On shooting the film in Oregon in the heat and in heavy costumes:“I know! The dresses . . . I miss that. The only part of your body left exposed to the sun were your hands. My hands have aged at a rate disproportionate to the rest of my body because of being out there in the hot sun for two months. You couldn’t keep sunscreen on your hands; you were just sort of filthy all the time.”
On how she and Ryan Gosling prepared for the second half of Blue Valentine: “We spent the first couple of weeks in the house just doing the dishes and making meals, taking out the trash and balancing out the budget and making home movies. But that wasn’t getting us to the place that we needed to go, so [director Derek Cianfrance] had us step it up, and he would ask us to pick fights with each other….First he did this ceremony where he had wedding pictures taken of us, and he took a framed wedding picture and put it in a wheelbarrow with fireworks that we bought at the grocery store, and he doused it with kerosene and we lit it on fire and watched it burn. But the crazy thing is, it didn’t burn all the way—it burned into a heart around our faces, around our kiss. He couldn’t destroy it.”
