Ensemble

Is Jake Gyllenhaal having trouble deciding what to wear for the Man of the World cover shoot? There seem to be a lot of props to choose from. Or perhaps he was just thinking really hard, something he seems to be doing a lot lately.



In both "Prisoners" and this, you have so much going on beneath the surface -- they're performances that stick with you. It's no coincidence they're my two favorite performances of yours. You seem to be digging deeper than ever before in your work. Is that due to what Denis asks of you, or did you just come to a realization of sorts?

Yeah. I feel a desperate need to bring that to everything that I do. And I feel that every interaction that I have, be it in the interaction that we're having now, or I go out on the street, whoever I see, whoever I meet, in my life, my friends, the people I love, my family... each on of those things in between each project I do is an accumulation of an experience and I want to put all those things, even if it correlates to the movie I'm doing or not. It's all inside me, it's how I grow. So, I don't want deny that stuff and then go and make a movie. I want to take all that stuff with me and put it into the experience I'm having. And that's a decision I made, I started to realize, "That moves me. Oh, I detest that. Oh..." Whatever it is, and bring it in to the performances. I think you get to a certain age where you start doing that and you're no longer feeling that.. I don't know (Laughs).



So I'm seeing more of you in every performance now.

I think so. I think so... I mean, I've become a lot more obsessed with the specificity of characters and like you said, my work, the choices I make, also being on stage was a really big evolution for me. Getting back on stage last year, I will again next year, to me, being a part of... I don't know... I just feel more alive in what I'm doing.

I can't explain it in any way, except the relationships I make with the people I make movies with matters to me the most and how we interact. I'm about to go do this movie about Everest with Baltasar Kormakur, directing the movie, and I know the relationship we have there, like, we will explore. I will listen to him and what he needs and then I'll go into unknown territory for him as a result. I don't now what that's about. I don't know what happened. I just know I went like, "Oh, now's the time." There's no other time but now to go do it. I'm going to make a bold choice and if someone doesn't want it they can cut it out.

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As far as Italy, at least. Jake and other members of the the Everest cast and crew took a tour of the Eternal City with Imago Artis Tours.



Some information on the Cinecitta sets for Everest. (Spoiler alert if you don't know what happened on the mountain.)

… the area of ​​7,000 square meters topped by a depth of 80 meters in width and 20 in height, the pool - in the past used by Martin Scorsese on "Gangs of New York" and the well-known series "The Borgias "- has been used to recreate the base camp of the tragic Everest expedition of 1996...

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And here's Jake at Il Gabriello restaurant in Rome:

The long tease

There's been a mountain of Jake news today. First off, a longer, but still too short, red band teaser trailer for Enemy. Warning that the trailer reveals some things better left unseen before your first viewing:



Take a look at the women of Enemy here.



And the man:

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From a new cover story in Man of the World magazine:

"It's taken me a long time in my career to realize that you can't be good at everything. You sometimes have to give something up. There are limits," the 33-year-old movie star says. "I do care about the stories people want to tell. But then I want to get back to my honest self for the directors I work with."



"It was just a shot in the dark—it was all about the relationship I had with Denis. For me, that's what movies are all about," he says. "Acting is a very strange job, as well as an amazing one, because it requires great trust. Your relationship with a director is very sacred, a sensitive space. I just can't do it with everyone. And that's what I have discovered about myself."

"The movie business is largely just stuffing actors in this place, and this place and this place," he says, noting that he typically takes time off to regroup between projects. "But it's time in your life that you can't have back."



"I was at a point in my life where I was struggling with the idea of reconciling parts of yourself—that we can exist just as one person," he says of the mystery movie. "Perceptions of who we are are never deadly accurate. I think we all come across as different people to different people in our lives."



"It's all about a level of commitment—how far will you go for a director you believe in? How far will you go for a story you believe in? I've always worked as hard as I can on everything I've done. But now I feel like I'm listening to myself and realizing that we have a finite amount of time, and how you spend it is really important."



We'll see how far Jake is willing to go for Baltasar Kormakur, seen here on set in Rome.

Seeing red

Enemy promo is heating up: a teaser trailer for the red band trailer:



Mixing the sacred and the obscene: Jake in St. Peter's:



And here, on a Roman sidewalk:

When in Rome...

Updated with fresh pics: Berlin today, 4/7/11:




And Rome last night:








... you promote a movie. At least, that's what you do if you're Jake Gyllenhaal and Duncan Jones, who brought Source Code to the Eternal City. Both Jake and the movie were very well-received by the press.



From reading google translations of several stories, we now know that if Jake were about to live his last eight minutes in Italy, he'd call his family... then eat a plate of pasta. Also, he's not a big sci-fi fan; his author of influence for the movie was George Orwell. Duncan listened to all his ideas and used maybe a quarter of them. E.g., it was Jake's idea to offer to pay the woman for the cell phone, in the movie.

