Jake Gyllenhaal for Brokeback Mountain (2005) Interview

Exclusive Jake Gyllenhaal interview
5th May 2006
Posted by: Ryan Izay

Question: Riding a horse. I hear you hadn’t done much of that before.

Jake Gyllenhaal: No

Q: Is it fun taking a project like this when you can learn some new skill like that?

J.G.: The best thing that I got out of it was I got a dog out of the process. I started riding and I’d always wanted to a get a dog and I just thought, “well, maybe it’s time to get a dog.” I’ve had an interesting relationship to animals growing up; kind of a distant one. It was a real opportunity to get close to animals, you know, horses, and dogs, and sheep, and I took it on. For a city boy to be riding a horse, it was great. My dog has changed my life and since then my sister has two cats, my parents have three cats and I have two dogs. Literally since this movie.

Q: What dog did you get?

J.G.: I have a German Shepherd and I have a Puggle. It was too cute not to get.

Q: Was it a sheep dog?

J.G.: No, I wanted a bigger dog than that, I wanted at first to get a guard dog, so I got a Shepard. German Shepard.

Q: I read that you felt drawn to the loneliness of this role. Why is that? Why this longing for loneliness?

J.G.: I don’t know, and it’s an unconscious thing, I think. I don’t know if it’s a longing for it. It’s just something I relate to. Something in it. I didn’t realize that either that it was going to be that lonely until we got out there. Both movies, both Jarhead and Brokeback Mountain were the topographies of…the topography of both the movies were like desert and then huge mountains. It was nothing but nature around, and your own mind. So, I don’t know if I really understood that that’s what it was going to be. When you read the script, you’re like, “Oh, cool. I get to ride horses,” and then you’re like alone for three months. I don’t know if I knew that at the time.

Q: Did you find God?

J.G.: Oh, wow. I don’t know. Umm…I can’t… No.

Q: At lest on Jarhead there were a lot of other people in the cast. This was much lonelier I am assuming.

J.G.: Yeah. I mean in a different way too. Yeah, it was much lonelier. There was a real sense, you do understand that when you’re in the armed forces they put you with twelve to fourteen guys that you’re pretty intimate with, because there is a comfort there. It’s a real comfort. It’s not as comforting being on your own or with just one other person and not speaking. There’s a real structure and there’s a reason for the structure. And also just when we were shooting, I remember I would go home on the weekends and I’d be alone for two days in Calgary and the only thing I’d be waiting for was the Calgary Stampede, which was going to happen in a month and a half. I remember being like, “What are we going to do? The Calgary Stampede’s coming in like a month and a half! Yeah!”. So, yeah, it’s a different mindset.

Q: But your character is actually quite gregarious compared to Anis, who is the real loner.

J.G.: I think there’s a part of him that wants to progress, wants to change, and wants to move forward and he’s constantly pushing Anis to come out of his shell, but it’s that dance between the two of them that I think makes the two of them fall in love. If Anis were to completely come out of his shell, would the two of them still be in the relationship that the two of them are in throughout the film? I don’t know. And it was a struggle to keep that up when you’re feeling a little lonely.

Q: You had mentioned how making Jarhead changed your perspective of the military. Did the making of Brokeback Mountain open your eyes to anything imparticular?

J.G.: I wanted you to say, “Did it change your perspective on gay cowboys”. It’s very hard to make this experience into a literal one, or the movie into a literal one. It’s about the struggles of two people dealing with intimacy, to me. What I learned from the movie was that those imperfections, and at the same time that you don’t have this ideal idea of love. You know, this thing you see in movies all the time, which is like, “Oh, it’s supposed to happen between these two people.” You know? Particularly a guy and a girl. You’re supposed to get the girl, you’re supposed to lose the girl, and you’re supposed to get the girl again. And when you get the girl again then the whole thing is all good. You know, yeah we talk about sometimes when you wake up the next morning and you’re brushing your teeth together, but we don’t ever usually talk about that in movies, and when we do it’s with a guy and a girl and we know that. But this was like putting it in an environment we had never seen before, and if I learned anything it was working with Ang Lee there’s a real benevolence in everything he does. I remember when I saw Sense and Sensibility, my Mom always says that I walked out saying, “I feel so clean.” I think you walk out of this film feeling devastated in a lot of ways but also feeling a real sense of benevolence, and I think the process of making the film produced that too. I mean, yes, he manipulated us. Yes, in a way he very gently abused us, but I walked out of this experience going, there’s a real benevolence to this. Like if Heath and I could do this, then it should be okay for the real people who are really doing this to do it.

Q: When you and Heath had to approach the intimate scenes, did you discuss it before so you would have a comfort zone or did you just throw yourselves in? Did you have a shot of vodka?

J.G.: Heath did, I think, but not me. Yeah, we talked about it, we joked about it, we would poke fun while we were doing it. Actually, I don’t really remember as much as I would like to for a press junket, unfortunately. It was one of those things where you don’t make it into the biggest deal. I mean, it was really important for me to portray a marine in the right way. It was very important to me, but if I thought about all of the soldiers now that I was trying to play, I think it would have put too much pressure on me. Just like it would have put too much pressure on the scene if we were like, “What are we going to have to do? Oh my God, we have to do this!”. I wasn’t up the night before. To me the physical stuff was easy. It’s a choreography. It’s a dance. That’s how we did. Just like in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it was like the fight scenes were like love scenes and everyone draws a metaphor for those. It seems to be harder for everyone to go, “Oh, the love scenes in this movie are like fight scenes.” And they are very similar. They do have a choreography. Very aggressive and that for us was like doing a dance. We were choreographing a fight scene. It was a choreography, so for me it was just getting the steps right for the camera and for Rodrigo. It’s amazing as an actor the things you are feeling how it translates, and when you’re not, how it translates.

