Ryan Gosling

Interview By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com

Ryan Gosling made millions of women swoon in The Notebook, made Sandra Bullock cower in Murder By Numbers, and made the Academy stand up and take notice in Half Nelson . Now he's making a story about a man and a sex doll into one of the most surprisingly sweet tales to come to the big screen this year.

In real life, Gosling enters a room with a friendly, likeable demeanor, unexpectedly snacking on gummy bears. He holds a jar of the brightly colored candy in one hand and he doesn't seem satisfied until he politely offers one to every person in the room. The gesture is both yummy and indicative of the kind of guy Gosling is'the kind of guy who would share his last gummy bear with you.

While Gosling seems like a sociable guy, the title character he plays in Lars and the Real Girl is quite the opposite. Lars is a lonely, damaged soul who avoids any real human contact. Instead he finds love with a life-sized doll, a delusion he creates in order to work out long-simmering issues. Though the story may sound absurd, the character of Lars is in fact very relatable.

'For the most part when I read scripts I can't relate to any of the characters so I when I can I jump at it,' Gosling says. 'I think movies make it look like it's easy to be a person and I don't think really that it is. I think it's kind of complicated to balance out who we are and who we think we are and who people think we think we are. I just look for characters that feel human and have jobs and have to work for a living and know what's wrong with them but don't know how to change it.'

In addition to his connection with the main character, the film's overall unique tone also drew him in to the project. 'The film hit me like something like Harvey or Harold and Maude or Being There,' he says. 'Just these movies that for some reason we all love, but there's just not many of them. They're like a genre to themselves. They kind of occur every once in a while. I don't really understand, but I love them. And I thought this would be my opportunity to make something like that. When I read Lars, I thought I wish Gene Wilder could play the part; if he did it would be the greatest movie ever. So I just thought it would be a really great opportunity for me to get to be a part of something that probably would never come around again.'

It's true Lars and the Real Girl is a hard film to peg down. It combines elements of comedy, drama, and romance. 'I think Craig [Gillespie]'s a great director because we took it seriously and the more serious we took it the funnier it got,' explains Gosling. 'A lot of comedies are trying to be funny. It's all about punch lines and jokes. For me this movie walks a really interesting line because it's sad and it's funny all at the same time.'

The film also presents an interesting take on human behavior. When Lars' delusion is made public in his small community, many of the townspeople decide to embrace it and treat the doll as if she were a real person. 'That's what I loved about the script and it makes it kind of a radical film in a way,' Gosling says. 'I felt struck by how kind of rebellious it was to make a movie that was nice and to make a movie that believed in the goodness of people. To make a film that asked the question to everyone who is a little afraid of being ourselves and just to varying degrees, and what would you do if you walked into a place where there was total acceptance.'

But does he really believe that people in America today could be so accepting' 'I really think we don't give people enough credit,' he says. 'I saw the effect of Bianca [the doll] on the crew who had never read the script'this is a job, they don't care about the movie, they work on movies all the time'and suddenly she had a really interesting impact on everybody. The idea of her and the idea of the script is she's a symbol. She demands you to look at yourself and she forces you to be creative and to create a relationship with yourself through her.'

Gosling explains the relationship of Lars and Bianca in an even more basic way: 'It's not dissimilar from somebody who's got a teddy bear, or a kid who's got a teddy bear and loves the teddy bear,' he says. 'It's possible. You go through something with that bear, you cry with that bear, you go through fun times, sad times, you really experience things with it and you bond to it. If you were to ever lose it, it would be heartbreaking. It would be a real sense of loss. So we're all capable of this.'

So the initial premise of a man and a sex doll didn't scare him off' 'I heard the tagline about a guy with a sex doll and I thought, oh yeah that sounds funny but I never thought it could last for a whole script,' Gosling admits. 'I couldn't be more wrong. I finished that script and I found myself crying because I was so connected to it. I couldn't believe that this writer took me on this trip, made me care about these people and made me care about this doll who became a woman to me when I read it. I thought it was really romantic; I thought it was a really romantic idea of a guy who makes a choice to love and doesn't need to be loved in return. He doesn't compromise his hopes just to be with somebody, he just has all this love to give and he gives it.'

Gosling has clearly thought about this character a lot, but Lars' look and wardrobe came about a little more accidentally. 'There was no picture of Lars; it just developed,' he says. 'I had a beard and I shaved it. And before I shaved my mustache off I just took a look up in the mirror and I saw him looking back at me. And he was kind of wearing woman's clothing underneath [in the film] and that came from when we were doing a fitting and just nothing felt right for some reason and then I sort of felt like he needed something feminine because he doesn't have any feminine energy around him his whole life so it just seemed like without judging it he would naturally gravitate towards things that were feminine just because they're interesting, they're exotic.'

Gosling goes from playing Lars, a childlike character, to playing a character who has lost a child in his next film The Lovely Bones based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold. But he'll always be reminded of his role in Lars and the Real Girl, mostly because he got to keep one key prop'Bianca, the doll.

'She's at my house,' he says slyly. 'She's reading a book by the window.'

Maybe he's more like Lars after all.