Ryan Gosling: On "Fracture"

Hot Ryan Gosling, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for his role as an addicted school teacher in Half Nelson, likes to take on all kinds of films; small indies like The United States of Leland and big budget films like the sweeping romance The Notebook (where he met current sweetie Rachel McAdams) or Remember The Titans with Denzel or Murder by Numbers opposite Sandy Bullock. Now, he plays a cocky young lawyer who has to re-think his priorities as he co-stars with Sir Anthony Hopkins in the thriller Fracture. We learned that Ryan was living in a tent when he first read the Fracture script...but he won't clue us in on why. Ah, cute AND mysterious!

Mr. Gosling is nothing if not a casual dude. Whenever we've chatted with him, he's dressed way down. Today is no exception. At the posh Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Ryan enters our interview room carrying hot tea and wearing a rolled-up sleeve, plaid flannel shirt ripped over the pocket and a white tank wife-beater undershirt. He's got on worn jeans and has a tattoo on inside of left wrist. We had to ask how a guy who is comfortable in that casual garb could play an uptight lawyer...

TeenHollywood: Is this the first movie where you wore a suit, tie and the whole thing? If so, were you comfy in that or not?

Ryan: [grins] Yeah, well I got very comfy in that as the movie went on.

TeenHollywood: Just curious but don't you own a restaurant in L.A.?

Ryan: I do, yeah. It's called Tagine. It's on Robertson and Wilshire and it's a Moroccan restaurant.

TeenHollywood: Yum. Okay, so, you are costarring in Fracture with a legend. Is Anthony Hopkins intimidating?

Ryan: Anthony is intimidating for different reasons than I thought. He's so good. In a way, he's just the warmest; a really loving guy, and he's so prolific. He paints, he's a composer, he directs and he's about to go direct a movie that he wrote when he was starring in this and he's still doing his paintings. He never stops. He sits there and he's doodling while he's talking to you. It's the most incredible doodle you've ever seen. He goes to his trailer for five minutes, he comes back and his hands are covered with paint and he's ready to shoot. He just never stops - he's this creative force. That's inspiring and intimidating at the same time.

TeenHollywood: Anthony is a hero of yours so was it hard to just watch him and pretend he's someone else?

Ryan: Yeah it is. I mean I did more acting in trying to pretend that I wasn't enjoying what Anthony was doing. [laughs]. It's hard to be in scenes with him and you're sitting there and he's being so good but you just want to watch him as if he was in a movie and then you have to remind yourself 'no you're in this film too.' I would laugh at stuff he was doing and go 'ha ha, great! But not great, you're a bad guy'. So that was hard. I was trying to break down why he's so great but he just is. There's no real secret. Many a time, he's told reporters that 'well, I learn my lines, I go to work, I speak then and I go home'.

TeenHollywood: I read somewhere that he barks like a dog on set?

Ryan: (laughs) He did. I don't know if I can explain it. I don't think Anthony likes it when people start taking everything so seriously and I'm certainly a victim of that. So if everything got a little too important, he would start barking. And when he barks, it's like everything he does in his life, he does it great. He sounds exactly like a dog. You can just about tell the breed.

TeenHollywood: That's hilarious! You stayed in character on set and is that something that, for you, feels more comfortable?

Ryan: I know a lot of actors talk about being in character and taking it home, but I don't think that's how it happens for me. I think you are all of your characters in some way and you just turn up the parts of you that are [the character] and you turn down the parts of you who aren't and it's just a tuning process really.

TeenHollywood: But this guy goes through an unusual arc because he's smug and arrogant in the beginning and then 2/3 of the way in, he's really starting to unravel.

Ryan: Yeah, that's why I liked him because first of all, he reminds me of agents I met. You're not really sure if they're faking their accents or not, you can't really know where they're coming from. And he's supposed to be the good guy in the movie, but he's not really that good. As long as he's not bad, that's good enough for him. Doing the right thing is kind of a pain in the ass. It's not in his nature to be heroic or to do the right thing. He leans more towards the narcissistic, self-serving, selfish side of things. And he never really quite changes. I found that interesting in this genre to have a character like that who's not virtuous.

TeenHollywood: You've obviously gone from big movie, to small movie. Which suits you better?

Ryan: I like all kinds of movies. I love movies. I like this genre of movie although I don't think I've seen a lot of good ones lately and I always wanted to try and make one. And I thought you couldn't have had a better partner than Anthony Hopkins. So for me at this point in my career, to watch a master work, I felt was really important. I try not to discriminate against budget because there's so little good material out there anyway that, if I focus myself on one world, I'll never work, so I have to do the best with what's out there no matter if it's big or small.

