In dreams

In a new article, Jake Gyllenhaal describes the dreams and nightmares, asleep and waking, that haunted and helped him in making End of Watch:

My dreams are often very intense. After waking up, it's mostly just individual images left behind, and above all, moods and feelings. Sometimes they are so strong that they accompany me for hours through the day. Particularly intense dreams provide a link between our consciousness and our unconscious. They illuminate who we are, and make us think about ourselves, which is not always pleasant. Successful movies, in my opinion, do the the same thing.



The police action took place mostly at a time when I am usually sleeping. It was a unique, dreamlike atmosphere to drive in the early morning hours through the city, where so many people were sleeping peacefully. I was with police who had to be wide awake and had to deal with all the nightmares that came crawling out of the shadows. Inside the patrol car, I felt like I was in an enclosed space, like a protective bubble, safe and secure, as in a dream. Leaving the patrol car to confront the threatening reality each time was a kind of awakening. A strange feeling.



When I came home in the morning, after the end of the shift, I often couldn't sleep. When I eventually managed to fall asleep, those images haunted me in my dreams. That was a kind of catharsis. The dreams helped me cope with the experience. All these nightmares, real and in sleep, cast a new light on my own life, which I've learned to re-appreciate and enjoy.

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This Railroad Revival Tour photo shows Jake in the opposite state of hirsuteness from the article photo:



Andythet Photography || 35mm || *Stowaway Diaries* RRT 2 Year anniversary :: DAY 4 :: April 24th, 2011 Marfa, Texas || One Crazy Easter

(Thanks to IHJ for the scan.)

Stars in the city

Jake Gyllenhaal out and about in Manhattan this week with co-stars (America Ferrera and David Harbour), friends (Marcus Mumford) and Jonah Hill:

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A shot of jake from the filming of Brothers. With a crew member:

A face in the crowd

Jake Gyllenhaal celebrated his Drama League nomination yesterday by joining the other 19,032 nominees at Madison Square Garden to watch the Celtics/Knicks playoff game.












Looks like Jake got a kick out of Spike Lee:

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The first still from An Enemy:

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Random shots: Jake on the street:





Jake with Glen Hansard prepare for the Poetry & the Creative Mind benefit last week:



Jake at the Edible Schoolyard benefit last week:

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(Thanks to Jake Gyllenhaal Brazil/Monica for the second shot, which looks lke a screen grab of Jake on the jumbotron. And to Stephanie, as always.)

The streets of New York

Jake Gyllenhaal on a SoHo stroll in New York on Friday. Jake wasn't just snapped by the paparazzi. A Chinese blogger posted these pictures of Jake walking into his/her shot:




And here's Jake in front of SoulCycle NoHo:

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I listened to this chapter of The Great Gatsby last week; it's Nick Carraway describing the city:

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for the solitary restaurant dinner– young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.

Jake's performance received a nice review in the South China Morning Post:

Australian director Baz Luhrmann's film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel about ambition, materialist success, identity, romantic obsession and failure is one of the most hotly anticipated movies of the year. Besides reading Fitzgerald's silky, sinuous prose on the page, you can now prepare yourself with this audiobook read by Jake Gyllenhaal. So smooth, cool and balanced is the Academy Award nominee's narration that it begs the question: why wasn't he chosen to play Nick Carraway instead of Tobey Maguire? His voice mellifluously conveys the beautiful rhythms of Fitzgerald's unsurpassed writing yet is supple enough to capture Carraway's satirical amusement at the doings of his cousin, Daisy, and her brutish husband, Tom Buchanan, and the weary melancholy of his grand disillusion - embodied by the titular Jay Gatsby, whose love for Daisy inspires the grandest of illusions. My only gripe is that Gyllenhaal doesn't quite capture the famously elegiac ending, both defiant and deflated. And the crashing piano doesn't help.

Amen to the Tobey Maguire casting. I haven't reached the end of my listening yet, so I can't comment. Nothing can match actually reading the end for the first time, so I don't think I'll be disappointed.

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A few shots from last week's gala for the Academy of American poets at Lincoln Center: