“What kind of director is Ryan Gosling?” you may have asked yourself in 2013 when you heard that the actor, heartthrob, and sweatpants enthusiast was helming his first movie, Lost River. Today, we finally get our answer to that long-forgotten question: Ryan Gosling is the kind of director who asks his actors to keep a dream journal.

In an interview with the Creators Project, Gosling explains why he elected to use this non-traditional mode of movie preparation with cast members including Christina Hendricks and Saoirse Ronan.

“That’s a style of acting that’s pretty popular right now, where actors use their dreams to connect to whatever material they’re working on,” Gosling explains of the method, which involved the actors then sharing them on set the next day. Like us, he also had his doubts about this mode of getting actors in touch with their feelings. “I wasn't sure about it—you know, you chum the waters and see what you can get. But it just played into the overall themes and narrative of the movie, which was about a woman whose dream was turning into a nightmare, and I thought that the film should have that same quality. I thought we could explore that privately and then in a literal way.”

Because our life partner is so in sync with our own thoughts and feelings—even without perusing our dream journal—he knows exactly what we are thinking. “I know that sounds kooky, but it’s like a symbol to represent a lot of things, and it gives you a shorthand,” he says. “We tried it, and it came in handy a few times. I’ve also never said the word kooky before, so that’s a first.”

As you may have heard out of the Cannes Film Festival last year, critics were not exactly impressed by the product of Gosling’s Dream-Integration Filmmaking. VF.com’s own Richard Lawson called the feature directorial debut “stylish but muddled” and correctly forecasted, “As first features go, it could be a lot worse, but given Gosling's high profile, it’s likely to earn a good deal of scorn.”

Well, Gosling read those scornful reviews, and he isn’t too torn up about them. “[H]igh school kind of prepares you for all this shit,” Gosling said when asked about how he felt about the negative write-ups. “It’s not that different, really. In high school every time you stuck your neck out there was always a bunch of people there ready to chop your head off. Hollywood's not different.”

In fact, Gosling has a message for those critics: “It’s just their opinion of the film, and my opinion of their reviews is ‘two thumbs down.’”

Take that, Lost River haters. Gosling’s dreamy dream film will get a V.O.D. release on April 10.