really in the script how he behaves or reacts to this, but when Paul, his brother, says to him, "You know this is a plastic thing, right? It's not real." --
RS: -- He says nothing.
CG: Yeah, he says nothing. Does he hear him? Does he not hear him? Does he acknowledge it? Does he ignore it? So we had to sort of struggle through those questions, which there was no template for.
RS: How much time did you have to work it out? Did you do it in rehearsals?
CG: It was a constant discussion. One way we looked at it was that there's a child who has a toy, a teddy bear that they have an enormous amount of affection for. And they know -- in some sense, they know that it's not real, but they have this whole imaginary world that they deal with, this child, and the parents come in and they go along with this world, but if the parents were to say, "Your teddy bear is sick and we're taking him to the hospital," there might be some dilemma for the child, like, "That's not quite right. This is my world, not theirs." So we would talk about where we'd have those moments. When they say, "Let's take her [Bianca] to see Dagmar" [a psychiatrist] then he's like, "But this is my reality, what's going on here?"
RS: I liked the part where Kelli, his would-be love-interest at work, suddenly finds a boyfriend and becomes rather cold to him, which he certainly notices. So the outside world can still intrude on him.
CG: Absolutely. She's a large catalyst for his relationship with Bianca, too, and why it turns sour. His observations of her, and he doesn't even know why he has these feelings for her or why he keeps looking at her, but that's what makes him come home and have an argument with Bianca and take it out on Bianca. Bianca's done nothing wrong. It's a classic relationship thing, where he's got these feelings and this resentment for being in this situation. He can't articulate it and doesn't know quite where it's coming from. All these forces are acting on him.
RS: Did Bianca have lines in the script, for Ryan to react off of?
CG: No, those conversations were Ryan. One of the first things that happened, the first scene we shot with Bianca and Ryan was him arriving at the party and he pulls her up the stairs. We had talked a lot about their dynamic and their conversations and their relationship, and so at that point he came over and said, "I feel like I should talk to her here. If I'm taking my girl out and these are my friends, she's gonna be nervous to meet them all, so maybe I should say something to calm her down." And he came up with that piece of dialogue. I thought it was just the most beautiful thing and I said, "Talk to her as much as you want." A lot of those little moments is him figuring out how he would be in that relationship.
RS: The party scene is also the scene where people come closest to making fun of Lars openly, but even that is remarkably tame. Some people think that the most fantastical element of this film is how indulgent the townspeople are of Lars, and how they bend over backwards for him and collectively support his delusion. What do you make of people who see it that way?
CG: I feel that, in some ways, it's more a comment on the person than on the film. [Laughs] You have the choice. You can either embrace Bianca and what's going on, or you can shun it. Fortunately, it seems like most people are embracing it. I'm somewhat cynical myself, so I really wanted to acknowledge that there were some realities there. That scene at the party was a dance between how people are reacting to this, and when you see those two people, the contrarians, saying, "That's just gross -- he has sex with her?!" and "That's what she's for, babe" you can't get more blunt than that about someone not wanting to be a part of this. Or that classic guy comment of, "So she's flexible, huh?" [spoiler alert] Those people are there, and then those people are very specifically not at the funeral. So in my mind, it's not that "the whole town" goes along with it, but he has this bubble around him of family and friends that protect him. You see Margo doing that in that scene where she says, "So, I hear you two are getting married." That's where the crowd goes nuts because you realize that everybody is on Lars's side at that point. I thought there would maybe be chuckles about the sex comments, but there's not -- I think people are mortified that he might get hurt here.
RS: Right. I like the way the delusion spins off and carries on outside of Lars's presence. At one point, we hear that Bianca has been elected to the school board!
