Lars and the Real Girl

Lars and the Real Girl, written by Nancy Oliver, directed by Craig Gillespie.

It’s a miracle this film ever got made. And it’s a miracle it works, given its’ absurd plot of Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling), an extremely shy young man living in a small northern town being so emotionally damaged that he succumbs to the delusion that a life-size plastic doll he sends away for is real. This may be the only weak point in an otherwise excellent film: the motivation for his actions in the first place. He just doesn’t seem that damaged that he would turn that delusional. It sounds like a major problem, but amazingly, it isn’t. Pulled off it is, Gosling giving his character uncontrolled blinking and facial ticks that help make him believable. It helps that Gosling is surrounded by equally talented actors, including the always reliable and never more beautiful Patricia Clarkson as the small town doctor who gently helps lead him back to reality. Paul Schneider as his trying-to-be-understanding brother is solid, though he seems to always be on the verge of smiling even when being completely serious and sober, giving him the air of a pompous wise-ass.

This is a film that depends very much on the details to make it work and the filmmakers have done a wonderful job in that regard, from the bulky computer monitors that sit on Lars’ desk to his half-zippered pants that he is oblivious to. Kelli Garner is wonderful as the girl we know will eventually become Lars’ real girl, but what’s keeping him from her at the beginning is missing; she’s clearly available and interested in him, so what is it that makes him so afraid to date real girls? We simply don’t get enough dramatic details of his past, and when we do, it’s simply not enough to explain his actions. But, taken as a comedy-drama that is not meant to be overly-realistic, it’s a terrific little film, and the fact that one can suspend disbelief enough to care about Lars, and to get emotionally involved with the characters and situation, well, that’s the little miracle this film creates.

Not a perfect film and one that could easily unravel once one starts to pick at it. Yet, the very fact that this is a film that shouldn’t work, but does, makes it one of the most interesting of the year. Nice clean direction, too, although I do wish the shot of Lars, in the doctor’s waiting room when a mother allows her young daughter to sit on the doll’s knee, was held a bit longer; it’s one of the funniest shots in the film but we are barely able to register it when the scene cuts.

Nice interview with writer Nancy Oliver from cinematical.com, a great resource:

Cinematical: Take us through how you got your start as a writer.

Nancy Oliver: I have always written, since I was a little girl. I would rather have been a rock star, but that didn't work out. I got serious about it when I was about 21, which was a while ago. I had seen Saturday Night Live, and at the time I was acting in college, but nobody was casting me because I was totally wrong for everything. So seeing SNL, I started thinking I could do that. Alan Ball and I were friends in college so we put on our first show together and it took off from there. We had a theater company for a long time, and wrote and produced all our material.

Cinematical: Was the desire ever to get into another medium or would you have been happy doing that the rest of your life?

NO: I was interested in every kind of writing. I was possessed by theater because I had the means to do it, whereas to get to a camera is a different sort of path. I didn't head specifically for television or film until I had sort of already turned myself into a writer. I wanted to have a certain command of what I did and a certain knowledge of styles, and I just wanted to be able to handle myself technically and in terms of craft before I came to L.A.

Cinematical: And Six Feet Under was your first television gig? How did you get on there?

NO: Yeah, it was my first legit job. I had been writing content for the website for a year, and I had a job reading scripts for Alan. After the first two seasons, they changed up the writing staff, and I came on in the third season. We had worked together for over 20 years, but the job came as a big surprise to me. I didn't expect it and didn't go looking for it. And I was actually going back to Florida at the time, giving up on show business when the Six Feet Under job came through.

Cinematical: Good thing you didn't go back! What was the writing process on that show, was it a traditional writers' room or was it written more like a film?

NO: It was a full-out writers' room, everybody was in on everything. We would break the story, break the season, break down individual episodes. And then you were assigned an episode and you'd go off to write it, and then you'd come back to the room and everyone would go through it line by line. There were three or four passes, and then you were on set with it.

Cinematical: Did you write Lars and the Real Girl after Six Feet Under ended?

NO: I wrote it before I was hired for Six Feet Under, in 2001/2002. I had just written it for myself, for kicks. And then when I actually got an agent a couple of months later, I told them I have this screenplay lying around. And they said "OK, we'll take a look at it." And then it kind of sat around on peoples' desks for a while. Or under peoples' desks for a while. And then I started meeting a couple of producers. I wanted to write a contemporary fairy tale.

Cinematical: At the screening I was in, there was a lot of laughter. And I questioned whether it was a response to the comedy or an uncertainty about how to react to what was going on in the film. Did you intend it as a comedy or were you not even thinking of it in that way?

