58 LISTENER NOVEMBER 5 2016
BOOKS&CULTURE
by HELEN BARLOWF
irst there was the isolation. Cape
Campbell on the wild north-
eastern tip of the South Island is
a half-hour drive on an unsealed
road from the nearest town.
Then the weather, says American
film-maker Derek Cianfrance, “added to
the madness of it all”.
“You’re in a place without cellphones
where the wind would wake you up at
three in the morning. You can understand
the human psychology and raw emotions
that get exposed when you’re living in
that sort of environment.”
That Marlborough environment is the
setting for his latest film, an adaptation of
ML Stedman’s bestselling Australian novel
The Light Between Oceans, due to open in
cinemas this week. Set in the 1920s on an
island off the West Australian coast, the
story follows a traumatised World War II
soldier-turned-lighthouse keeper (X-Men
star Michael Fassbender) and his even-
tual wife (Oscar winner Alicia Vikander)
when they claim as their own a baby who
washes up on shore.
Cianfrance made a name for himself
with Blue Valentine (2010), a US$1 million
movie that helped catapult actor Ryan
Gosling to stardom. He became more
ambitious with the US$15 million The
Place Beyond the Pines (2012), again attract-
ing Gosling, his partner Eva Mendes and
Bradley Cooper, and it started the ball
rolling for Ben Mendelsohn’s comeback.GETTY IMAGESWith a penchant for adventure and
Oceans
and Eden
Derek Cianfrance
goes elemental at a
remote Marlborough
lighthouse in his quest
to explore love.
“I told the studio I wanted
to shoot there and they
said, ‘Impossible! You’re
going to spend hours
every day in a car.’”
FILM PREVIEW
Film-maker Derek Cianfrance: “I want to ind
a place where acting stops and life begins.”searing romantic stories, Cianfrance then
turned his attention to Stedman’s The
Light Between Oceans. A stickler for detail,
the writer-director had wanted to make
the US$20 million film in the region, but
he hit a snag. The hugely expensive Pirates
of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
had taken all the Australian tax dollars.“The Australian Government
gave them 100% of the tax credit
and I just couldn’t afford to make
the film in Australia,” he says,
speaking at the Venice Film Festival
after the world premiere of the film.
“I’m not cynical or bitter; it’s just
one of those things. I’m always trying
to will the impossible, but there comes
a time when you have to give yourself
over to the universe – and New Zealand
was right there dangling a cherry.”
Fassbender, who had produced and
starred in last year’s mystery thrillerSlow West in the wilds of the South Island,
substituting for Wild West America, told
him the Kiwi crews and the locations were
exceptional.
Even if Cianfrance was initially unsure
about filming on a peninsula rather than
an island, the location at Cape Campbell,
complete with impossibly romantic light-
house, was irresistible. (Some scenes were
later filmed in Stanley, Tasmania.)
“When I read the book I was interested
in the raw, human, primal landscape,
almost like Eden, and this place was so far
from anyone,” the 42-year-old explains.
“I told the studio I wanted to shoot there
and they said, ‘Impossible! You’re going to
spend hours every day in a car.’ I said,
‘Well, not if we live there.’”
Even Fassbender, who was
instrumental in casting rising
Kiwi actress Caren Pistorius,
his love interest in Slow West, as
the grown-up baby in The Light
Between Oceans, wondered if
that was necessary.
But Cianfrance can
be persuasive. “I told
the actors what I
could give them is an
experience,” he says.
“I consider myself
a documentarian
of fiction. I want to
find a place where
acting stops and life
begins.”