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Q&A with Jake Gyllenhaal

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Guilty.


There are many constraints built into this film… you’re in a call center, on the phone, there’s limited space to move. What drew you to that?

Jake Gyllenhaal: I guess I’m a fan of creating a certain type of resistance, and then I think that gives me a sense of freedom. For me, when I think about the process, I always thought it could be done in forty-eight hours—the movie, I thought we could shoot it in forty-eight hours. When I presented it to Antoine as something to direct, I said we could shoot it in five days. And then we ended up shooting it in eleven days. It became an issue for us while we were shooting because Antoine had been near someone that tested positive for Covid on a Friday, and we were supposed to start shooting on Monday. He had to go into quarantine for twelve days, which would have shut down everything. I should mention that he directed the entire movie from a van a block away that we hardwired to the stage I was shooting on and I never saw him the entire time. I didn’t consider it constraints; I considered it new land, a new world, a new creative space… one that I had not been in before. I also loved Antoine saying, “you cannot move from this space,” and I wanted to know what feelings would come from that. I’m a very physical actor.  He tends to move his camera a lot, but he forced himself to keep it still particularly for the first quarter of the film. As we faced all these technical difficulties in the process, and as these emotions started to come through the actors, and as I started to realize that all the research I had done was leading me down a very difficult emotional road, I didn’t like standing still or sitting still. I hated it after a while and I was forced to. All of these very primal, very childish—infantile—feelings came out of having to sit still. Which was a really interesting part of the process.

All of these very primal, very childish feelings came out of having to sit still

Because of Antoine’s situation, it almost sounds like he was method directing this film.

JG: After a while, it became so odd. He was in a van with like three or four monitors. Communicating through a walkie-talkie and through the phone. And I was in a room, with three or four monitors around me, communicating through a walkie-talkie with him. So we were complete mirrors of each other.

It seems like you were almost living a similar situation to an actual 911 control center worker. Covid is happening all around the world, your director is in a van, you can’t  move… it sounds pretty intense.

JG: Part of the advantage of the role is that he’s not a 911 dispatcher. It allowed for this brash and initial toxicity in him. And then all that crap comes out during the course of the film and there’s a sort of theatricality as the acts progress. We split the movie into five acts, twenty pages each. We shot twenty pages a day, one continuous take for each one of the twenty pages. Each one was staged with the actors on Zoom. I didn’t see them, but I heard them. The AD would cue them based on the script and whether I called them or they called me. And that was pressurized. One of the reasons I love Antoine is that he gave me so much ground and room to express.  And then he started to move his cameras in closer and closer to me as we got into that room. He started choosing lens where, no joke, the cameras were six inches away from my face. Focus was so sensitive and my movement was so important. You have six people operating three cameras and they’re this close to your face and they have masks on and you don’t. You’re in a period of time where any one of you could have contracted something. And you’re in a pretend world. And that was the odd thing for me. As soon as I took my mask off to act, which is always my space to sort of pretend, using my imagination, the actual risk to me sort of contradicted all the reasons I got into the whole thing and I thought, I’m actually unsafe. And I thought that added to all of it. I think we were all pent up. There were all these political things going on, and I think all those feelings started to come through. That’s what’s so great about my job—there’s an allowance for feelings that you might otherwise shun or be ashamed of, and you are praised for when you express them in that space. You’re encouraged. 

I was fascinated by the world you guys created for this character. It’s almost reality, but that lever is dialed to 11 and his inner anxieties have permeated his entire space. There’s a blurring of subjective reality and actual reality. What sort of conversations did you have about that?