NO: I was telling a story. And in a good story, you get everything. I never tried to control peoples' responses to the material at all. I think some of the laughter is nervous, and then I think there are some parts of it that are just really funny. We did this with Six Feet Under too. You know how when you go to a funeral, and something happens that's funny? It doesn't bother me when people laugh.

Cinematical: The only real issue I had with the movie -- and I eventually came around to it 100% -- but there was a point about halfway through when I was getting frustrated with the other characters enabling Lars. Was that a concern of yours, that the audience would get angry at the other characters for continuing to fuel his delusion?

NO: When someone has a delusion, it doesn't matter what you say to him. It's not about enabling, because you can scream at somebody and throw things when they have a delusion, and it's not going to change their mind. This is everybody's problem with the movie. There were originally scenes in the movie where you saw people being mean to him (Lars), but there wound up being no time or money to shoot those scenes. But in the end, it's not about the people who are cruel to him. It's not about confronting the audience with that reality. It's about exploring the geography of kindness and compassion. So in a way, that stuff was irrelevant to me. It was a given that people would treat him badly, but that wasn't the point of the story. Can I ask you a question? I'm interested in your response to the whole enabling thing. Did you ever see that movie Russian Ark? The one where it's one shot through the whole entire movie?

Cinematical: I'm familiar with it, but haven't watched it.

NO: The first 20 minutes of that movie, I was so tense because there weren't any cuts. And I was either going to walk out of the movie or I was going to stay. And I kind of feel that's the same kind of tension that develops in Lars, when you see people not being mean to him. Is that how you experienced it?

Cinematical: I was never eying the door or checking my watch. To me, it just seems that somebody would have sat Lars down and told him his relationship with the doll was ridiculous. When I started to change was when Lars was having breakfast, and his brother made a cutting remark, and Lars totally disregarded it. That was when I started saying "OK, no matter what anybody says, it's not going to be an issue for him." Was the issue of Lars becoming a man the theme you were going for? That definitely seems to be Lars' arc.

NO: That's written in right from the top, as far as I'm concerned. It becomes articulated in the middle of the movie. My whole thing was that what makes Lars break and go delusional is this convergence of pressures. He's 26, he hasn't been able to make contact, he hasn't been able to break through, his sister-in-law is pregnant, he has a desire to be normal to be grow up and be a man. All of those elements come together to break him, and how to be a man is part of that -- how does he move on from where he is? He's stunted, and he knows it. And to me, it seemed like the question that he had to ask his older brother. It's a big question. There's no guidance. Who do you ask? Who prepares you? If you don't have a good father, how do you know?

Cinematical: At any point in the writing process did you consider exploring the sexual relationship between Lars and the doll?

NO: In the original script, and it's not that I have any differences with the movie that was made, my intention was to make that another of the pressures that was on Lars -- his sexuality. With Ryan's interpretation and the director's interpretation, that whole line was kind of cut out of the movie, which is fine. It made it a different movie.There was one scene in my original script where you saw Lars beginning to touch her and sort of get a sense of her femaleness while he was giving her a bath, but that didn't sit with Ryan's interpretation, and so that left the movie.

Cinematical: Yeah, Lars seemed almost asexual to me in the film.

NO: Yeah, that was a choice that Ryan made with the director. It wasn't how I envisioned the character. That's what happens, they take it in their own direction. Ryan had very specific things that he wanted to play. You see little hints of sexuality in the bowling scene, but in Ryan's interpretation, Lars wasn't at that point yet. In my mind, in the script he kind of was, but anyway...

Cinematical: You have to be happy with the final product, though.

NO: I'm very happy with the way it came out.This happens all the time when a script gets produced. That's just part of the process, things fall away. I'm not trying to indicate displeasure with the final product at all, it was just different in the script. I was on set for the whole thing, so I kind of knew what they were getting. It wasn't a surprise to me. There's a lot of twitching and cringing when you finally see it, but a lot of that is just my own writing.

Cinematical: What inspired this script?

NO: A script is born from so many different things. The specific real doll thing -- I had a weird job that brought me in contact with a lot of young guys and a lot of weird websites. And I saw that website, and the dolls' faces are kind of haunting and creepy. At the same time, I can completely understand how it could happen and why people have them. So that stayed with me for a while. I wanted to make a fairy tale and give it that twist. It's an old story, and you just try to package in as many universal themes as will fit.

Cinematical: I understood the sex doll thing too. I think a lot of people would say "Oh these people are sick perverts." I would never purchase one, but knowing how hard it is to approach the opposite sex, especially if you are shy and introverted -- I understand. It didn't freak me out is what I'm saying.

NO: Exactly. Is it so different from a pet? Some people get really creeped out, but people have all different ways to act out, and it's not always sexual. At least he connects with something.