CG: It's funny, that line gets so ... people are embracing the concept so much that it just erupts. It's a little surprising, but it's great. Also, on that point about the believability of it, I like the comment that "there's no such thing as a normal family." You can talk to any person and within their family is some kind of heartache or hardship that's happened with an individual. It could be anything from alcoholism to being a manic depressive, but there's usually some kind of human tragedy that they're dealing with. And they deal with it. They don't shun it. They don't say, "You know what? We can just close that door, cause that person's a little out there." They try and deal with it and friends try and deal with it and help. This is just a more extreme example of that.
RS: But certainly there's a school of thought that would say intervention is more of a caring response than indulgence of a problem. Maybe that's reading too much into it. The script needed to be a certain way.
CG: I think what's beautiful about Nancy's script is the optimism and the hope and the love that everybody wants to bestow on Lars. Bianca is that conduit. I feel like they knew that Lars had issues and troubles. This community is a small town and they obviously know the story of his mother dying and the depressed father, but they have no way to deal with him. They have no way to get to him, and when Bianca turns up, that's their conduit. They have access all of a sudden. They've been wanting to help, but they have no way of doing it. I think that's a beautiful part of the story and what I wanted to keep, just for the tension aspect, was that sense that something could go wrong. You see it, I think, when the guys turn up to bowl. You're like, "Oh no, I hope they don't do something here." I wanted to keep that; it's something I sort of pulled from Being There with Peter Sellers. He's in this bubble. The whole time, you're hoping he doesn't get found out. He comes close and comes close and then never does. It's sort of a beautiful thing about the film and I wanted to try and pull it off. You would typically expect some antagonist to come along or for it go to a dark place, and what's so pleasantly surprising is that it doesn't.
RS: What do you think is the basic appeal of movies like Lars and Harvey and Being There? What's so compelling about a man and his delusions, and people wanting to buy into them?
CG: I think it reinforces the goodness in people, and it's rare to have it be pulled off in a palatable way sometimes. Not too manipulative or hokey. This does it in a respectful way and, I think, in a plausible way and you rarely see that in films these days. People tend to think that films need to have a dramatic, dark context to be worthy of telling.
RS: There's no love scene in this film, but I'm sure you must have thought about including one at some stage, as tricky as it would be. It had to be in there at some point.
CG: There was a scene where he bathes her. He has that argument with Emily and realizes how much they've been doing for him, and Paul and Emily have been bathing her, and in the next scene he says, "I'm gonna bathe her now and look after her." But very shortly after that, he's already questioning the relationship on a romantic level, because of what happened with Kelli in the bowling alley, and we had sort of passed that milestone of there being any sexual exploration at that point. It became something different, and it didn't fit in the piece. And the sexual side wasn't what this was about. It was about him being able to bestow love. He has all this love to give and nobody to give it to. It's an emotional connection, not a physical one.
RS: You think Lars is better for having had the experience? You think he's well?
CG: Three movies from now he'll be well. [Laughs] I think this will always be a real thing to him. I don't think one day he'll be like, "Wow, was I messed up back then." He had this incredibly intimate relationship and it was dignified and he grew from it.
RS: You said three movies from now -- you kind of paint yourself into a corner, though, sequel-wise.
CG: Yeah. Maybe there'll be a TV show, not a sequel.
I recently sat down with director Craig Gillespie to get some insight into how he went about walking this tightrope between comedy and drama and absurdism, to find out if there was a love scene shot for the film, and to ask why he thinks audiences are responding so well to the story of a man and his sex doll. "Lars and the Real Girl" hits theaters on October 12.
Ryan Stewart: Are you going to push for an Oscar nomination for Bianca?
Craig Gillespie: Wouldn't that be wild? I tell you, it's the most understated, giving performance you could have.
RS: I told one of the publicists earlier they should have wheeled her in for the roundtables, to give us a chance to ask her questions.
CG: [Laughs] She came in for the read-through, when we did the read-through before we started. It was the first time Ryan met her. I had Bianca wheeled in and put next to him.
