Interview: Derek Cianfrance on bringing The Light Between Oceans to the big screen.

If there’s one thing you need to be equipped with when watching The Light Between Oceans, it’s tissues. The first trailer for the film alone was strong enough to trigger emotions. The film itself will make you shed more than a tear or two. Derek Cianfrance adapted and directed M.L Stedman’s novel by the same name.

Michael Fassbender plays Tom Sherbourne, a World War I veteran who works in a lighthouse alongside his wife Isabel, played by Alicia Vikander. The couple’s blissful marriage soon hits a bump after it’s discovered that Isabel is unable to carry a child to term. One day, a rowboat washes ashore, presumably from shipwreck, and a baby girl is the lone survivor. The couple take her under their wings and raise her as their own. A few years later, Hannah (Rachel Weisz) arrives on the mainland and it soon becomes apparent that she could be the baby’s mother.

What happens next is an emotionally raw tale of family and loss as Hannah realizes her daughter is alive and well.

The cast; Fassbender, Vikander and Weisz are truly impressive. Fassbender’s character is not expressive, so much of his acting comes from the words he doesn’t speak in this film, relaying the thoughts of a tortured man through silence and emotion.

Vikander gives yet another tour de force performance. She is outstanding as Isabel, taking you on her journey of love, happiness and then the crushing blow as she faces an impossible dilemma with Lucy, her “daughter.”

Weisz doesn’t get much screen time, but there’s so much power in her performance as Lucy’s mother.

Cianfrance, too, goes in unexpected directions, this time adapting another writer’s story from the 2012 novel. I caught up with the director in Beverly Hills to talk about why he chose to go a completely different route this time and how he got Fassbender and Vikander to stay on a remote island for five weeks. I would have loved to present this as a podcast, but we met in a restaurant that had a lot of background noise.

***MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD***

Awards Daily: Your PR and I were just talking about the two moments in the film where you ripped my heart out.

Derek Cianfrance : [laughs] Yeah? I’m sorry by the way. Which two moments were they?

AD: First of all, the second time she loses a baby. You realize what’s going on, what’s about to happen. That was one. Then the scene in the prison where she’s giving the child back to Hannah, and it gave me a flashback right to Sophie’s Choice because I haven’t seen anything as powerful in a long time.

I watched that scene one time. I had it in the back of my mind and was traumatized by it. You’re picking the two most traumatic scenes to shoot. Both scenes were about having a child taken away from you. Both scenes were the characters clinging to some sort of hope, and as the moments continue on, there’s an inevitability to what’s happening, that they can’t stop. What I think is so brilliant is what the actors did in those scenes is you can feel the inevitability approaching them.

AD: What was it that made you want to do an adaptation this time?

DC: After my last movie, I was just sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I was looking for a story to work with so I could play inside the story, so I’d have a structure. I spent a year reading scripts and books and couldn’t find anything that made any sense to me at all. It felt like I was reading things in different languages, I didn’t understand them, and I couldn’t make something that I couldn’t understand or that didn’t feel close to my soul, or something that was part of my psyche.

I went to Dreamworks for a meeting because Steven Spielberg had loved Blue Valentine and it was his favorite movie of 2010.

AD: I think so many people could say the same. Right?

DF: I know. So, they said, “We want you do to do something here.” They gave me a pile of stuff, and on top of that was The Light Between Oceans. Immediately I was intrigued by it because it’s about a lighthouse and a lighthouse keeper, and I thought it’s a cinematic concept. It’s a light shining through a lens, and beaming its light into the darkness. That’s cinema. I thought I could work with it. I started reading it. It’s about a lighthouse keeper living on this island with his wife and they have this secret. It’s exactly what I thought when I was a kid, that people lived on islands. It was because when people used to come and visit my family we would change. When company came over we would behave differently, and when they left, we’d go back to being real again. I always thought that was strange as a kid, watching us change. I didn’t know why it was happening. I’d go over to friend’s houses and the same thing would happen. So, I had this idea that every home is an island, and every family is secret. I’ve tried to make movies about families and what goes on in those homes. Blue Valentine is about husbands and wives. Place Beyond The Pines is fathers and sons. This is the same, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and fathers and daughters, and the secrets that happen in the family.

I read the book and it dealt with questions of paternity, legacy, duality of everything light and dark, man and woman, joy and sorry. I thought there was this undeniable story, and it was almost like Solomon’s tale. At the end of the book, I was on the C train and I was weeping, I was so embarrassed to be crying, and I thought to myself, “If anyone else was on the train right now, reading what I was reading, they’d be crying too.” That’s when I knew that was the one. I went on the offensive to get the rights, to get them to trust me and to hire me. It took about eight months. Finally, they gave it to me, by that time I had memorized it, and it was such a crucial experience for me as a filmmaker. I really wanted that structure that I could count on.

