Lars And The Real Girl

The deleted scene included on this disc runs at under a minute and shows a fully clothed Lars (Ryan Gosling) getting into the bathtub with Bianca, splashing his face with water, looking up at her and saying “Hey!” It is innocuous enough, but the written introduction to it by Craig Gillespie tells of the director's continuing pain in having removed a sequence that he felt showed Lars at too dark a crossroads for the film's overall tone. If nothing else, this reveals how carefully nuanced a production Lars And The Real Girl was, and few who have seen the finished film would question the director's fine-tuned sensitivity to his material's emotional trajectory.

There is the usual, entirely conventional Making Of featurette (10 minutes), in which much is said about the fine line between fantasy and reality, the perfection of Nancy Oliver's screenplay (inspired by her discovery of the real RealGirl© website), the unusual compassion and affection of the film towards its characters and the excellence of Gosling's performance, right down to some well-attuned improvisations. Perhaps Gillespie best summarises the film's unusual effect on the viewer when he declares, "The premise of the movie just doesn't do justice to the journey that you go on," while Gosling adds that the film concerns a pure kind of love that gives without expecting anything in return.

Better, funnier and altogether less conventional, except in a parodic way, is A Real Leading Lady, a six-minute featurette in which cast and crew talk about their experiences working with Bianca. Never letting on that she is anything other than a talented actress, they discuss her process, her undemanding professionalism, her openness to ideas and willingness to collaborate, her quiet patience (despite needing "a good two hours to get her camera ready every morning" and having "specifics that she had to go through each day in terms of putting her face on"), her chemistry with fellow actor Gosling and the tensions that inevitably arose between them after spending so long together on set.

Bianca herself appears alongside Gosling for an interview, in which he praises her presence as a performer ("There's no such thing as a silence with her, you know?") and claims that "working with me really was what drew her to the project," echoing Patricia Clarkson's actual words in the previous featurette. Apparently jealous of his co-star's links with an actor from The O.C., Gosling eventually storms out of the interview, leaving Bianca to face the camera alone, a situation which, for all its awkwardness, she handles with typically tactful poise, like the star she is. This featurette sharply satirises those fawning performer portraits that so often accompany features on discs, while also reflecting the actual conditions on the set, where Gillespie insisted that everyone at all times relate to Bianca as a real girl, rather than a RealGirl©.

It is a shame that there is no audio commentary, but then again, perhaps there is one from Bianca herself, if we just listen more carefully...