Photo Courtesy / Maple Pictures

For the modern day Travis Bickle/Steve McQueen hybrid, apparently, there’s always Ryan Gosling, who plays this year’s silent anti-hero in Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest film noir, Drive. As TIFF’s man of the year, with George Clooney’s The Ides of March along with Drive garnering heavy acclaim, it’s going to be a while until we no longer hear about the all-Canadian boy.

We caught up with Gosling at a recent roundtable interview during the Toronto International Film Festival to discuss Drive, in theatres now, which Gosling gleefully described as “a violent John Hughes movie.”

The Underground: You initially signed on to Drive, and then chose Nicolas Winding Refn as your director. Why was it important to you to work with him?
Ryan Gosling: I saw Valhalla Rising and halfway through the screening, when Mads Mikkelsen took out his friend’s guts and showed them to him, the whole audience went nuts. They were hitting each other, laughing; they didn’t know how to feel. You were just really happy seeing that in the theatre.  I wanted to make a movie you wanted to see in the theatre.

I also knew he had made Bronson for a million dollars and Valhalla for a couple. He was able to work for a small budget but make it look big and you wouldn’t be aware of the budget while you were watching the film.

UG: Your character is very quiet, to the point where there is very minimal dialogue.
RG: I didn’t really wanna talk. It didn’t feel right. I would say the lines and it seemed like there was no point to it. A lot of times with a script, for some reason, there’s this arbitrary rule where they have to be like at least 90 pages, or at the most, 110 pages; why? They’re just filling it up with dialogue to make the page count higher so people will take it seriously. [But] maybe the dialogue isn’t necessary.

UG: We don’t know much about Driver’s past or present. Did you keep your own personal narrative of what he might be like?
RG: You know, I tried that for a while and then I would ask Nicolas, and he would just say, “he’s half man…half machine.” But for me, he was a guy who saw too many movies. He was confusing his life for all the action films that he’d seen, and [became] an amalgamation of all those heroes in those films.

UG: How much of the film was taken from the novel?
RG: It evolved. The script is very different from the book; the script is very different from the movie. The biggest shift was when we decided to make the film a fairy tale. [They aren’t] just attracted to each other…he’s her knight and is going to rescue her, not just get her in the sack. For some reason, when we started working on the script, we started talking a lot about John Hughes movies. We started watching a lot of his films and talked a lot about ones we were influenced by in the genre, but John Hughes kept popping up and so did ‘80s pop music…Why were we fighting it? Let’s see where it takes us.

Already considered a major Oscar contender this year, Gosling curtly asserted, “I don’t understand. What does the Oscar have to do with the movie? I’m not thinking about it at the time or how it’ll affect my career. I just wanted to make those movies. I can’t plan it all out.”

And if you don’t consider yourself much of a Gosling enthusiast, don’t worry, the Canadian actor understands. “It might be the year I overstayed my welcome; two movies at once, it’s a lot. I’m sure it’ll have an impact on my career, but I don’t really know.” We’re thinking a little more than just an ‘impact’!

For more with Gosling’s Drive co-stars Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, and director Nicolas Winding Refn.