AD: There were so many afterthoughts on the film, and what I loved about it, was that you kept it gray. There wasn’t a black and white to it, as to what was right or wrong or good or bad?

DC: I was on jury duty a few years ago before I read the book. I remember when the prosecution was speaking, I was certain that he was guilty. Then the defense came up and I was certain he was innocent. I spent two weeks on jury duty going back and forth. I could not judge this human being, and that was my feeling reading this book. It’s exactly my feeling when I experience people in my life. I don’t know any heroes. Even men that I know, they’re just humans, and they have as many flaws as the next person. I’ve also never met someone who is truly evil, I’ve never met a villain. I’ve met humans. It just so turns out that author of the book is a lawyer. They have to empathize with the human condition. I love that about it. In all my movies, I never have a good guy or a bad guy… maybe Ray Liotta is the bad guy.

AD: It’s hard to have him play a good guy, let’s be honest.

DC: Henry Hill was a pretty good guy but conflicted. It’s the gray areas that I love to work with. To me, one of the sicknesses in Hollywood is this likability factor. “Don’t have your characters do anything unlikable.” But the people I’m closest to in life do unlikable things all the time. It doesn’t mean I love them any less. There’s this Hollywood obsession with perfection all the time, and to me, it’s not relatable. I’m not looking for perfection and I’m not looking for superheroes. I want humans. This movie had it in spades. Who do you root for? Whose side do you choose? It’s impossible because they’re all right.

AD: I flipped several times.

DC: It’s great. If you do choose a side, then great, let’s talk about it. It’s a movie that’s open to discussion, there’s no one way to see it.

AD: When you’re sitting down to write page one to shooting the film, how much changed from the book to the screen?

DC: The emotion I had while reading the book was my North Star. I trusted that. That was the thing that I didn’t want to shy away from. There’s a certain thing nowadays when emotion isn’t that cool, I didn’t want to be scared of emotion, it’s something that can be labeled as melodrama. I wanted to go a place where people were living in a heightened reality.

I always saw the movie when I read the book, but you can’t just film a book, and there are things in a book that don’t always translate, so you really do have to adapt it in to a cinematic world. There are numerous changes in the movie. Tom and Isabel learn about Hannah at exactly the same moment in the book, and you have a dozen arguments over the next 100 pages. I changed that so Tom only sees Hannah first, so he holds this secret for years. There are things like that. M.L Stedman said when she saw the movie for the first time she spent the whole day weeping because she felt that she was understood, and to her that was the purpose of her life, and the film understood her.

AD: Something else that really stands out are the visuals. The cinematography is beautiful. That’s part of your resume. What did you tell Adam Arkapaw about capturing the lights, the ocean, and the sky?

DC: It all comes from a soulful place. There’s a passage in the book where Tom is talking about his love for his daughter. He lived in this epic landscape, and he’s talking about the rocks that had been battered by the waves for over a hundred thousand years, and they were once mountains that had been turned into pebbles. This love he had for his child was more important than anything that had ever come before in the history of time. I thought what was interesting was to take those smallest details and make them momentous. I did that by placing it in that epic landscape. The idea behind the film is about scale. What details do you choose? I told Adam I wanted a Cassavetes movie in a David Lean landscape.

We spent four months scouting locations to find the perfect lighthouse. The book takes place in Australia but we were close to shooting there, and then Pirates of the Caribbean Five came in and we got booted out. We couldn’t afford to shoot there.

I went to New Zealand and found this great location, after four months of searching and looking at every lighthouse in the Southern Hemisphere. What I loved about it, and what was crucial to me was that there was no one around. it was isolated. The closest person was an hour and a half away on a dirt road. I thought if I could go there with my actors, live there, never go home and not go to a boutique hotel, without cellphones and room service. The whole notion was to immerse ourselves in this world where other lightkeepers had lived before. When we were there, the natural beauty of the landscape is undeniable. It’s impossible to take a bad picture because it is what it is.

Early on I had a discussion with Dreamworks and they asked where was the green screen? I told them, we were going to find the place. They went with me in finding the real places and there was not a green screen in sight. The sun and clouds and wind and ocean and the breeze, and nature will give you all her secrets when you’re not looking. We just hunted.

AD: What did you tell Alicia, Michael and Rachel who all give these wonderful performances? You had them live on this island, on the lighthouse?

DC: When you make a movie it’s a collaborative artform. There’s a lot of movies that are about the pre-visualization of it. Before a movie is shot, you know what opening weekend is going to be. I’m more interested in the experiment. I’m interested about getting actors who want to explore with me. I don’t want actors that have rehearsed their lines. I asked Alicia and Michael and Rachel to fail for me. I told them, the number one thing I was looking for was failure from them. Then I said, I was looking for surprise. If they do a scene and never get it wrong, then we haven’t done it.