RS: I noticed earlier that you bristled when someone made some random joke about the sexual element -- you didn't want any part of that. Do you feel that neutering the sexuality is the key to making this project work?
CG: Particularly on the set. I mean, very quickly, when I interviewed a crew member they'd start joking about the doll and I thought we really have to be careful to set an environment for Ryan that he can perform, because this is really sort of a traumatic, emotional journey that he's gone through. It's a real commitment on his part, to be able to get into that space. That was a tricky element there, and we decided to treat her with as much respect as Lars as a character does. So we'd have her change off set, in her own space, and only have her on the set if she was in the scene. She'd never be sitting around. People couldn't really approach her.
RS:Why didn't you include a scene of Lars selecting her and buying her? He overhears about Real Girls from his co-worker, and then we cut right to the big box arriving on his doorstep.
CG: You know, Nancy's script is so well-thought-out, and there are certain things that are better left unsaid and happen off-screen. We don't see his darkest hour, when he orders this doll. It's a six-week process and you start to see him in his decline, but you don't know quite what his intellectual state is at this point, or how delusional he is, or where that moment happens. I think it's a hard thing to portray on film, and this way we're told it happens and so we go with that.
RS:The reason I asked about a buying scene is because if I were you, with this material being so tonally tricky, I would have said, "I'm going to jump on every opportunity to make them laugh, if nothing else."
CG: I was actually the opposite. Ultimately, the goal is to go on this journey with Lars and that, to me, was the most important thing. I actually said to people, in terms of the studio, the producers and actors, I said, "I don't know how funny or not funny this movie's gonna be, but I want to make sure they go on this journey and that they embrace this character." The humor is honestly a by-product, and the great thing about it is, every screening we have, it's different. Sometimes it's so loud you can't hear the dialogue. Other times, it's much quieter. It becomes a very personal choice -- what you find humorous.
RS: Did you see this specifically as a first-love story?
CG: It is, it is. I joked with Ryan that this is probably closest to The Notebook for him. It's really, basically, a love story and the whole way we treated their relationship was like they're a couple. What that couple is going through, and where the friction is, and what they're arguing about, and the give and take within their relationship. That's where all the motivation came from. When he's seeing Kelli at the office and he's noticing her, or she's distracting him, it's not that he's even admiring her, it's that he can't help but keep watching her. He doesn't know where his feelings are coming from, but then he goes home and he takes them out on Bianca, because that's what happens in a relationship, particularly with men.
RS: Ryan has said, about this film, that everyone's first love is all about them anyway, so this is really no different.
CG: I think that's a nice comment. You're in love with the idea of love. This is his learning curve and he's trying things out with her. He says to her, "You look really pretty today" and then he goes to the office and says it to the receptionist, you know? He's learning how to deal with women and with a relationship.
RS: But could he really learn anything about women through his interaction with Bianca? Could it be insulting to suggest that?
CG: Well, he's surrounded by strong women. Karin is a very strong woman and I think a lot of Karin is projected into Bianca. The way that she's dressed and the dark hair and she wears Karin's clothing. He sees that relationship that Karin has with Paul and I think in his relationship with Bianca, the dialogue that we talked about them having, she's a very strong woman. She's really tough on him. She's, in a way, the catalyst that forces him to make these choices. Like a typical relationship, I find that women are, a lot of the times, are the motivators of pushing men into making these tough choices, "When are we gonna get married? What are we doing? Where is this relationship going?" Those kinds of questions came up to us, as he was working through this character.
RS: It's hard to pin down exactly what kind of mental illness Lars is afflicted with. Aside from the delusional aspect, he also finds human contact to be physically painful. Was Ryan comfortable with the character's psychological ambiguity or did he want to pin things down more?