Q: The scene in the backseat with Anne Hathaway; the same thing?

J.G.: Now it gets more complicated. That was…She’s a very beautiful girl. That’s all I can say. She’s very, very beautiful.

Q: You mentioned that the characters have to do a dance with each other. What about Jack’s dance with the rest of his life? Do you think he was living two lives, or was he comfortable with himself having part of that in reserve?

J.G.: I think Jack is a bad dancer, first and foremost. He can’t waltz very well, and in the scene where he has to waltz with the girl, Anna Faris’s character, I couldn’t ever get it. I don’t know why. I look like a fool if you look at it again. I think Anis is balancing things much more than Jack is. I think the world Jack lives in is a different kind of world of a different kind of denial. He and his wife are necessarily the most communicative kind of people. You don’t really spend a lot of time seeing how the two of them really love each other, as you do with Anis and Alma. It’s funny, I walked into all of those scenes with Anne thinking, “She knows.” I never was hiding anything from her as an actor. I just thought, “We both know. I’m going off to go fishing. She knows what I’m going to do. How could she not?” Heath’s whole thing was hiding, and hiding, and hiding. I think that’s what makes the two of us different as personalities. I’m just not the kind of person who can really hold in. You ask any of my friends. Unless it’s a very important secret or something they really need me to hold onto, I’m the first person to be like, “I’m really feeling this, and I really need you to know.” I think that our personalities definitely play into, but I do think he’s dancing but his dance is more of a rain dance than a ballet.

Q: I hate to ask you to speak for Heath’s character, but at one point you say that it’s so difficult going without. Do you think that Anis is going through that same thing, or is he just missing you?

J.G.: My interpretation is that I don’t think he is. I think he’s just missing me and I think that I’m just missing him. I think that people have different ways of trying to find intimacy, and searching for intimacy. You know, you close your eyes and you picture someone, you know what I mean. I think there is with Jack, he has had experiences before, and I don’t think that Anis has. Ang and I have talked about that a lot, before we shot the movie. But I think that Jack going to Mexico is the same thing as never ever, ever, ever going to Mexico. They’re like a ying and a yang, which is why you ask yourself, “How does Anis even know there’s stuff like that in Mexico?”

Q: Does he?

J.G.: He does, because he says to him, “I heard what they got for people like you in Mexico.” So that choice for the two of them to do the opposite thing…

Q: Did Anis want to go to Mexico?

J.G.: No, in some ways I think maybe Anis’s love is even stronger in that way because there is a faithfulness to that, and I think you see that happen. I think Jack eventually goes, “I’m going to have to go on with my life. I’m going to have to find someone else and find an intimacy with him and try and figure that out.” And he does. He says at the end… His Dad says he brought some other guy here and they were gonna work on the farm.

Q: You appear to be a very kind person, but then you were kicking some guy in Jarhead. Is there a darkness in Jake Gyllenhaal?

J.G.: I don’t know. If you don’t know it yet, you’ll know it soon. I will hopefully play roles where all that stuff comes out. Darkness is a pretty broad term. I don’t know what that it, but there’s definitely, hopefully, much more sides than I’ve shown in film up to this point. Hopefully I’m not done yet.

Q: What are you doing next?

J.G.: I’m doing this movie, speaking of darkness, I’m doing Zodiac. David Fincher. About the Zodiac Killer. I play a cartoonist, actually. I play Robert Graysmith who is a cartoonist who became obsessed with the case and eventually solved it, even though they never found Zodiac.

Q: We all care a great deal about what people think of us, which is a large part of the film. How do you feel about it?

J.G.: Well, I think Jack in particular is someone who cares a lot about what others think of him. I do think that there’s a big part of that I can relate to, but I also think that there’s a part of me…I made this move almost two years ago now, and I’ve really changed since then and am changing. Ang says a really beautiful thing about the movie. He says, “ I think Brokeback Mountain is a place where the two of them get to go where nobody is judging them and nobody is worried about pretending to be something they’re not, and that we all have our Brokback Mountain. And if you’re in love with somebody now, or you’re married to somebody now, or you’re in a relationship of any kind, and if you bring them to that place and you’re still in love with them, then you’re truly in love. We all have that part of us. Ultimately it kind of goes away when you’re really intimate with someone.

Q: You and Heath achieve an onscreen chemistry that most male and female leads don’t manage. What was the process you used to achieve that? How did you choose to play it?

J.G.: There are so many complications to this and describing exactly what it is… For Heath and I, I think it was a friendship and a trust. As actors we were going to go someplace we both were afraid of and we knew that we were, and we just trusted each other somewhere. And in that trust I think there was a chemistry and there was a connection. I’m describing it like we were on special teams. It was like Heath and I were a team and then Anne and I were a team and Michelle and Heath were a team, and we all were sent out to run different plays. We just had to trust each other. So there was this really interesting. I don’t know what it was for us, being straight. We didn’t have that complication that you usually have when you’re working with someone that is a female. We would be here for an hour with me trying to describe this. I think he was a great guy and we were just sort of friends from the beginning and we both admired what it took to play both the characters we were playing. It was like we knew at a certain point we only had each other, because never knew how people were going to respond to the movie. So we just joined up and said, “Fuck ‘em, let’s go for it.” And we did and I think you probably see that and that’s a lot of the chemistry. I’ve done scenes with women that I haven’t necessarily been attracted to in movies, and I’ve done scenes with women I probably shouldn’t have been as attracted to. But I relate to that and at a certain point it is pretty mundane and pretty cold no matter what you’re doing or who you’re doing it with. But Ang did it is such a tasteful way that it’s kind of hard to look at it… There are many things that if you had asked me to do, I would have said no, but it was done in such a respectful and beautiful way.

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