That all came from when I was interviewing Danica Patrick for a documentary. I asked her how she got so fast. She said, that when she was a little girl she would race her go-kart, she’d race faster than she could go, and she’d crash. So, I thought to myself, “Failure, you must fail.”

Getting them to live on the lighthouse with me, Michael said, “Is it really necessary?” I told him this was my process and to give it a shot, and that I wanted to make magic. He agreed to spending a night there. Five weeks later I had to pull him from that world. Alicia too, they embraced it. We were looking for moments between moments. It’s not theater, it’s about maintaining consistency. Cinema is different, all you need is once, the best things that you can get are the best things you can never do ever again.

There’s a moment when Alicia shaves Michael’s mustache in the movie. Going into that scene, I had people so nervous; health and safety, and art departments were worried that she would cut him.

AD: Of course!

DC: They wanted to shave him, cover it with shaving cream and said, the audience would never know. I told them that the audience would know, and secondly, Alicia and Michael would know. So their performance would be stale and gone. You’re making them fake it. I asked Alicia if she was comfortable shaving Michael, and she said she was. I asked Michael if he was comfortable with Alicia shaving him, and he said yes. They trusted each other. My props guy and I, along with Alicia and Michael were sweating bullets, but that created the moment.

AD: That revelation. It was beautiful.

DC: There’s no take two on that. The mustache is shaved, and whatever happened happened. That’s so important to me when I’m making a film is we don’t have expectations for how something is going to play out. I consider myself an instigator. I want to set up feelings and situations and stories that instigate you go to into your life  — and shave your mustache.

AD: Going back to Rachel’s character, Hannah. You introduce her in silence, and it’s such a powerful moment, it clocks as to who she is.

DC: That moment with Rachel was one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever had with an actor. I had spent almost a whole day by that gravestone, we had the camera there and spent time. I asked Rachel to feel the headstone and asked if it was cold. The coldness of the stone triggered her. I remember my grandfather’s headstone, the coldness always triggered something in me, and it did for her too.

There was never anything written that said, “Cry here.” We never did false tears. We were trying not to cry, not to have the emotion. We were trying to keep ourselves together but it was just so honest.

AD: The traumatic life events in the movie are very hard to have anyone deal with. Did you do any research for it? I’ve never had one, but it felt like I was watching a real life couple go through this trauma.

DC: On miscarriages? I’ve fortunately never been involved in that either. I did read a lot of first-person accounts. I had two great actors who were courageous enough to go there. We would shoot those scenes for forty minutes. We went in, she made tea, she drinks tea, she plays the piano because she had learned this piece. I had no expectation for when it’s going to start. I just tell her it’s at the piano. It happens and we have some secrets that we introduce into the scene as it goes on to pull the scene further, and they have to live in there. I don’t cut. For 20 minutes, the actors are against the piano in the corner of the room consoling each other, and the camera keeps going.

Some of those moments make the movie, we do another take, and a structure starts happening. It’s a full exploration that you can’t do without actors. On my movies, I never say “action,” and I never say, “cut.”

I never have the costume designer or make-up come in right before a take. I don’t want that. I want imperfections.

AD: You have the actors, the visuals, and then Alexandre Desplat’s score which is another character. How do you work with someone like him? Do you give him direction, or do you trust him implicitly to score the film?

DC: It’s a collaboration. To me, he is the greatest living composer. I’d listen to his music while writing the film. I have this script, send it out. I sent it to him and Michael. Of course, Michael was moved by it. Alexandre was the same. I talked to him about thematics and instruments. I told him what I wanted was to have Isabel play something and that was part of the score. I wanted him to write something simple as Alicia didn’t know how to play the piano. I listened to this 90-second theme that’s so beautiful, Alicia learned how to play it, and that’s the theme that grew into the rest of the score.

He’s a genius. He was such a storyteller, and his music became a character. When he blew me away with that piece. I asked him what his ideal way to work was, I offered the film to him with temp music, but he said, “I’d rather you didn’t, but no one ever does. Every time I see a movie, it always has temp music on it. Polanski is the only filmmaker to show me a film with no temp music.” So, I stripped all the music and showed it to him naked. He came out of the screening saying the movie didn’t need music. He did his thing. To me, the movie without music was probably what Jaws was without its music.

AD: It’s a whole character. Did you shoot it linear?

DC: I don’t do that. On Blue Valentine, I was fighting it because I wanted to go linear, but the very first scenes that Ryan and Michelle have is a sex scene. I thought it was never going to work, I had no choice, but we did the sex scene, and it was a stroke of genius. It put the hardest scene right at the beginning, so instead of having it hanging over their heads, it was done right at the beginning. So, I did that with The Place Beyond The Pines. On this movie, very early on, we did it. Sometimes you can adjust the schedule in a way to help your process.

AD: I picked those two scenes where you ripped our souls out.

DC: It ripped my soul out too. The one with the little girl was the hardest scene I’ve ever had to shoot without a doubt.