CG: We talked about how specific we'd get about that, and I think what's nice in the way that Nancy deals with psychotherapy is that a lot of the time there's no black and white, clear-cut answer to somebody's issues and problems. There's no magic pill, which is what Gus is looking for. Sometimes they work through stuff and sometimes they don't. People go to therapy for a long time and sometimes they figure things out and they don't even know how. In terms of that, we didn't actually have to know the answers of how these afflictions manifested themselves. Obviously there are the elements of his mother dying in childbirth and Karin is now pregnant, which could be a trigger for what's going on. But what's nice in Nancy's script is that you don't have to have all the answers. Ultimately, he's not aware of looking for these answers He's in a delusion that he's in a relationship. Life is normal to him.
RS: He's also highly functional for someone in such a delusional state. He shows up for work everyday.
CG: Oh yeah. The hard part in the acting was how aware he is of the delusion. There are a couple of key scenes ... it's not really in the script how he behaves or reacts to this, but when Paul, his brother, says to him, "You know this is a plastic thing, right? It's not real." --
RS: -- He says nothing.
CG: Yeah, he says nothing. Does he hear him? Does he not hear him? Does he acknowledge it? Does he ignore it? So we had to sort of struggle through those questions, which there was no template for.
RS: How much time did you have to work it out? Did you do it in rehearsals?
CG: It was a constant discussion. One way we looked at it was that there's a child who has a toy, a teddy bear that they have an enormous amount of affection for. And they know -- in some sense, they know that it's not real, but they have this whole imaginary world that they deal with, this child, and the parents come in and they go along with this world, but if the parents were to say, "Your teddy bear is sick and we're taking him to the hospital," there might be some dilemma for the child, like, "That's not quite right. This is my world, not theirs." So we would talk about where we'd have those moments. When they say, "Let's take her [Bianca] to see Dagmar" [a psychiatrist] then he's like, "But this is my reality, what's going on here?"
RS: I liked the part where Kelli, his would-be love-interest at work, suddenly finds a boyfriend and becomes rather cold to him, which he certainly notices. So the outside world can still intrude on him.
CG: Absolutely. She's a large catalyst for his relationship with Bianca, too, and why it turns sour. His observations of her, and he doesn't even know why he has these feelings for her or why he keeps looking at her, but that's what makes him come home and have an argument with Bianca and take it out on Bianca. Bianca's done nothing wrong. It's a classic relationship thing, where he's got these feelings and this resentment for being in this situation. He can't articulate it and doesn't know quite where it's coming from. All these forces are acting on him.
RS: Did Bianca have lines in the script, for Ryan to react off of?
CG: No, those conversations were Ryan. One of the first things that happened, the first scene we shot with Bianca and Ryan was him arriving at the party and he pulls her up the stairs. We had talked a lot about their dynamic and their conversations and their relationship, and so at that point he came over and said, "I feel like I should talk to her here. If I'm taking my girl out and these are my friends, she's gonna be nervous to meet them all, so maybe I should say something to calm her down." And he came up with that piece of dialogue. I thought it was just the most beautiful thing and I said, "Talk to her as much as you want." A lot of those little moments is him figuring out how he would be in that relationship.
RS: The party scene is also the scene where people come closest to making fun of Lars openly, but even that is remarkably tame. Some people think that the most fantastical element of this film is how indulgent the townspeople are of Lars, and how they bend over backwards for him and collectively support his delusion. What do you make of people who see it that way?
CG: I feel that, in some ways, it's more a comment on the person than on the film. [Laughs] You have the choice. You can either embrace Bianca and what's going on, or you can shun it. Fortunately, it seems like most people are embracing it. I'm somewhat cynical myself, so I really wanted to acknowledge that there were some realities there. That scene at the party was a dance between how people are reacting to this, and when you see those two people, the contrarians, saying, "That's just gross -- he has sex with her?!" and "That's what she's for, babe" you can't get more blunt than that about someone not wanting to be a part of this. Or that classic guy comment of, "So she's flexible, huh?" [spoiler alert] Those people are there, and then those people are very specifically not at the funeral. So in my mind, it's not that "the whole town" goes along with it, but he has this bubble around him of family and friends that protect him. You see Margo doing that in that scene where she says, "So, I hear you two are getting married." That's where the crowd goes nuts because you realize that everybody is on Lars's side at that point. I thought there would maybe be chuckles about the sex comments, but there's not -- I think people are mortified that he might get hurt here.