JG: First, it was really important that as soon as Emily calls, it sets off this sort of fantasy. And the movie is a fantasy. Because essentially, I think the movie is about how we judge people and how we project on people that we can’t see, but only hear. And the choices that we make that we think are right and may not end up being right because of those assumptions. So often we’re wrong about what we think of other people. So often we don’t look within ourselves to realize, oh shit, that’s actually coming from me. I think we realize that if it was a psychological journey that was internal, that it became Greek, you know? As you progress from act to act in this five-act structure that we had created, in the end, I think the admittance of forcing out that feeling is almost an exorcism for him. It has to come out and it’s a horror film in a lot of ways. I always thought about that. When he admits to what he’s done and as things start to get worse, it becomes what Antoine refers to as Dante’s Inferno. That’s why he starts it in the fire. The feelings that come out of him become huge and that’s all part of that fantasy. We don’t live in a world where someone in his position says, “I did it, I’m sorry. I will not be redeemed on this earth but I will be redeemed spiritually because I have admitted and expressed this truth.” That’s a necessary thing. Both Antoine and I believe that big feelings needed to be there, because truthfully, there are big feelings in those ideas. There is a world—maybe more so in the Danish version—where those feelings are sort of held back and you see a man making a decision. But for us, it was so important that those feelings come out like snakes. You see Medusa’s head and it has to come out that way. For us, it did. That’s more metaphor than reality.

Q&A with Oona Laurence and Jake Gyllenhaal

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Southpaw.

How did you two work together on the big dramatic scenes?

Oona Laurence: Those scenes were difficult, they’re really emotional. But I had Jake’s support and Antoine’s [Fuqua] support. And since we all went through this journey together, I got to know her [Leila] more as we went on. So when we shot those scenes, I really knew why she was crying. That scene was part of the whole journey. That was helpful in figuring out why she was crying and why she was upset.

“We needed to connect on a human level, not just character to character.”

Jake Gyllenhaal: There was a lot of improvisation. When Oona first came in to read, she walked in and we started to improvise different things. In explicit detail, I remember her saying, This is Jane my doll, and that’s John, and don’t mind his long hair, and I thought, this girl is incredible and then we started to explore. Antoine and I knew the only way this relationship would feel real was if we could actually connect to each other, on a human level, not just character to character. In the courtroom scene, there’s a lot of improvisation. Antoine had hired 5 or 6 real security guards and he said, Jake get’s wild – which I do – and just make sure he can’t get near Oona. And I didn’t know that they were real security guards. Antoine will roll for a long time, and as things got heightened, I tried to get closer to her. The first take I was able to hug her, and then I wasn’t ever allowed to do that again in any other take.

It was the same thing in the scene at the foster home where she hits me. That wasn’t written, we were just talking before the scene, and I said you can hit me if you want, and she said, I don’t want to hit you. And then we started to do the scene, and your dad, who is amazing, was like, it’s okay if you hit him (laughs) and I feel like there was a connection not just between me and you but also between your dad and me and you. There was permission given to enter the scene and give all yourself to the scene, and we all shared in that.

Can you talk about the incredible physical and emotional transformation you went through?

Jake Gyllenhaal: Antoine said he was going to shoot the film like a real fight. I didn’t know how to box so I trained for 5 months, twice a day. I figured if I trained twice a day for 5 months, that would be like training for 10 months! I would’ve done 3 times a day, I was so scared I’d look silly. I learned all the techniques and we’d go to fights on weekends and Antoine would send me film. I’ve seen so many fights over the past year, not just live, but the history of fighting and I was just in that world all the time. I didn’t do much else but learn how to fight and over time I went from pretty horrible to moderately okay. I really learned the skills and it changed my life in that way. We talked about the fact that Billy was not very articulate verbally, but he was hyper-articulate in the ring. That was where he could express himself. And the only place he really felt safe to express himself with his sensitivity and his vulnerability was with his daughter.

What’s the actor/director relationship like with Antoine Fuqua on set?

Jake Gyllenhaal: He was with me every morning when I went to my training sessions. From the very beginning. We were together through and through for all of it. So by the time we got to set, after discussions about character, the script, story, there was a secondhand language between us and we both understood exactly where we were going. We were extraordinarily close. When he lets an actor into the scene, he lets you go. He says, this is your space, you can’t break this – because it’ll hurt you – but this you can break and this you can break. He literally gives you space and says, do your thing.

Oona Laurence: He really let’s us do what we want with a scene, he let’s us direct it. He will throw certain things at us to experiment with, but otherwise we’re pretty free to try what we want to do. It’s great.

Q&A with Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Dan Gilroy, Bill Paxton, and Riz Ahmed

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Nightcrawler.

How did you come up with this idea, and learn about this world?
Gilroy: The original idea came when I was exposed to the world of Weegee, the New York crime photographer. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car, way back in the 1930’s. I just loved his photographs. And I thought it was a very interesting idea. And as it turns out, Joe Pesci did a movie on a similar subject called The Public Eye. When I moved to Los Angeles, I heard about the modern equivalent of Weegee, which are these “Nightcrawlers” who drive around at a hundred miles an hour with a dozen police scanners in their cars. As a screenwriter, this struck me as a very vibrant, kinetic world that I’d never seen before. And as interested as I was in this world, it didn’t really come together until the character of Lou plugged into the picture. So that’s when it actually became more of a character study – as opposed to the study of a world – in spite of how interesting I thought that world was.

Lou’s hunger, his drive, his ruthlessness, mimic that of a wild animal.

Can you discuss how you approached the character of Louis?
Gyllenhaal: Very early on, Dan and I were talking over the character and how we saw him. And Dan said to me, “I see this as a success story,” and I loved that— it was just brilliant to me. And he went on to describe how even though Los Angeles is a huge metropolis, it’s also surrounded by areas that are completely inhospitable to people: Deserts. Mountains. Ocean. And at night the edges of the city just fall off into blackness and nothingness. Wild animals come down from the mountain ranges and they infiltrate the city, scrounging for food. And I remarked that Lou was like a coyote, and he just said, “Yes, perfect!” And we went from there. I felt like Lou’s hunger, his drive, his ruthlessness, mimic that of a wild animal. I wanted him to be literally and figuratively hungry—I wanted him to walk into a scene, and to just to eat up whoever was playing opposite me, to drive through them until he got what he wanted. To not really hear what they’re saying, to just have my own agenda. And when you’re hungry, you only have one agenda; it’s primal. So that’s how it all started.

Ms. Russo, could you talk about becoming involved in the film?
Russo: Well, it helps to be married to the director! And he told me he was going to write a part for me, and I said, “Ok,” but thought nothing of it really—I mean, it’s hard to get a movie made, particularly one like this. So he gave me the script, and I thought it was brilliant, but I remember saying that the female lead needs some work! But you know… it didn’t. It took me a long time to discover Nina, because I’m not by nature a cutthroat person. So I didn’t know at first how to get a handle on her. But if I do ever cross moral boundaries, it’s usually because I’m afraid. Or I’m desperate. So once I found that, I was good to go with her. But it took me a while to find that.

Mr. Ahmed, can you talk about becoming involved, and getting to understand the character of Rick?
Ahmed: Well, I was in LA randomly for something else, and my agent called me and told me I had to meet Dan Gilroy. So we met for a juice or something (did I mention I was in LA?), and just went over the part. And he said to me, “Look, I’ve got this part, it’s a good part, but I don’t think you’re right for it at all.” And that really took the pressure off, I can tell you! When you know you already don’t have the part before you’ve started talking about it, that takes the pressure off. But he told me a bit about the character, and I remember one insight in particular that stood out, since it was so smart. He said that the character thinks like a three-legged dog. He’s so used to getting kicked he thinks it’s mealtime, when someone hurts him. So with that, and with the knowledge that I was expected to completely fail this audition, I just went for it without any anxiety at all!
Gyllenhaal: And of course when he came in, he was completely convincing. He just blew away everyone else we had been looking at. It’s amazing, the transformation he went through.