Cinematical: Did you purchase a real doll? Get any hands-on experience for the script?

NO: Oh no, they're like $6500 bucks. They used four different ones in the movie. There are different heads and bodies that you fit together. I wasn't involved in the actual choosing of the doll.

Cinematical: The casting, if you will?

NO: The casting, yeah!

Cinematical: And what's next?

NO: I'm back in television again, a vampire series for HBO (True Blood). The Alan Ball show. That's fun. It comes from a series of books, that whole genre of vampire fiction. It's about Louisiana vampires, and the vampires are mainstreaming at this point. And it's sex, blood, fangs, violence, fun. The production design is awesome. We just started shooting the episodes. Depending on the writers' strike, they're aiming to air that in the summer. I am working on a new feature script for Warner Brothers. I can tell you it's going to be a "southeastern western," and completely different from Lars.



Here’s an interview director Craig Gillespie gave to Filmmaker magazine in October 2007:

Filmmaker: How long have you been here in America?

Gillespie: 20 years. I came over when Crocodile Dundee came out and it was fun to be Australian for about three weeks, and then I had to lose the accent because I couldn’t get through a conversation without people going, “Oh, my God, you’re Australian!”

Filmmaker: When you were in advertising, was it always your aim to get into directing?

Gillespie: Yeah, I mean features was [always the aim]. I enjoy doing commercials, it’s a great way to try things and take risks and work with really good people. The cinematographers you get to work with, everybody works in commercials: Adam [Kimmel, the DP on Lars and the Real Girl] I did hundreds of commercials with, and Rodrigo Prieto I worked with, who did Babel and Brokeback [Mountain]. There’s all these guys you get to pick their brains and learn from, so it’s great from that aspect.

Filmmaker: So was there a conscious game plan to get into features?

Gillespie: Well, for the last seven years I’ve been trying to do a movie! [laughs] Woodcock happened to be the one that I got to do first, and it was a great learning experience and I’m actually really happy it worked out this way. In some ways it was humbling, and then to be able to take those things that I learned and worked through and then apply them to Lars was great.

Filmmaker: Mr. Woodcock wasn’t the smoothest of productions.

Gillespie: Depends what you mean by smooth. [laughs] I was trying to make it an Alexander Payne film, which didn’t suit the concept. I was making a much more dark, complex film than I think the concept could sustain. It’s a great concept, but it’s a broad concept. What I realized when we went to a test screening [is that] it’s a gym teacher from hell that torments this guy, and they wanted those big gags in there and I miscalculated the audience.

Filmmaker: There were reshoots, weren’t there?

Gillespie: Yeah, and David Dobkin came in to do those. It’s a sensibility that I think he was better suited for.

Filmmaker: Mr. Woodcock certainly seems like much more of a David Dobkin kind of movie, and is comedically extremely different from Lars and the Real Girl.

Gillespie: They're dealing in very different ways. In Mr. Woodcock it’s a conventional comedy in the sense that it’s all about the writing and the punchlines, and that’s what a large studio comedy is. It’s about the witty one-liners, and each scene builds to that moment, whereas in Lars it’s much more of a character story. The humor comes from the relationships and it’s not about the writing, it’s about the situations. It’s a different kind of humor.

Filmmaker: You said Mr. Woodcock was a learning experience, so what lessons did you take away from it?

Gillespie: Honestly, the really basic one [is this]: I came into Woodcock a first-time director and I thought that I had to show that I know exactly what I’m doing and the reins were really tight and I had to have all the answers, and so I would say, “You’re doing this and this and this, and this is how it’s going to work,” and it wasn’t as collaborative as it really should have been. After that experience, I came into Lars and I realized it’s really a group effort and you’ve got to let everybody contribute.

Filmmaker: So you’re saying you were being too controlling?

Gillespie: Yeah. It was really liberating [on Lars and the Real Girl]. I could come in and say to the actors, “So, what do you want to do?” and turn to the DP say, “What do you think?” It was a creative process with all of us and you have all these great ideas coming up.

Filmmaker: Was there about a year between the two films?

Gillespie: There was a year, but literally Lars got set up three weeks after I finished principal photography on Woodcock. Actually, we had the great luxury of prepping Lars for a year, so I went to Canada three times and scoured it, and worked with Ryan [Gosling] for months in advance, and we really got to thoroughly prepare for this movie. All those visits to Bianca down at the factory… [laughs]

Filmmaker: The film is set over the course of a long winter, so how long did you shoot for?

Gillespie: 31 days.

Filmmaker: That’s quick for a whole winter.

