Michelle Williams Is Unsure If ‘Blue Valentine’ Could Be Made Today: ‘I Don’t Know If Anybody Could Work Like That Again’

Director Derek Cianfrance previously said that the 2010 indie was a "lightning strike" of a film that could only happen once.

Michelle Williams has a lot of love for 2010 indie “Blue Valentine,” but the actress is skeptical over whether or not the film could be made today. “Blue Valentine,” which marks its 15th anniversary this year, stars Williams and Ryan Gosling as an ill-fated married couple struggling to maintain their love across years together. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance spent 12 years (and 66 script drafts) preparing to helm the now-acclaimed drama.

Williams said during the “Armchair Expert” podcast, as reported from Variety, that the dedication to and scrappiness during the production most likely could not be replicated today. “I don’t know if anybody could work like that again,” Williams said. “You’ve got a crew that’s on hold. You’re paying people, I mean, it’s such a small movie, so, so low budget and a small crew, but you’re taking a big down period in the middle of the thing.”

For the latter portion of the film, which was shot chronologically, Cianfrance encouraged Williams and Gosling to live together to further deepen their onscreen dynamic. “We took a break in filming. We shot the first part when they’re young and in love and everything’s going really well,” Williams said. “And then we took a two-week break, and we lived together.”

She added that living and working with Gosling was a “professional situation” and that the duo had “office hours” from “nine to five” every day to practice. “We did these improvisations during the day, honestly, to figure out ways to annoy each other and to destroy this thing that we had made,” Williams said, citing that it was “horrible” to antagonize Gosling while in character.

“We were having such a hard time letting go of the thing that we loved,” she said. “[Director] Derek [Cianfrance] was like, ‘We gotta mess this up, and we need to burn it down.’ And we did a ceremonial [burn of] our wedding photo.”

Cianfrance previously said during IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” that he believed the project itself was “cursed” for more than a decade due to its stalled production process. He continued that getting “Blue Valentine” made was a “lightning strike” moment. Cianfrance began writing the script for the Oscar-nominated feature while at Sundance 1998 after the premiere of his debut film “Brother Tied.”

“For ‘Blue Valentine,’ I spent so many years [on it]. People said, ‘Just make the movie,’” Cianfrance said. “For me on that movie, I had to shoot it half on film and half of that movie digitally because that was part of what I was dealing with in that film. It was a duet between love and hate, between husband and wife, and it was also between film and digital. So I needed a certain budget to shoot film on that.”

He continued, “Eventually in the midst of that, I got the script to Michelle Williams. She loved it. OK, now I have this script. It’s draft 30. I got Michelle Williams, she had just come off of ‘Dawson’s Creek.’ She’s going to be great for the movie. No one would give me money. If I had Katie Holmes, I might have money. And so I felt cursed. I went back to the drawing board, wrote it again, wrote it again.”

And then there was the matter of casting Gosling: “Eventually I met Ryan [Gosling]. When I first met Ryan, he loved the script, but he thought he couldn’t play the older guy. He didn’t think he could play the second half of his character,” Cianfrance said. “And I said, well, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we just shoot the past, the young part, now and then we’ll wait six years and we’ll do the present. And he was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the greatest idea ever.’ And so we had a high five, and that’s how Ryan and I really connected because we both believed in a crazy process idea.”

Cianfrance and Gosling had their first collaborative decision to propose filming half of “Blue Valentine” first and waiting years to chronologically shoot the second portion with the time jump.

“Eventually what happened was timing worked out. By the time we shot it in 2009, Ryan was now old enough to play both versions. Michelle now had a child. So she knew also what it was like to be a mother, which would inform that character. And it just became a blessing,” Cianfrance said. “What was a curse for so many years became a blessing. [That film] was a lightning strike. It only happens one time. The moments where Ryan was in his life, where Michelle was in her life, where I was in my life, where the entire crew was, there was an alchemy that happened.”