Last week we reported that Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance is writing and directing a new project entitled The Place Beyond the Pines, which will reunite him with actor Ryan Gosling. I recently had the chance to speak with Derek Cianfrance about the May 10 release of Blue Valentine on Blu-ray and DVD, and he spoke a bit more about this new project. Here's what he had to say below.

"The next film I'm making is called The Place Beyond the Pines, which we'll shoot this summer. We're just locking up all our financing right now. It's a film about fathers and sons. It deals a lot with ancestry. Ryan Gosling is going to play a motorcycle stunt rider who comes back to the town of Schenectady to find out he has a young son from this one-night stand. He has to choose whether he's going to be a father, or whether he's going to be a motorcycle stunt rider. It's kind of a crime movie and it takes place over a couple of generations, and it's definitely very epic in scope. I'm super pumped about doing it."

The director also talked a bit about the crime element in The Place Beyond the Pines, and how this movie wraps up a "trilogy" of sorts, which started with his feature debut, Brother Tied.

"It's going to kind of end like a family trilogy I've been working on, from Brother Tied, which is about brothers, Blue Valentine is about husbands and wives, and this is about fathers and sons. At the same time, there are guns in the new one. I remember shooting Blue Valentine, that scene at the end of the film with Dean and Cindy in the kitchen and it was so emotional, so painful, and so difficult to get to that moment, I thought, 'This is why people put guns in movies.' Emotional violence is more difficult to get to. At the same time, when you put guns in movies, people shoot like 10,000 bullets. In The Place Beyond the Pines, there are two bullets that get shot. When the bullets get fired, they do damage. It's going to hurt."

The Place Beyond the Pines is aiming for a summer shoot, once financing gets fully secured. Our report from last week also indicated that Bradley Cooper has been offered the role of a rookie cop who sparks a feud with Ryan Gosling's character. It isn't known if Bradley Cooper has accepted the role yet.

Be sure to check back for my full interview with Derek Cianfrance about Blue Valentine, which arrives on Blu-ray and DVD on May 10.