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Blue Valentine Director Derek Cianfrance to Reteam With Ryan Gosling, Develop HBO Series

Derek Cianfrance has spent so many years working on his passion project Blue Valentine that come March, when the film has finished its theatrical and awards-season run, he’s somewhat concerned about letting it go. “I’m a little nervous, actually,” he told Vulture at the Gotham Awards this week. “I feel a little lost. You know, what am I going to do? I might crash.” Luckily, he intends to keep busy: Cianfrance revealed that he will reteam with his Blue Valentine star Ryan Gosling in the summer for his next film, the Jack London–inspired The Place Beyond the Pines, and he’s also developing a TV show for HBO. “I can’t tell you what [the show’s] about,” he teased, “but I can tell you that we’re gonna try to give new meaning to the word ‘character development.’” Since Cianfrance had Gosling and Michelle Williams live together and improv “fight days” during the months it took to shoot Blue Valentine, interested actors should know that when he says “character development,” he means business.

So has Cianfrance kept in close contact with Gosling, since they’re about to work together again? “You don’t have to talk to someone every day to know that you love that person. I just sent him a YouTube clip, though. You know ‘You Always Hurt the Ones You Love,’ the song from the trailer? It’s spawned all these people on YouTube that are playing that song and doing it and all these tablature sites, people trying to learn how Ryan did it. So I sent it to Ryan because it’s kind of cool that it caught on. I mean, there were only eleven people that viewed it. But he taught himself how to play that on ukulele and now all these people are coming out of the woodwork, all these fans who play the uke, trying to teach themselves, and now there are all these YouTube videos of people singing ‘You Always Hurt the Ones You Love.’ I mean, there’s like eleven views on them, but it’s cool. It’s so nice that people are taking it on their own. That’s what’s so great about this movie.”

And what did Gosling have to say about the online groundswell? “His response was, ‘No way!!!’ Exclamation, exclamation, exclamation.”

Blue Valentine Director Derek Cianfrance to Reteam With Ryan Gosling, Develop HBO Series