Guest post: BULLITT's Alan Trustman on DRIVE and the potential for Ryan Gosling to be the next McQueen

Over the last few weeks I've been corresponding with BULLITT screenwriter Alan Trustman and in one of his emails, he asked me who I thought the modern day Steve McQueen was.  I mused over the question a bit and even asked some of my friends who they thought measured up.  We had a few candidates, with the best one being Ryan Gosling.

I reported this back to Alan, who mentioned he had several screeners to choose from and that he'd move one featuring Gosling to the top of his list.  Soon enough, Alan sent me the following email with his thoughts on DRIVE and Ryan Gosling's potential to be the next McQueen.  With his permission, I'm reprinting it here.

I loved DRIVE’s trips down my memory lane. 

In BULLITT, we were pushing mass audience taste byblasting two victims with a sawed-off shotgun onscreen,which we didn’t think anyone had ever done before.DRIVE pushes that limit to the edge and beyond with itsdeliberate onscreen savage butchery. Fortunately wewere watching the DRIVE Academy screener so whenmy wife felt sick, she up and left. 

Question: Will the audience segment with that sort oftaste require it of Gosling movies in the future? Willthey be disappointed if it isn’t there? And if it is there,what will it do to Gosling’s appeal? 

We thought our BULLITT car chase would be the carchase to end all such chases. Peter Yates betteredhis ROBBERY camera-on-the-following-bumper shots,the San Francisco hills were glorious, and my soaringhubcap and ebb-and-flow of tension sequences werekept by Academy Award winning editor Frank Keller.We never dreamed that we were setting a requirementfor action flics and that the chase would be copieda hundred times, often in the very same locations. Ithought the DRIVE chase was pretty damn good, butL.A. at night can’t match San Francisco by day, and theDRIVE chase fails to match the BULLITT ebb-and-flow oftension standard. 

Another Gosling question: Can he be the newMcQueen? The physical resemblance is striking, butnobody has told him to study the facial expressionsof Bogart and McQueen and no one has given him thecharacter mantra he needs to say to himself before heshoots each and every scene so that he never seemsunsure and lost and the mass audience will see him asa star they love and not just a sexy lookalike wannabe. 

Good luck, Ryan Gosling.