While so many screen romantic comedies feel plastic, Lars and The Real Girl makes a virtue of it. The star and director of the offbeat film talk to Helen Barlow
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Ryan Gosling is known for playing loners and outsiders, and mostly for making them likable. After realising his potential as a romantic lead in The Notebook, he was keen to try screen romance again. Yet it was never going to be an ordinary romance because in Lars and The Real Girl the girl of the title is a doll. Not an ordinary doll, but an anatomically correct life-size sex doll named Bianca.
Lars is delusional and he believes that Bianca is the love of his life. Naturally it was important that Gosling respect the silicon doll in order to play someone who loves her.
In fact the film's Australian New-York based director, Craig Gillespie, went to great lengths to ensure that was the case.
"Bianca had her own trailer, and when she came on set, she was treated like any other actor," explains Gosling. "Somehow she had a really calming and peaceful quality and when they called action and we were alone there was a real connection. For me this is the most romantic film I've made, even more romantic than The Notebook."
Lars, whose mother died giving birth to him, lives in the back yard of his brother's house under the watchful eye of his pregnant sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer). Now that a new baby is coming he needs someone to love of his own. He buys Bianca on-line.
Gosling absorbed himself into the character and even lived in the garage on the film's wintry Canadian set to develop a sense of Lars' isolation - until crew members became too disruptive early in the morning when laying fake snow.
"I just felt like I needed to get out of my own body," says the 27-year-old Canadian, who grew a moustache and put on weight for the part.
"Mostly for roles I have to work out. My body is not normally the body of a guy who has just sat in his garage his whole life."
The thing is, no matter how ridiculous the scenario seems, Gosling makes it work. We rally around him like Lars' loved ones and friends in the film and it's a testimony to Gosling's acting talent and charisma that this happens. He was nominated for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actor's Guild award for his efforts.
"Ryan and I are cynical guys," notes Gillespie, "and it's funny to think that we've done a film that has so much heart. But it's so hard to pick on a character who is so sincere and genuine and out on a limb. People just connect with him."
The reason that the film works so well, he says, is that the screenplay by Six Feet Under scribe Nancy Oliver, was so well written that the actors could all relate to it.
As one might expect the casting of Bianca presented its own unique challenges. Gillespie travelled to the San Diego RealGirl factory to see the dolls for himself.
"The choices were endless. There were 14 faces, nine bodies, five skin colours, different eye colours and hair types. I was overwhelmed. Then I happened across this book, Still Lovers, where a photographer had taken photographs of guys with dolls and one of the dolls was particularly soulful. But the factory doesn't make that doll any more because her eyes are at half mast and they kept getting complaints that she either looked drugged or bored. So they had to pull the old mould out and get it going again. They really wanted me to use their more popular No. 7. In the end we used two of them - we had three bodies and nine faces because she changes during the film. It's really subtle but she goes from having synthetic hair to real hair and we make her look more human."
Still, given that we don't get to see her private bits, what's the point in her having them? People usually pay US$6500 for that pleasure, (though Gillespie got them at cost price) and I recall such a specimen going for $10,000 on Nip/Tuck.
"I wanted her to be as realistic as possible, for the actors to live and breathe it. I wanted that scene where they're giving her a bath for the actors to actually see it. The awkwardness of it definitely helped."
Gosling and Gillespie are planning to make another film at the end of the year, after Gosling wraps All Good Things, a thriller co-starring Kirsten Dunst, and Blue Valentine, a romantic drama with Michelle Williams. Interestingly Gosling's smaller films are the ones that hit a chord, given that he also won accolades, including a best actor Oscar nomination for his performance as a drug-addicted teacher in Half Nelson, where again there were heartfelt scenes with a teenage girl who brings him back to life.
"I don't think anyone was more shocked than I was," Gosling says of the Oscar nomination that allowed him to subsequently do what he wants, including backing out of Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones - when he realised the film wouldn't work for him - to be replaced by Mark Wahlberg.
"The age of the character versus my real age was always a concern of mine," he told a magazine after a tabloid storm over his early departure with the line that Gosling was too overweight and was proving too difficult. "Peter and I tried to make it work and ultimately it just didn't. I think the film is much better off with Mark Wahlberg in that role.
"Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker and I'm here to tell you that he has things up his sleeve that are going to blow peoples' minds. I'm going to be the first person in line to buy tickets."
"I never thought that Half Nelson would get recognised on the level that it did, and now this one too. Life is full of surprises."
Certainly Gosling has not always been the flavour of the month. His penchant for outsider-dom in fact began at age 11, when the Mickey Mouse Club, which then included Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, was desperate for a Canadian recruit. Gosling apparently was it. "When they discovered I couldn't sing or dance I was on the sideline for most of the shows, coming in briefly at the beginning and end," he notes wryly.
"They were sorry that they picked me. They said I was a bad influence on other Mousketeers. I was 12, what could I do? I was a young guy and to me I was being normal. Most of those kids were really sheltered. I almost got fired a couple of times. They said I was too sexual to work for Disney, that I was corrupting the girls. I didn't touch the girls, by the way. They pegged me as the bad guy. They needed a Mr Trouble."
Gosling was so rebellious in his teens that he ended up being home-schooled by his mother. "I had problems in school, but I caused a lot of those problems too. I just was restless and looking for trouble, and I think I've found an outlet."
His early acting career included fair bit of Canadian television and a stint in New Zealand in the late 90s with a regular role in the series Young Hercules. These days, with his penchant for brown pants, regular shirts and wearing his hair boyish and spiky, Gosling, who was raised a Mormon - though not strictly he says - is an unlikely movie star.
He first created a stir at the 2001 Sundance Festival with his charismatic turn as a Jewish neo-Nazi in the award-winning The Believer, and went on to play a teen killer in Murder By Numbers, a disappointing Hollywood thriller, where he nonetheless managed to get his way and lick Sandra Bullock, in order to demonstrate his character's seductive means of persuasion. Gosling ended up in a relationship with Bullock, who was 16 years his senior, for two years. Even the gossip columns were not aware of it until it was over.
Reeling from the Hollywood experience, Gosling stuck with independent films - but even he couldn't stop his ensuing stardom. He was already on everyone's next-big-thing lists and had seemingly entered the club of cool. He made the surprise hit, The Notebook, in order to work with Nick Cassavetes, son of director John Cassavetes, and again swept his co-star, Rachel McAdams, off her feet. The pair are no longer an item. Likewise he appeared in Fracture, an above-average Hollywood thriller, to work with Anthony Hopkins.
Soon he will make the most of his recent success by directing his first film, The Lord's Resistance Army, about child soldiers in East Africa.
"I feel like I have this window where I have more options available to me than I might ever have. So I want to make sure that I use that opportunity and that if I only ever make one movie, it will be this one."
A few years back he helped film a documentary on the Darfur refugee camps, and had been dealing with the experience - "Like anybody who goes to Africa, that experience follows you around forever" - when he learned about child soldiers in Uganda.
"The whole situation sounded so surreal that I honestly couldn't believe it. But my film is a small personal story; it's not a political film. In a way it's trying to put the viewer in the jumpseat of these kids as they are abducted and go through the indoctrination process."
"It's an attempt to try and understand how little kids are being turned into killers."
