Nothing rattles this coolest of Canadians
Gosling dishes on new movie, working with Chazelle again and the Oscar flub
NEW YORK Even amid the chaos on the Dolby Theatre stage during the infamous best-picture Oscar flub, Ryan Gosling was typically unflappable. While most reacted with shock and confusion, there was the La La Land star cool and bemused on the side of the stage.
“What can you say?” Gosling said in an interview from Los Angeles. “I was very happy for Moonlight at the same time. It’s such a wonderful film. It’s great to see such great work acknowledged.”
It takes a lot to rattle Gosling. But making Terrence Malick’s largely improvised Song to Song, the 36-year-old actor grants, was like working “without a net.” Gosling stars in the film, opening April 28, alongside Michael Fassbender and Rooney Mara. Broadly speaking, it’s a love triangle set against the music scene of Austin, Texas.
Gosling is currently readying for another film with La La Land director Damien Chazelle, in which he’ll play astronaut Neil Armstrong. And he stars in this fall’s sci-fi sequel Blade Runner 2049. But Gosling ’s experience on Song to Song, shot all the way back in 2012, is still powerful for him.
“It was just: Would you be interested in working without a script? I said sure,” he says of working with Malick. “A little more than a year later, he asked me to come out to Austin. They were doing some kind of preliminary shooting at one of the music fests out there. The idea was that he wanted to try to cause what he called ‘collisions’ between a narrative film and this music scene in Austin, to take these scenes into real environments that you couldn’t control and see what happened.”