After filming Lars and the Real Girl, an independently financed feature about a man who has a strange relationship with a blow-up doll, this fall, Gosling's next step will perhaps be his riskiest yet. In 2007 he hopes to direct a screenplay he has written. He doesn't want to discuss what it's about—just that it will feature nonprofessional child actors. He's well aware that, given the way he scrutinizes (and sometimes trashes) the scripts out there, he's leaving himself wide open to criticism.
“I'm not saying what I've written is a great script,” Gosling admits. “Anybody could write a bad script, and I'm one of them, you know? But I'm not making a script, I'm making a movie. I wrote a script, but I really drew a map of what the trip is going to be. Anything I could capture by getting real people together to behave honestly with one another is way more interesting than something I could conjure up.”
In an interview last fall, Gosling said that he'd never direct a film. Nowadays he's less likely to predict the future, least of all his own. “I don't know that anyone really knows how to do this,” he says of making movies and, one supposes, life in general. “We're all just trying to make our way through it and to find a way to be ourselves and to not get stuck.”
“I don't know where the road will take me exactly,” he continues. “But I have some things to do here first before I'm done.”
