As we draw closer to Cannes, one of the most exciting films has got to be Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River. The trippy fantasy flick already has us intrigued for several reasons and today, a batch of new photos have landed on the internet that have piqued our curiosity about this one even more.
With a cast that includes Christina Hendricks, Ben Mendelsohn, Eva Mendes, Saoirse Ronan and Matt Smith, the thriller will focus on a single mother named Billy (Hendricks), who finds herself  “swept into a macabre and dark fantasy underworld while her teenage son discovers a secret road leading to an underwater town.”
We haven’t seen any footage yet, so it’s difficult to know exactly what we’re in for, but that premise certainly sounds quite out there and a pretty big departure from the norm. This isn’t going to be a directorial debut that plays it safe and takes no risks. All signs point to Lost River being an ambitious and inspired effort behind the camera for the young filmmaker and I, for one, cannot wait to see how it turns out.
Check out the new photos, along with a statement from Gosling, below, and let us know what you think of Lost River so far.
In many ways, this movie is a gift from the directors I could work with in the last years. As actor I’ve passed though deeply real movies with Derek Cianfrance to the imagination of Nicolas Winding Refn. I think I have oscillated between these two extremes because my own sensibility as a director lies somewhere between the two. While shooting The Ides of March, I’ve found out Detroit, a city that now lives on the border of these two realities. Although I spent only a few days, this city has marked me. The city was on the brink of bankruptcy. There were neighborhoods that are about 60 km large and somewhere in those neighborhoods there were parents trying to save their children a few steps from demolished or burned houses. Detroit is the cradle of Ford, Motown and of the American middle class. At a point it was the American dream but today, for those who are living there the dream has turned into a nightmare. But there is still a lot of hope that remains there. There is a great collective consciousness in Detroit, she deserved to be inspired. What she was and what she will be again a day remains alive today. I knew that I had to do something there. I went back several times the year after to try to keep track of these areas before they are demolished or destroyed. I started to invent a story that would not take place in Detroit but in Lost River, a fictional town in an imaginary past. Fragments of the story has appeared to me little by little: a family who lost the house, a mysterious secret hidden beneath the surface.. I went deep in the mainstream fantasy movies of the 80s with whom I’ve grown up and I put these references in what I’ve learned from cinema. So, the story of LOST RIVER began to emerge as a dark fairy tale, with the city in the role of the damsel in distress, and similar figures with pieces of a broken dream trying to rebuild.