Gillespie: Yeah, and particularly because there’s 196 scenes in the film. There were days when Ryan would go through nine different scenes and wardrobe changes, basically go through the [timeframe of] the whole movie in a day, and all the different grieving processes and alienations. But it was a movie that we thoroughly blocked out beforehand, my DP and I, and we were very economical on the coverage which I think served the movie and the tone of it.

Filmmaker: There seems to be an interesting conflict between the low-key tone of the film and what was presumably a very frantic feeling on set, due to your restricted shooting time.

Gillespie: The shooting style came from the creative process rather than from the schedule but we approached the way that we were telling story in a very 70s style. I looked at a lot of 70s movies trying to figure out how they captured these tones in this moment, and one of the basic things is there’s not a lot of coverage. You let scenes play out, and you let them play out in wide shot.

Filmmaker: Which 70s movies did you watch as reference points for this?

Gillespie: The closest were the Hal Ashby films, like Being There. The best thing that I wanted to capture from Being There was the sense that [Chance, the protagonist] is in this protective bubble, and you hope all the way though the film that it’s not going to burst and that his story’s not going to be ruined. I wanted to try and capture that in Lars and try and figure out what that tension is that you have to keep sustaining so the audience is invested and on the edge of their seat a little bit but ultimately totally relieved that it works out. That was a good reference in terms of the pace and the patience of that film. We [also] looked at Harold and Maude, Local Hero, but the funny thing with those films is that they didn’t go to quite as deep an emotional place as I knew Ryan would want to go. That was the part that I really felt like we were going out on a limb, the part that was really interesting.

Filmmaker: How clear a vision of the film did you have when you first read Nancy Oliver’s script?

Gillespie: Honestly, it’s the only script I’ve read that I knew exactly how I wanted to shoot. I don’t know particularly why that is, but there’s a style to her writing that I completely got the tone of what was going on, and that hasn’t happened before or since.

Filmmaker: You’ve said that Ryan Gosling was first choice for the role of Lars, and yet it's totally unlike anything he’s done before.

Gillespie: It’s completely unlike anything he’s done before, but I was first and foremost approaching this from a dramatic place and treating the material with the utmost respect, so I wanted an incredibly capable actor. When I met him, he has this accessibility and this openness about him, and as we discussed the scenes I could see this innocence in the way that he would think about things. Within 45 minutes, I thought, “This is the guy.” And it was really exciting to see that it was him and that he’d be able to take it to some really emotional places and not shy away from that. I wasn’t quite sure how far he would go, but that’s what was exciting.

Filmmaker: How involved was Ryan in the creation of the character?

Gillespie: Enormously. All the details and the clothing, the layers, the blanket, the watch, the moustache, the weight, it’s all stuff that he builds slowly and is part of the process of figuring out his characters. It’s all stuff that’s not on the page that we have to talk about and design and discuss. He gets consumed with it, and completely gives himself over to it.

Filmmaker: It’s heartening to see that, despite his success, he’s still doing character roles like this.

Gillespie: I felt we were being spoiled while we were making this film because we truly had the freedom to explore the character and try things in scenes and make mistakes, and we were allowed to go out on that limb. It’s such a rare thing these days. We stuck very closely to Nancy’s script but there are half a dozen scenes that were really Ryan’s creation that are some of the most memorable moments in the movie for me, like when he’s dancing at the party or the resuscitation with the teddy bear. There are some beautiful moments that aren’t on the page. We’d get a call from the studio: “I guess you didn’t shoot the script yesterday.” [laughs] But they were OK with that, it wasn’t a big deal. I think they instilled confidence in us with that.

Filmmaker: If you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?
Gillespie: To me, the unlimited budget part's not really relevant because I don't think you need a lot of money to make a beautiful piece. Honestly, I'd like to work with Ryan again. Just to find that collaboration, somebody that you're in sync with, is rare. There's actually a project that we want to do that we can't get, so I won't get into the details of that. It's frustrating. It's a book, and we're still working on [getting] it.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Gillespie: I remember seeing The Poseidon Adventure when I was four at a drive-in. I don't think it was the best choice my parents made. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Did you have nightmares afterwards?

Gillespie: Yeah. I remember the kitchen scene, throwing the jacket over the burnt face. That was the first [movie] I can remember.

Filmmaker: What impact did it have on you?

Gillespie: It's funny, I didn't really create a passion for film until I was in my twenties, and even then it was a friend of mine who got me into directing, because he was doing it. So it wasn't really on my radar. I enjoyed films, but it's something that I became more educated in as I got older.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was your dream job as a kid?

Gillespie: I wanted to be a pilot, a jet pilot. I wasn't smart enough. But I feel like now I'm in my dream job. I've made a film that's a good reflection of me and my sensibilities and was a great experience.