TeenHollywood: Your Fracture director uses more cameras and does less takes, is that right?

Ryan: I don't know about less takes, but he does use more cameras. It's different, I like to try new things, so for me it was a whole different world to come into. It's a big movie, lots of cameras and it was interesting to try find a way to navigate through that. Greg [Hoblit] is really like a kid, he's still excited about making movies. He sits in front of the monitor like this all the time, and he's thrilled to be there and it's really fun to be around that kind of energy.

TeenHollywood: Was there any ad-libbing? Anthony Hopkins makes little gestures....

Ryan: First of all, you never know what Anthony's going to do. He doesn't... [Ryan stops and looks behind him at the door] Is he behind me? [We tell him it's safe] Anthony, just like every time he does a take he does it completely different, he says the lines but it's amazing how many takes on one line that he can have.

TeenHollywood: Did you do any legal research at all or did you think you didn't need to know that to play this guy?

Ryan: I did the normal things. I went to courts and watched trials, met with lawyers who had been involved with these really high profile cases where we all know that they did it and they defended them anyway. And just trying to understand that, how one justifies that.

TeenHollywood: Are there other courtroom dramas that you've really enjoyed in the past?

Ryan: Yeah, I like the genre. I think it's interesting, I also think that the real thing is interesting as well, if you watch Court TV or something, it's like natural theatre. I like the fact that a lot of them are kind of bad actors; if they were better they might not be lawyers, they might be actors.

TeenHollywood: Do you watch a lot of 'Judge Judy'?

Ryan: Yeah, I love that show. My dog George loves Judge Joe Brown for some reason, I don't know why but every time he comes on he really relaxes.

TeenHollywood: What's your process of getting scripts? Does your agent filter out stuff or are you reading scripts every day? How involved are you in the process?

Ryan: I try to read everything. It doesn't matter how big or small it is. I have a lot of people helping me too, people whose taste I really trust. Like I've been working with one woman since I was 14 and she just really knows the kind of thing that I'm going to dig. Also there's so little good things out there that it's not hard to sift through. They stand out like a sore thumb. Something like Half Nelson comes around it's really obvious, because you're not reading anything like that.

TeenHollywood: Have you found, since your Oscar nomination, that you're getting different types of scripts, more scripts - has it changed your life at all?

Ryan: It has. I think there's a lot more opportunities now than there was, but I think also with those opportunities comes a certain responsibility to do the most with them. I mean, you only have one option when you're starting out, it's easy because you take that option. But when you have a lot of them you really have to make sure that that option is going to give you more opportunities or take you in the direction that you want to go.

TeenHollywood: You live in downtown L.A. Do you just like the old buildings or the feeling, or the people?

Ryan: Yeah, I've lived all over. I think it's interesting to watch a city develop. I've been involved or been able to watch this kind of 'gentrification.' And I love and hate it, I think it's a kind of fascinating thing to be a part of and to watch happen.

TeenHollywood: What other things do you have coming up? Are you filming something right now?

Ryan: I'm not. I wrote a film that I'm going to try and direct, hopefully by the end of the year. It's called The Lord's Resistance and it's about the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda and the conflict in the north, the 20 year conflict, and the war affected children and child soldiers.

TeenHollywood: How much research did you do for that? How long did it take you?

Ryan: It's been a couple of years process, and I just was there a month ago doing some more research, shooting some B rolls, getting ready. Obviously, as you can imagine, it's a hard film to put together.

TeenHollywood: Did you always want to direct?

Ryan: It's not like I've always wanted to direct something, I just heard this story and I was in the Darfur refugee camps in Chad about two years ago, and I was shooting a little piece of a documentary. I think, like anybody that goes to Africa, that experience doesn't leave you, especially those kids. I started to learn about child soldiers and then this phenomenon of night commuters in Uganda, and the more I learned about it the more I couldn't believe it, and I felt like it was some kind of Grimm Brothers story or something.

TeenHollywood: It's horrible. They kidnap the kids, don't they?

Ryan: Yeah, 30,000 kids in the last 20 years. 1.5 million people misplaced from their homes. It's one of the bloodiest conflicts in Africa's history and they're famous for them. And it's still going on, and has been going on in plain view of everybody and it's involving children fighting children and children killing their own parents, little girls being made sex slaves and it's gruesome, and I just heard that story and I thought that it was something that I wanted to try and tell.

***

Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.