And now you can see Jake answer the questions on video:



Watching Jake and Duncan is more fun than the answers.





Video of Jake and Duncan doing an Italian interview. It's hilarious to watch their expressions as they wait for the questions and answers to be interpreted:



More Rome Jake: posing and shopping with Duncan.






And yet another brief Jake/Duncan interview:

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Some bonus Jake in Madrid. First up, the press conference with Duncan:

Rueda de prensa Código Fuente

And Jake on Source Code, being an Oscar nominee and End of Watch:



Very interesting comments about his role in EoW. I wonder what he means.

Then more of Jake with fans:



(Photos from IHJ.)

Buon appetito!

As Jake and Reese continue their cultural, retail and culinary tour of western Europe, a wee sign on the wall outside this establishment caught my eye.



It sounded so familiar. Then I remembered where I heard the name of the restaurant before.

I wonder if he suggested they order the artichokes?




Grazie a IHJ per le fotografie.

Encore: Vive la France !

Reese Witherspoon is Vogue's November cover girl, and there are a few Jake Gyllenhaal tidbits in the story. Plus some gorgeous photos of Reese.





Along the Avenue Montaigne again, this time at Theyskens's atelier, where Reese is dressed in a bustier-like Nina Ricci dress that, aside from being sexy, is a work of art. The mirrors of Theyskens's office have become a spiraling prism of Reese Witherspoon in black, complemented by Olivier's long, raven-black hair. She is talking about dinner the night before, when her boyfriend, Jake Gyllenhaal (who dropped by during makeup), wrote cute remarks in the restaurant's guest book (something about French melons), which his girlfriend found charming, her smile now bubbling like champagne in a black crepe flute. "He wrote, 'Vive la France!' " she says, laughing. Ah, Paris and love!


On Bastille Day, Reese is at another café. She has done her share of cafés in Paris. "It's the first time I've taken my kids," she says. She believes in taking the kids. "My girlfriend was saying the other day that it's like that famous Mark Twain line, about how travel is fatal to bigotry and narrow-mindedness—I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like that." Travel is also good for discovering croissants, crepes, and macaroons. Also for introducing her son to the toy boats at the Jardin du Luxembourg, or the French sewer tour. And then there's the Métro, a five-year-old boy's thrill. "He goes from one stop to another; it makes his day," Reese says, beaming. And on that very evening, as the French celebrated, she and Monsieur Gyllenhaal would take her nine-year-old daughter out late to see the fireworks—the Seine glowing, the Eiffel Tower a sparkler.



As far as the boyfriend goes, she doesn't like to talk about him so much, and it can make you feel a little tabloid about asking. Still, this is Paris, city of light and love, and if you've heard the song by Carla Bruni about French president Nicolas Sarkozy—"I give you my body, my soul, and my chrysanthemum/For I am yours/You are my lord/You're my darling/You're my orgy/You're my folly"—then you figure, what the heck, it's Paris. You ask. "He's very supportive," she says. You press her. "Suffice it to say, I'm very happy in life, and I'm very lucky to have a lot of really supportive people around me who care very much for me, and, you know, that's all you can hope for in life. I am very blessed in that way."




She will tell you that she was with the guy she'd rather not blab about some weeks earlier—in Rome, speaking of beautiful cities—and that one night they went out to see the Trevi Fountain. It was late, it was beautiful, and she threw a coin in and made a wish. What did she wish for? Come on. Do you really think she's going to tell you that? "If I tell you," she says, "it won't come true."


(I know it's not the Trevi, but hey, they managed to go unpapped on the trip she's mentioning!)

And because I can't resist:



(Pictures courtesy of Vogue and IHJ and flickr.)

Jake Card

No doubt inspired by suvee's post, an enterprising ad agency has created some new, compelling ads commemorating the Year in Jake Gyllenhaal:

The first warms my local-team loving heart:

Fenway frank: $4.00



Souvenir cap: $31.99




Ticket for the Green Monster: $2999.00



Watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees? Priceless

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And this travelogue is pretty cool, too!

Gelato from Zodiaco Cafe: $1.50



Private tour of the Eternal City: €500.00




First-class flight from NYC to Rome, return to LA: $1999.00



Finally being able to hold hands in public? Priceless.

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I forgot the presents! A few pre-Christmas treats for you all - just a grab bag of small but rare goodies:

Pictures of Jake and Reese from the Rendition press conference.

A video with some Reese/Jake answers from the same press conference.

Very brief shots at the end of this video of Jake outside a BBM pre-Oscar party.

A couple of old "Day After Tomorrow" cast interviews. In the second one, Jake talks about Emmy Rossum.

Finally, a trailer for the movie Highway. They manage to mispronounce Gyllenhaal and Leto, so I don't know if it's authentic, but I've never seen a highway trailer before.

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Merry, Merry to the Christmas folks. We wish you all joy and peace. And Jake under your tree : ) Thanks to you all for the present of your presence!

(Photos courtesy of IHJ.)