Mr. Paxton, can you talk about Joe?
Paxton: I just loved the script. The story is original; the characters are very well drawn. When I met Dan, we had a great conversation, and I knew I had to get involved in this. You don’t see movies like this getting made, frankly. This was an original film, and I think it’s a success purely for that reason. When I was reading the script for the first time and I got to the climax of the film, I didn’t see it coming at all, which is a rarity and a real credit to Dan.

Mr. Gilroy, can you talk about the score? It really sets the tone for the film perfectly.
As Jake mentioned earlier, we approached this as a success story. Not to celebrate what’s going on, but to highlight the fact that Lou sees this entire experience as way to achieve success. If you start on someone who is looking for work and end on that same person running a thriving business, maybe a question pops into your head: Maybe the problem isn’t Lou (although Lou is certainly a problem for other people in the film). Maybe it’s the society that creates and rewards Lou. When I discussed the score with James Newton Howard, we wanted to do a counterpoint, subversive score. We’re going counterpoint to everything you’re watching. Every time Lou does something wrong, we’re celebrating it. The scene where he steals the bike, there’s a little score that might fit into a kid’s movie! For this movie in particular, the score carries a lot of weight. It’s pushing against all of our natural inclinations to judge Lou. Which runs counter to a lot of scores that serve to pre-digest and underline the intended emotions of a scene… “In case you weren’t picking up that something bad is going on, we’re going to put insane string music to mirror the inner mind of the character.” And I think it’s a really brave score for that reason.

Q&A with Director Denis Villeneuve, Hugh Jackman, and Jake Gyllenhaal

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Prisoners.

The different reactions of each character to a horrible situation seem remarkably realistic: No one knows quite what to do, but they all feel they have to do something.

Jackman: One thing I think Denis is really drawn to is the moral ambiguity – the gray areas – of characters and life. And I think that’s what really attracted us both to this material. The idea of playing someone who you may be watching and thinking, “yeah, I’d definitely do that,” and then as the movie goes on, you think, “well, I’m not so sure I’d do that…” So it plays with all our ideas of heroes and righteous violence. When people are scared and in the most fearful places, they do things and allow things to happen that they wouldn’t normally. And I think that’s what is so evocative about the film.

Gyllenhaal: I think there’s a great benevolence to Denis’ work. When you see a movie like Incendies and even Polytechnique, there’s a sense of forgiveness regarding actions that we would normally feel were unforgivable.

“I think there’s a great benevolence to Denis’ work.”

The scene between Keller and Loki in the parked car is incredible. Can you discuss your approach?

Villeneuve: I shot the scene with two cameras. For a director it’s pure, deep happiness to see those strong actors get off the rail and go in a chaotic direction that would create life and strength, and the result that you see in the film is the improvisation of those two guys. And I had nothing to do with that—it’s just them, as actors, having the generosity and the will to play with art in a way that, for a director, is pure poetry and beauty. And I thank you guys for that.

The theme of control permeates the entire film.

Gyllenhaal: When Denis and I discussed this film, we talked about how there’s a real play between institution and individual, and that Hugh’s character Keller represented the individual, while mine represented the institution. And the irony is that there’s a very cyclical way this movie works in that they both imprison themselves and one another at the same time by not working together. And there’s a balance and equality when they listen to each other. And that is, I think, the faint glimmer of hope that the institution and the individual exist together for a very particular reason. In a time today when we have so many intense responses to the institutions we’re involved in (the government, and so forth), that really do need to work in tandem. I think that was always the idea: the desperation for control from the institution and from the individual, and if they let go and balance each other out, they may be able to solve this case.

Jackman: Specifically for my character, who is a recovering alcoholic and a survivalist, there’s so much that’s obviously about trying to be in control. And in eight days of the film, you watch it all unravel. I always have a soft spot for characters like Keller, where you get the feeling it’s been hard for him to be the best version of himself—to be a good man. The title to me has always referred to us being prisoners of our innermost fears, and how we try every day to control those fears, really, whatever they are.