‘The Light Between Oceans’ is Intense

Hollywood has always been a place where the close quarters of actors and crew on sets together for weeks on end leads to torrid affairs — and, later, passionate breakups.

But one filmmaker  in particular, Derek Cianfrance, has wound up overseeing serious relationships in all three of his major studio releases — 2010’s “Blue Valentine,” 2103’s “The Place Beyond the Pines,” and the new historical romance from Disney that’s out today, “The Light Between Oceans.”

“I loved that they have a secret all to themselves.”

“Light” stars Oscar-nominated actor Michael Fassbender (“Steve Jobs”) and Oscar-winning actress Alicia Vikander (“The Danish Girl”) in an adaptation of a 2012 Australian war fiction debut novel from M.L. Stedman. The book proved to be an intense work of art as well as thought-provoking entertainment.

Australian Tom Sherbourne returns home after fighting in the decidedly non-quiet trenches of the Western Front in Europe during World War I. He takes the job of keeper at a lighthouse on a nearby island, and soon meets and quickly marries a young woman named Isabel, who also wants intense isolation after losing all her brothers in the war.

Sadly, Isabel, who desperately wants a child, miscarries twice. But one day the couple is faced with a shocking ethical dilemma: A baby washes ashore alive in a dinghy next to her seemingly untraceable dead father’s corpse. Isabel begs Tom to let them keep the baby and never tell anyone it’s not theirs, a decision that sets off a series of serious consequences.

“How I relate to this story is that being a parent, a husband, and in a family is everything to me,” says Cianfrance.

“I was obsessed with marriage in ‘Valentine,’  husbands and brothers in ‘Place.’ I  don’t want to keep telling the same story over and over.” And yet, he seems to always come back to relationships. “There’s no God and villains in the movie, just these ideas of primal human needs and the need to love, whether you choose your partner or your partner chooses you.”

Cianfrance, meanwhile, had his choice of deep romantic projects after the Oscar-nominated success of “Valentine.” He spent a couple more years working on “Place,” and decided that he was sick of his ideas and wanted to find an adaptation to do, so he read books and scripts and finally found “Light.”

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“I thought: What’s more cinematic than a lighthouse keeper in the middle of nowhere? And I loved that they have a secret all to themselves,” says Cianfrance.

“When I was a kid I thought people had secrets they hid when people visit, so they change with visitors, and then go back to normal. It’s my life mission as a filmmaker to explore those kinds of homes on the screen. This was the metaphor made literal in the story.”

Cianfrance and his team took the challenge of matching the period of 1920s Australia seriously, but his biggest interest was “this primal hidden landscape, this very specific and seemingly unimportant relationship between people and  location” that he became obsessed with for three years.

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He plans to take on a much broader historical epic for his next project, “Empire of the Summer Moon.” The story covers 40 years in the life of the greatest Comanche chief of all time, Quanah, and he hopes to take all he’s learned from his three features so far to create his greatest and most meaningful canvas yet — one in which he can inspire long-term spouses to regain their spark and communicate.

“I see people all the time, my parents included, who made it through a relationship solely because of the children, and then they split up when the kids are gone,” says Cianfrance.

“They’re sitting together at dinner, not talking to each other or looking at each other. It happens when I have a child. My mom said, ‘You’re gonna be miserable the rest of your life because the love of children above else is never gonna change.’ This movie is about love surviving children, it’s about the strength of the individual and how someone close should check the people they know underneath it all. This relationship brings out the best and the worst in each parent and shows that love is a really dangerous yet undeniable force.”

“The Light Between Oceans” opens at theaters nationwide today.