Catching Up

Many news outlets have interviews with Jake Gyllenhaal and/or Duncan Jones this weekend, leading up to Friday's release of Source Code. We'll include a few snippets and links, as well as some Jake pics that have popped up. First up, Jake out and about in Los Angeles on Friday, apparently checking out a bike shop.

From The Gyllenhaal Code in the Boston Herald:

Perhaps Gyllenhaal’s gut feeling about the “Source Code” script can be chalked up to maturity — the actor who played the troubled teen in 2001’s “Donnie Darko” is now 30 years old.

“I feel like I’m lucky to have gotten to 30. There’s a great confidence that comes with it, a real security in understanding myself,” he said.

“This movie is actually a nice representation of that, because there’s a lot of trusting my instinct, trusting that I love this story and that I was going to go with it and never second-guessing it.”



Gyllenhaal hopes moviegoers will respond to his love story with Michelle Monaghan, set on a speeding train bound for destruction.

“In the end, it’s romantic. The choice for this guy is not like, ‘Oh, am I really going to save the world?’ The choice is that he starts as a guy essentially in someone else’s body who is nervous to ask this girl to get a cup of coffee and then has to get blown up eight times to realize that maybe he’s got to ask this girl out for a cup of coffee. So I do relate to that.

“Sometimes it feels like when you walk up to somebody and you’re intrigued by them, to gather up the gumption, to ask someone a question like that, feels like you’re blowing up inside eight times.”



From London Free Press:

Reflecting on his own career -- and putting it in context -- he observes, "As Donnie Darko was a metaphor for childhood into adolescence, I think this is a metaphor for adolescence into adulthood."

Besides, it's not like he has the option to stay young -- whether he's on or off-screen.

"If there's one thing I've learned from turning 30 it's that I really don't have a choice as to whether I'm going to get older or not. I have no intention of pretending I'm 15 when I'm 40. But, please, be aware there may be some mistakes along the way." ...

Regardless of the conceits of the plot, in his own life, Gyllenhaal describes regret as "a great teacher if you listen to it. I wouldn't redo anything."

Including, it turns out, some of his recent films. Both the romantic drama Love & Other Drugs, in which he co-starred with Anne Hathaway, and the video game-inspired Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time underperformed at the box office despite high commercial expectations.

"My experience has been the movies I'm most proud of always get found," he says when asked about Source Code's box office chances. "And with a movie similar in tone to this, Donnie Darko, it's become something more than it initially started as "¦ I believe Source Code will be discovered regardless. All you can do is movies you believe in and trust your instinct. If it's good, people will find it."



From Denton Record-Chronicle:

Jones said Gyllenhaal was instrumental in developing his character behind the scenes, and also in getting Jones involved with the project. The director said he read the script by newcomer Ben Ripley at Gyllenhaal’s request, and the two collaborated while fine-tuning the film after that.

“Jake and I had a very good shorthand as to how we wanted to approach this. We were able to be very improvisational,” Jones said. “We wanted to lighten the tone of the script, and Jake himself had an idea for what he wanted to do in each iteration. My job was to really make sure that we captured that, and to push Jake to do something a little bit more than what he was planning on doing, so we could really go to extremes at times. We had a lot of fun with that.”

Jones, 39, credits Gyllenhaal for helping to ease his transition from independent filmmaking to the Hollywood system, where directors must answer to a host of producers and studio executives that can sometimes threaten creative control. For example, when Jones made a decision to inject more humor into Ripley’s more straightforward script, Gyllenhaal was the first to back him.

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Here's Jake at the Harvard Westlake Film Festival:



At the conclusion of the film screenings, Gyllenhaal took the stage and shared his memory of Harvard-Westlake’s first film festival in Rugby Auditorium as well as his admiration for the filmmakers.

"Promise me you’ll all hire me for your movies," he said.

A brief video of Jake onstage with the students:



Jake at the Hoyle Jackson launch party:



Jake with Sam Asi, one of the Source Code press junketeers: