Author Topic: Gyllenhaal-aissaance Continues with Jean-Marc Vallée’s DEMOLITION (April 8 2016)  (Read 11451 times)

Online southendmd

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Unfortunately, Lisa was sick and had to cancel.  So, no Jake for me.  In any case, it opens this weekend.

She did get to see him film a scene at the Boston Garden from his upcoming film "Stronger" about the marathon bombing.


Offline CellarDweller

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Unfortunately, Lisa was sick and had to cancel.  So, no Jake for me.  In any case, it opens this weekend.

aww, that's too bad!  Get better soon, Lisa!!!


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.vulture.com/2016/04/jake-gyllenhaal-on-his-new-movie-demolition.html

CHAT ROOM
Jake Gyllenhaal
on His New Movie
Demolition
Donald Trump, and
Acting Like an Adolescent
By Bruce Fretts
April 8, 2016
5:34 p.m.




In Demolition, Jake Gyllenhaal plays an investment banker who questions the conventional choices he’s made in life after the sudden death of his wife. The story arc mirrors the 35-year-old actor’s own path — not the dead-wife part (he’s never been married), but the fact that he’s recently veered away from traditional career moves like action franchises (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time) and rom-coms (Love and Other Drugs). Rather, he’s favored darker, more complex films like End of Watch, Nightcrawler, Enemy, and now Demolition.

The parallel isn’t lost on Gyllenhaal. “You go through periods of time when you’re convinced following the conventional route is the way towards happiness,” he says. “A few years ago I realized that following my own route was the way to happiness, and I was probably going to get a lot of flak for it. The irony is I have gotten more praise than flak, at least creatively.” Gyllenhaal talked to Vulture about the objects he got to obliterate in Demolition, his feelings on Donald Trump, and his memories of making City Slickers.


What drew you to Demolition’s script initially?
The unconventional quality of the whole thing. It’s a movie about loss, but it’s not. The movie starts in a very conventional way, and all of a sudden you just you have no idea where you’re headed. It knocked something in me like it does with my character, Davis. It’s not this huge epiphany or massive catharsis. And three quarters of the way through the movie you realize how unconventional it is, but in a very palatable way. A couple people have said to me, “Oh, he’s like Tyler Durden,” and I was like, “What?” [laughs] That’s the darkest movie ever made, and there is hope in the end of this movie.


You’ve never lost a spouse, and both your parents are still alive. What do you draw when you play a character in this situation?
I’ve lost people that I love and am very close to. It’s sort of easy to generalize loss, but it’s all different. [Director] Jean-Marc [Vallée] wanted there to be an awkwardness to the way you felt about my character. He struggles between apathy and numbness. I constantly struggle with my own feelings, like “What do I actually feel if I’m feeling anything?” I’m spending a lot of my time trying to exist within convention, and it was very easily relatable to me.


Do you feel like you’re at a stage where you can pick and choose projects now?
Well, there are still filmmakers who don’t want to work with me.


Really?
Yeah, [laughs] so many of them, but there are also filmmakers who do and as long as there are a few, then I hopefully will continue to keep working. But in terms of picking and choosing I try now to create stories that I really love and want to tell. I think storytelling is the most important part of movie-making over performance.


Yet Jean-Marc Vallée’s films are distinctive for the performances, like Matthew McConaughey’s in Dallas Buyers Club and Reese Witherspoon’s in Wild. Do you consider him an actor’s director?
Absolutely. He’s eliminated all that Hollywood vanity and the kind of bloated moving blob that a movie set can become. Simplicity is the key. Within simplicity we can get into the mess of human behavior. He comes at it from an editor’s point of view, so generally he’s always looking for truthful moments. He is an actor’s director, but he is truly a filmmaker, and the visuals are extraordinarily important to him. It’s a balance. He’s just an all-around wonderful director.


Davis reacts to his wife’s loss by literally and figuratively trying to destroy his world. Did you have a favorite thing to break?
I really loved taking a sledgehammer to that marble tabletop. That was fun. There’s something satisfying about cracking something and breaking it into pieces. I still have a piece of that marble as a paperweight that Jean-Marc gave to me as a wrap gift.


Did it feel dangerous? Did you ever think you might get hurt?
I feel like I’ve been asked that question on a lot of movies I’ve made recently. [Laughs] Yes, and that’s probably why I wanted to do it.


So are you an adrenaline junkie?
No. I mean demolishing a house is not an adrenaline junkie’s job, but there’s no success unless there’s a level of risk. And obviously in risk there is possible injury in the physical world, but also in the figurative. I always try and stay safe and thoughtful, but yeah.


In terms of what the demolition represents, I’ve seen you say you’ve always thought it was easier to destroy something than to create something. Do you feel like that’s a trend going on in the culture now, whether we’re talking about art or politics?
I see it everywhere. I see it in bullying. It’s a pre-adolescent behavior. Kids at a certain age build up blocks and a second later, they’ll kick them all down, and there’s this satisfaction. I see that when we talk shit about each other, when we criticize each other about things that are obvious projections, but hurt. People should be held accountable for that. Even in the political spectrum at this moment, I feel there’s an engagement of that preadolescent piece in all of us. I feel like Trump seems to be engaging that preadolescent part, but we need an adult as a leader, and we need an adult who ignites the adult in us. I only speak that way because I act in an adolescent way, so I need someone who’s my leader to show me how to act.


How do you act in an adolescent way?
Well, I’m an actor. [Laughs]


So you pretend for a living?
I actually don’t think I do, but I do think there is some sort of absurdity to the job. Kids should be allowed to have a tantrum. They’re in a world way bigger than they are. Their feelings are huge, and they’re very small. But you can’t do that when you’re an adult. Sometimes I get overwhelmed because I see the state the world is in. Sometimes I can shut it off, and apathy is ever present. But finding how we really feel — no matter how hard it is — I think that’s the journey.


This is the third film you’ve made with Chris Cooper, who plays your father-in-law in Demolition. You did 1999’s October Sky and 2005’s Jarhead with him. How did it feel different each time?
When I did October Sky with him, I had no tools on my belt, very few. I was flying by the seat of my pants. I tried to use as much talent fuel as I could, and I ran out halfway through. Chris had this massive tool belt of choices and techniques, and I didn’t understand him. He was cold to me the whole shoot. I was confused, but also I could feel his heart, very much like my character would feel about his character in that movie. When the movie ended, his heart totally opened up to me. He took all his tools and put them away into a shed, and we became friends. Then when we did Jarhead, I was obviously still continuing to learn. But when we did this movie, I came to it with my own tool belt, and I could see him really for the first time saying, “Oh I love that, I use that choice.” We laughed a lot and enjoyed each other in a way I didn’t know how to when I was young. It’s been a wonderful evolution with somebody who’s a legend and somebody whom I actually love.


You also work well with Judah Lewis, the young actor who plays the son of your quasi-love interest, Naomi Watts. Did the fact that you started out as an actor in movies around the same age he is now help you relate to him better?
Yeah, it’s tough being a kid in this business. It is an adult’s business, and he’s incredibly talented, sharp, and charismatic. And he believes in himself, which is really important. He has a family that’s supporting him, which is fantastic. At the risk of sounding totally cliché I definitely did see a lot of myself in him, and that was also really wonderful.


You made your film debut as Billy Crystal’s son in 1991’s City Slickers. What do you remember most about making that movie?
I remember a cow shitting all over a minivan [laughs] and watching 14 people from a movie crew try and clean it up and frantically stress about it like they never should. That’s my favorite thing about a movie set, when somebody runs up in a total panic like, “Oh my God, this is the most important thing in the world!” And in two days this moment is gonna mean nothing. [Laughs] That was the feeling I got from the memory of watching a cow shit in a minivan.

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Front-Ranger

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Great interview!  :D
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Sophia

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Anyone seen Demolition? In Europe - particularly Sweden - we haft to wait another few weeks for the premiere.  :-\ >:(

Offline Sophia

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Fenway Park, Boston. The right place to be tomorrow. To see Jake throw out the first pitch.  ;D

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/24/jake-gyllenhaal-interview-pushing-myself-is-part-of-my-life-film-demolition

Movies
The Observer

Jake Gyllenhaal
‘Pushing myself is part of my life’
Jake Gyllenhaal has driven his body to the limit for his acting roles.
Now it’s his mind that’s taking a hammering. He talks to Tim Adams

By Tim Adams
Sunday 24 April 2016
07.00 EDT



Jake Gyllenhaal: “I am a big proponent of continuous self-reflection, I don’t mean to be too lofty.”
Photograph: Dan Steinberg/Invision/AP




I meet Jake Gyllenhaal in a makeshift production office in an industrial estate outside Boston, Massachusetts. He is bright-eyed and sitting in a bare corner room. He closes the door on his dog, a big Alsatian, which roams outside among a team of assistants staring at screens and eating lunch. He has been here for six months making Stronger, a film based on the life of Jeff Bauman, who lost his legs in the Boston Marathon bombing and then identified one of the killers, who he had stood next to in the crowd. Gyllenhaal, who has a legendary work ethic, is both starring in and producing the film. He’s got to know Bauman well. “The irony is that, however terrible the situation was, it gave him a real meaning and purpose,” he says. “Jeff is quite a character. A hilarious person. The movie is very funny. It is a story of someone who had to learn how to become a father and an adult through an unbelievably difficult and horrific situation. It is a story of how to grow up.”

Having watched the last half-dozen films he has made back to back, I suggest to Gyllenhaal that he seems lately drawn to exploring the difficulties of such rites of passage; perhaps it’s the curse of his boyish looks. His latest release, Demolition, comes at the question obliquely. Davis, a cool, disaffected Wall Street banker, loses the wife he is not sure he loves suddenly, unexpectedly, and then tries to work out what to do next. To begin with, he feels not much at all. Then he starts to destroy everything about his hated former life, literally, with a sledgehammer and JCB. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (who made Dallas Buyers Club), Gyllenhaal offers a compulsive study of the unhinged strangeness of grief you don’t often see on screen.

“I think apathy is a feeling,” he says of the character. “I think that it is disrespected as a feeling. And I think this movie respects it. Not feeling, or not knowing how you feel, is a very large part of life.”




Jake Gyllenhaal with Chris Cooper in Demolition: ‘I think apathy is disrespected as a feeling, but I think
this movie respects it.’
Photograph: AP




At various points in the film, Davis tries to summon up “appropriate” responses, watching himself weep in a mirror, trying to behave like they do in the movies, something Gyllenhaal is at pains to avoid.

“I think conventions override our lives all the time,” he says. “And then the universe delivers something unexpected, and convention no longer works. In movies, change tends to be some cathartic epiphany that happens in a moment with a swell of music. But this is a subtle change. From 10 to 10-and-a-quarter. You don’t see the flower bloom, but you wake up in the morning and it has.”

Gyllenhaal studied Buddhism at Columbia University – “the closest I could find to a course in abstract thinking,” he says with a smile – and from time to time as he talks you can hear traces of it. “I am a big proponent of continuous self-reflection,” he says, then pauses, reflects, smiles again. “I don’t mean to be too lofty.”

His interest in Buddhism, in openness to the present moment, informs his acting. “I start off by crossing out stage direction in a script,” he says, “anything that suggests in advance how you are supposed to be feeling or behaving. There is a scene in that Meryl Streep movie on a white water raft [The River Wild]. Her family is kidnapped and a guy pulls out a gun and her first response to seeing the gun is to laugh. And then she gets terrified. I love those microcosmic honest details.”




Family business: Jake with his sister the actor Maggie Gyllenhall and his parents.
Photograph: Donald Weber/Getty Images




Gyllenhaal is a friendly, spirited presence. He doesn’t take things lightly but is never quite in earnest. When you ask about his life, he replies with answers about work – and though he is notoriously guarded, not all of this sounds like evasion.

He tends to divide his career – and his life – into a before and after. The shift happened about six years ago, just before he turned 30. After his early, edgy successes the cultish Donnie Darko and his Oscar-nominated performance alongside Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain, his career appeared to follow the Hollywood money. In 2010 he played the lead in the $200m Disney video-game adaptation Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the part of a Viagra salesman in the limp romcom Love and Other Drugs opposite Anne Hathaway (“dishonest nonsense”, according to the Guardian). Gyllenhaal wasn’t convinced that was all he was good for.

He took a breath. And then immersed himself in more challenging, less obvious films, beginning with the acclaimed low-budget drama End of Watch. To prepare, he spent five months working alongside real cops in the LAPD, on one occasion witnessing a murder during a drugs bust. After a life flirting with make-believe, the reality got to him, he says. In some ways, he has never looked back.

The change coincided with other shifts in his life. “A lot of things were redefining themselves. Not all of them good.” There was the death of his friend Heath Ledger. His parents, both film- makers, separated, leaving him and his actor sister Maggie, though long left home, “trying to figure out a way of the family still being together. People were moving and changing. I moved from Los Angeles to New York City.” The world of film seemed “more than usually absurd”. He made a pact with himself: to make it more meaningful. He wanted to find exactly what he was capable of.
The string of films he has made since have tested those limits. For Everest Gyllenhaal filmed in the Alps, Iceland and Everest base camp for three months (“It was worse for the crew – the actors talked about getting frostbite; the crew actually had it”). For recent boxing epic Southpaw he spent half a year in a professional gym. In Nightcrawler, a brilliantly unsettling film about an ambulance-chasing TV journalist, Gyllenhaal became feral-eyed, scarily thin. He suggests the shape-shifting, his literal body of work, is instinctive and necessary.

“When I started to learn the dialogue for Nightcrawler, the words and the punctuation were so particular that my body started to respond to it in a certain way,” he says. “I had this animal idea, like a coyote. I grew up in Southern California, and at night you could hear them howling sometimes as they tore apart an innocent animal, so I thought it should be like that. Coyotes always look sickly and have crazy eyes and wander round in the shadows. I could see that worked as a concept, and so I shaped myself to that idea.”




Into the wild: with Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. Photograph: Kimberly French/AP



Gyllenhaal grew up in a Hollywood family: his father, Stephen, is a director; his mother, Naomi Foner, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. Paul Newman and Jamie Lee Curtis were godparents. Donnie Darko, he suggests, was “a pretty accurate representation of my experience of adolescence”. It’s tempting to suggest that his masochistic dedication is a response to a perception that his entry into the business was gilded. Is it?

“Maybe,” he says. “I am certainly aware in interviews that it is brought up. ‘Gilded’ is a particular word for you to use. I am aware of how it looks.”

But he believes his particular ethic is more an ingrained part of his character than a reaction to perceptions of his background. “It’s part of my ancestry, I think, somewhere. My grandfather on my mother’s side was second-generation Jewish American. His father was a tailor from Poland, and he became a surgeon. He was the pride of his family. My father is from a long line of hard-working Swedes. Both were men who got up at 4.30 in the morning to start work. Pushing yourself both physically and mentally has always been a part of my life. From an early age, my dad would wake me up early to go for a run.”




Donnie Darko was a pretty accurate portrayal of my teenage years’: with Jena Malone in the hit 2002 film.
Photograph: Allstar




Although gossip columns have tried hard over the years to link Gyllenhaal with possible partners – Taylor Swift, Reese Witherspoon, his Southpaw co-star Rachel McAdams – he suggests that all the hard work has come at the expense of any long-term romance. In interviews Gyllenhaal has routinely said, in a vague manner, that he has been in love two or three times. I wonder, at one point, if he has always lived on his own as an adult.

“You mean, like, roommates?” he says, innocently.

No, relationships.

“Have I always?” He pauses for a moment, as if to try to remember. “No, I have lived with girlfriends sometimes. My house is always open to all my friends.”
There is another short pause that says he has nothing more to say on the subject. I wonder what he would like to do in the next six years.

He talks about doing more theatre – he has starred in two plays by the young British writer Nick Payne. He has inevitable ambitions to direct: “I would like to be watching people more talented than me play a scene and not have to sully it with my own lack of talent,” he says, not entirely modestly.

And what about beyond work?

“My dad, the Swede, said something beautiful the other day,” he says. “He said: ‘Jake, you’ve got to remember to have fun, too’. I had to go: ‘Oh? So it’s OK now? I’ve done enough?’ And he was like: ‘Yeah, why not turn that switch on?’” He laughs. And then he’s restless to get back to work on his movie.


Demolition is out on 29 April
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"