QUIET WALKER

Photographs are our memory when memory fails us but they also immortalize a moment. And in the film this was just one moment of happiness amongst everything else and after that things change quickly but they always have that moment as the one to remember. Why did you decide to have this photograph in there? Everything that you said. Look, you said it better than I could. That’s why. But I will say the person who took the photograph was my wife. I cast her as the ice cream lady. My wife has made about 250 films, she makes silent comedies and she just made her first feature. So she’s comedy in our house and I’m tragedy. But she took that amazing picture of them. In the film there are these baton passes that happen and when you have someone who has the screen presence that Ryan Gosling has, they have a way to exist even beyond the scenes that they’re in—but it’s also nice to see them and to miss them and to think of them. And I hate guns, I never thought that I would have a gun in a film; I feel like it’s such cowardly device and a coward’s tool—not only for human being but also for filmmakers, they’re just thrown around with such reckless abandon. If I had to put a gun in a film I wanted to make sure it had an impact, and not in a grotesque, oh how violent I could make it, but an actual impact in terms of story and characters and longing and destiny.

And the one moment with the gun in this film, that’s the crux of it; all the ramifications rely on that moment. Yes, and the photograph is a way, to me, that we could see people that we don’t see anymore because they’re not there. Death is permanent and this was just another honest way to show that instead of flashing back—like if you lose someone or miss someone, what do you have? You have your memories and your pictures.