RS: Right. I like the way the delusion spins off and carries on outside of Lars's presence. At one point, we hear that Bianca has been elected to the school board!
CG: It's funny, that line gets so ... people are embracing the concept so much that it just erupts. It's a little surprising, but it's great. Also, on that point about the believability of it, I like the comment that "there's no such thing as a normal family." You can talk to any person and within their family is some kind of heartache or hardship that's happened with an individual. It could be anything from alcoholism to being a manic depressive, but there's usually some kind of human tragedy that they're dealing with. And they deal with it. They don't shun it. They don't say, "You know what? We can just close that door, cause that person's a little out there." They try and deal with it and friends try and deal with it and help. This is just a more extreme example of that.
RS: But certainly there's a school of thought that would say intervention is more of a caring response than indulgence of a problem. Maybe that's reading too much into it. The script needed to be a certain way.
CG: I think what's beautiful about Nancy's script is the optimism and the hope and the love that everybody wants to bestow on Lars. Bianca is that conduit. I feel like they knew that Lars had issues and troubles. This community is a small town and they obviously know the story of his mother dying and the depressed father, but they have no way to deal with him. They have no way to get to him, and when Bianca turns up, that's their conduit. They have access all of a sudden. They've been wanting to help, but they have no way of doing it. I think that's a beautiful part of the story and what I wanted to keep, just for the tension aspect, was that sense that something could go wrong. You see it, I think, when the guys turn up to bowl. You're like, "Oh no, I hope they don't do something here." I wanted to keep that; it's something I sort of pulled from Being There with Peter Sellers. He's in this bubble. The whole time, you're hoping he doesn't get found out. He comes close and comes close and then never does. It's sort of a beautiful thing about the film and I wanted to try and pull it off. You would typically expect some antagonist to come along or for it go to a dark place, and what's so pleasantly surprising is that it doesn't.
RS: What do you think is the basic appeal of movies like Lars and Harvey and Being There? What's so compelling about a man and his delusions, and people wanting to buy into them?
CG: I think it reinforces the goodness in people, and it's rare to have it be pulled off in a palatable way sometimes. Not too manipulative or hokey. This does it in a respectful way and, I think, in a plausible way and you rarely see that in films these days. People tend to think that films need to have a dramatic, dark context to be worthy of telling.
RS: There's no love scene in this film, but I'm sure you must have thought about including one at some stage, as tricky as it would be. It had to be in there at some point.
CG: There was a scene where he bathes her. He has that argument with Emily and realizes how much they've been doing for him, and Paul and Emily have been bathing her, and in the next scene he says, "I'm gonna bathe her now and look after her." But very shortly after that, he's already questioning the relationship on a romantic level, because of what happened with Kelli in the bowling alley, and we had sort of passed that milestone of there being any sexual exploration at that point. It became something different, and it didn't fit in the piece. And the sexual side wasn't what this was about. It was about him being able to bestow love. He has all this love to give and nobody to give it to. It's an emotional connection, not a physical one.
RS: You think Lars is better for having had the experience? You think he's well?
CG: Three movies from now he'll be well. [Laughs] I think this will always be a real thing to him. I don't think one day he'll be like, "Wow, was I messed up back then." He had this incredibly intimate relationship and it was dignified and he grew from it.
RS: You said three movies from now -- you kind of paint yourself into a corner, though, sequel-wise.
CG: Yeah. Maybe there'll be a TV show, not a sequel.
VIEW 10 of 10 COMMENTS
clio:
I loved this movie.
iluvpatrick1421:
I also loved this movie. I found it fascinating!