CARELL: Let’s talk about this movie you’ve done, Blue Valentine. [in talk-show voice] Tell me about this film, Ryan.

GOSLING: [laughs] Well, Steve, it’s a romantic film—I hope—which follows this couple during two different time periods in their lives together: One is when they meet and fall in love, and the other is six years later, when they have a kid and they’re kind of searching for where that love went. It’s kind of like that song “Where Did Our Love Go?” Michelle Williams plays my wife in the film.

CARELL: I want you to know that this is getting quite a bit of advance buzz. There’s advance buzz, Ryan—I think you should know that.

GOSLING: Oh, no.

CARELL: People are abuzz. People are buzzing about it.

GOSLING: [laughs] Really?

CARELL: There is a buzz.

GOSLING: This is like talking to my mother.

CARELL: I know that you’re sort of like me in that you don’t like talking too much about this stuff, but how do you prepare for a movie like this where you’re crosscutting between time periods?

GOSLING: Well, the director, Derek Cianfrance, had been working on the film for, I think, twelve years, and Michelle Williams had been attached to it for about six, and I was attached to it for about four, so we had years to work on it and develop the characters, which is a luxury I’m sure I’ll never have again.

CARELL: Does it feel different when you go in to shoot a movie where you’ve got that kind of history with it and have been thinking about it for so long?

GOSLING: Yeah, it was definitely wildly different from any other experience I’ve had before—especially with the way that we worked, because we shot the part where we were falling in love first, and then we took a month break before we went back and did the rest. It was a very small movie, so [Cianfrance] had to fight very hard to get us that. In fact, he had to give up having lights for most of the movie. There were no lights, lighting trucks, a very small crew. Basically, having that month cost him all those luxuries, but he felt it was important. And, during that month, he had us sort of live in the house. We had Christmas and wrapped presents. We had birthdays and made cakes. We would have whole days just dedicated to fighting. We had to fight with each other all day and then, at the end of the day, when we were exhausted, he would have us take the girl who plays our daughter to a family fun park, so we had to pull ourselves together and have a nice time. All of those things never made the film, but I think you can feel them in the fabric of the movie. So by the time we were shooting the later part of the story, it really felt like a lot longer than a month had gone by, which made it much easier for us to leave the past behind and embark on something else. It felt like we made two films, in a way, and he cut them together.