HBO’s I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE Writer & Director Derek Cianfrance on Adapting the Wally Lamb Novel for Television and Working with Mark Ruffalo
“This series is a sweeping epic saga about familial trauma being passed down. It felt like this was something I was born to make as I read it.”
Derek Cianfrance can’t remember a time when he did not want to make movies. Since elementary school, Cianfrance has been fascinated by film and developing a story, allowing an audience to grow along with a character.
The critically-acclaimed director behind films such as Blue Valentine and The Light Between Oceans, Cianfrance’s latest project is the new HBO limited series I Know This Much Is True. Based on Wally Lamb’s award-winning New York Times bestseller of the same name, I Know This Much Is True stars Mark Ruffalo as identical twin brothers Dominick and Thomas Birdsey in a family saga that follows their parallel lives in an epic story of betrayal, sacrifice and forgiveness.
Developing Wally Lamb’s book of the same name into a limited series was no small feat, given the text is almost one thousand pages long. Below, Cianfrance describes how he became an established writer and director, and how I Know This Much Is True came to be.
*Spoilers for Episode 1 Below*
When did you know you wanted to be a director?
Derek Cianfrance: I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to make movies. I consider myself a member of the VHS generation. My earliest memories are that of renting VCRs, bringing them home, and watching movies over and over again. I remember my brother’s eight-year-old birthday and my parents rented “Creepshow” and “Airplane II.” I remember watching those movies multiple times before returning the titles.
I didn’t have a camera when I was younger, but I had a tape recorder. I would capture performances from my family, I’d do skits. I’d use the tape recorder like a surveillance device. That was like my sport when I was a kid.
How has your directing process changed throughout the years?
Every project, every film I make has a different kind of set of rules that I set up for it, and they all have different things that I’m trying to improve upon or confront as a filmmaker. The first feature I ever made was a movie called “Brother Tied” and I made it when I was 25 years old and had dropped out of film school, living in Boulder, Colorado. I shot this $40,000 feature on black and white 16-millimeter film using all my friends.
When I finished “Brother Tied,” I kind of went back and looked at the idea of performance and really spent the next 12 years of my life focusing on how to tell stories with actors, not with the grammar or the trickery of cinema.
The book I Know This Much Is True was published in June 1998. When did you first come across the story? What led you to make it now, 22 years later?
Mark [Ruffalo] reached out to me. Mark had always been one of my favorite actors. I had actually tried to get him to be in “Blue Valentine” back in like 2006. He instead chose to do “13 Going on 30” and I’m not mad at him for not at all. Then I ended up meeting him at Sundance in 2010 where I had “Blue Valentine” and he had his feature “Sympathy for Delicious.” We kept seeing each other at all of these awards events over the course of the year and I always wanted to work with him.
About five years ago, I got an email from him asking if I wanted to meet for breakfast and talk about a project he had. I met with him and what’s comical is normally, as a director, I get to cast my actors but this was the opposite, the actor cast me. He cast me to be his director in this, which I reminded him anytime things got tough on set.
Wally Lamb had, for 20 years, been trying to get I Know This Much Is True made into a movie. The book is too big to make into a movie. I had never read the book when it came out. It was simply this connection with Mark which led me to explore it. Once I started to explore it, it just felt so true to me.
What made this story feel true to you?
All of the stories I make are always about family and all about these private secrets within families. I love to explore the bond and the burden of familial relationships. I Know This Much Is True is also the story of an Italian-American. I grew up with Italian-American heritage and so did Mark, so we very much connected with that.
The story also had this idea of legacy and shows the struggle of people dealing with familial trauma. All of my movies are about legacy — about the things we inherit and the things we pass to our children. This series is a sweeping epic saga about familial trauma being passed down. It felt like this was something I was born to make as I read it.
The series starts with a very emotional and visceral scene. Why did you choose to open the series in this way?
The opening scene takes place in the library where Thomas makes the sacrifice. I started to think about what this as the Big Bang moment and structured the rest of the series around it. For our series, this explosive moment it was the beginning of the universe or the beginning of the story.
From that explosion, everything goes outward in every direction — it sets the course of events that will move the story and revelations forward in linear time, but also backward, into the past as we try to uncover why and how we got there. Thomas cuts off his hand in the library as a sacrifice and the present-day thread of Dominick’s and Thomas’ lives are affected and changed by that. Thomas is sent to a maximum security mental forensic institute and Dominick tries to save him from that place. At the same time, the story also goes backwards. It expands to the past as Dominick is trying to find clues to why his brother did this. And so in many ways it’s a mystery.
I was inspired by the structure on Errol Morris’ “Thin Blue Line.” The structure of that movie always blew me away, because it starts out with this murder of a police officer and then the story expands. It expands through the present and into the future but it also expands in the past to find out what led to this moment when the officer was shot. It all hinged around this one moment, this one dramatic moment. That’s kind of why we started it there, the idea of Big Bang structure.
There is also a scene where Dominick’s mother is speaking to him for the last time. She asks Dominick to promise to take care of his brother, Thomas. Throughout the entire scene, all the viewer sees is Dominick’s eyes, which tell a story all on its own. How did you decide to capture the scene from this perspective and in this way?
This is obviously a moment that the entire series hinges upon. This moment sets up Dominick’s burden and responsibility, which is to be a caretaker to his brother. His mother in on her deathbed, telling him take care of his brother — but what she’s really asking him to do is forego his own life for his brother’s. And, of course, Dominick is a good son and he’s a good brother and he agrees to it. This scene carries a lot of weight throughout the rest of the series. We all knew what that moment meant, when I was writing it and I knew what it meant when we were shooting it.
Melissa had really bonded with Mark and we were shooting this scene in a real hospice, with real nurses giving Melissa a bath in her bed. She had nurses around her sponging her down. She was completely vulnerable. Mark was in the room, facing her and seeing this. I had my camera on Mark, knowing that if anything was going to happen, I was interested in Mark’s reaction.
We weren’t set up to shoot the scene where Dominick’s mother tells him to take care of his brother. We were supposed to shoot that sometime later in the evening. But there was something that I sensed in Mark as he was looking at his mother, at Melissa in the bed, where I sensed this transmutation. It was no longer Melissa and it was no longer Mark, it was Dominick and his mother.
I told Melissa to ask him to make you the promise right now. I whispered it to her. She started and it caught Mark off guard a little and this great kind of emotional catharsis built up inside of him. Mark, in his own beautiful way, was trying to erase the moment with a smile so his mom didn’t feel like he was crying for her.
I had this moment, I had a close up on Mark and it was all happening in the close-up. We had been shooting a lot of the film with zooms and this was early on in our shoot. My camera operator was zooming in slowly and we were getting closer and closer to Mark’s eye when suddenly we were right on this edge of his eye being blocked by Melissa in the foreground.
We knew right there that we wouldn’t have to film the scene again. There was no need for a second take. There was no need for coverage because it happened and it was real, something that can’t be fabricated. When I finally got back to the editing room I never wanted to leave the shot. It has all of that truthful emotion and tension at the same time. It was Halley’s comet—these moments with actors, they can’t be replicated.
I Know This Much is True is now available on HBO and to stream on HBO Max.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
