Ryan Gosling trades in his fast muscle car from Drive for an even faster dirt bike in the crime thriller The Place Beyond the Pines.

Pines re-teams Gosling with Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance for a movie that serves almost as an unofficial sequel to 2011’s Drive.

Gosling plays Luke, a motorcycle stuntman who turns to bank robbing to help make ends meet. That doesn’t sit too well with Bradley Cooper’s character, a rookie cop tasked with taking Luke down.

Joining the two are Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta and Dane DeHaan (The Amazing Spider-Man 2).

A lucky few got a chance to see Pines when it screened last September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it earned considerable praise. The film’s March 29 release date can’t get here fast enough.

Check out the gallery above, for new stills from “The Place Beyond the Pines.” Then tell us: do you think this film will be another box office hit for Gosling? 

Ryan Gosling took on what is literally a dream role for the 31-year-old Canadian star, re-teaming with his Blue Valentine director, Derek Cianfrance for their latest, The Place Beyond the Pines.

In the movie — released at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7 – he plays a stunt motorcycle rider who robs banks on the side.

In a candid conversation with Celebuzz, the star of The Notebook and The Ides of March revealed why the premise of the film appealed to him so much.

“I’ve always had this fantasy about robbing banks, but I’m scared of jail,” Gosling said.

It was that fantasy that Gosling revealed to Cianfrance in a casual conversation during one day — only to learn that the filmmaker had just written the screenplay for The Place Among the Pines, including that very same scenario.

In order to make the sequence more realistic, the production used civilians and real-life bank employees. But the effect was lost once they realized they were being jacked by a movie star.

“We thought they would be scared and we got half way into it and looked down and everybody was just smiling,” laughed Gosling.

“We had to do a lot of takes and I had to do a lot of screaming, a lot of carrying on, in order to try and scare all these nice people.”

While a stuntman performed most of Gosling’s riding in the movie, the bank heist required the actor to perform the dangerous sequence himself.

“He had to leave the bank and get on a motorcycle in one shot, drive into traffic, be pursued by a police officer, narrowly avoiding traffic in the intersection,” recalled Cianfrance, to Celebuzz.

“Ryan had to avoid 36 cars in this intersection and it took us 22 takes to get there.”

Though clips haven’t been publicly released for A Place Beyond the Pines beyond its Toronto premiere, watch a trailer for Gosling’s upcoming film Gangster Squad, below:

If Eva Mendes looks a little frail in her latest film, The Place Beyond the Pines, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. The sultry brunette lost 15 pounds for the role of a single mom abandoned by her lover played by Ryan Gosling.

“I wanted it to feel that this baby had depleted me,” Mendes told Celebuzz. “I wanted it to feel like he has sucked the life out of me both literally and figuratively.”

Mendes’ skinny frame is revealed in a wardrobe selected from her own personal collection, including a pair of jean shorts she can still fit into after 20 years.

“I’ve had them since 1992, since high school,” she laughed. “I don’t remember them being as snug but yes, they still buttoned.”

How did Mendes make it into Ryan Gosling’s latest movie?

Mendes pursued director Derek Cianfrance after seeing his breakout movie, Blue Valentine, also starring Gosling.

She arrived at her audition dressed as the character, wearing black liner on her lips, big earrings and big hair.

“I was waiting in the lobby and Derek and the producers were walking back and forth and no one noticed me,” she recalled. “So I was like, ‘Nice, I’m onto something.”

In order to convince him she was right for the part, she took the director on a tour of her old neighborhood in the Echo Park/Silverlake area of Los Angeles, a place that might have spawned a character like the one she plays in the movie.

“I showed him the first place that lived when I came to LA and I showed him what school I went to and our first house,” she said. “It was just a beautiful, beautiful hour and half drive.”

Dressing down for her role in The Place Beyond the Pines, Mendes found it to be a look she was comfortable with in her everyday life, the opposite of the red carpet and glamor the world expects of a movie star.

“The photographers at the red carpet, they’re always yelling at me to come back because they’ll say, ‘Turn around!’ I say, ‘I am not a show pony, people. I am not my little pony!’ I tell them that and they laugh, but I certainly am not the one who’s parading on the carpet,” she revealed. “In fact I walk through, I turn, I smile and hopefully you got it.”

Watch Mendes discuss her recent turn in Girl in Progress, where she plays a single mother: