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:

Enemy front

While Everest films in Italy, Enemy begins its Stateside media blitz. DirecTV has an exclusive (and unimbeddable) feature. There are new interviews at Yahoo and Huffington Post.

Some highlights:

There were a lot of challenges Gyllenhaal faced filming scenes twice — once as his professor character, Adam, and then as occasionally working actor, Anthony (each with their own beautiful blond paramour played by Mélanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon, respectively). "I like working with actors who push me and who are more talented than me," Gyllenhaal said. "It always makes you better. I've had the opportunity to do that and in this case it wasn't true," he said of his scenes with himself.

On set, he tried different techniques, also acting opposite another actor who would later be digitally replaced with his own character. But he found it didn't quite work. "It became distracting," Gyllenhaal explained. "No matter how great other actor is — to see their choices was distracting because I knew I had already made other ones and I knew which way the story was going to go."

Instead, he preferred the tennis ball with the two dots. He would throw his voice to represent his other character — and if one were to watch it live on set, out of context, you might just think Gyllenhaal was going mad. "Boundaries got a little lost and that definitely affects you psychologically," the actor confirmed.

"I legitimately pictured a person in front of me," he explained. "This is going to sound odd, but I can picture and feel what it felt like in a moment that I had just done previously," he said, further describing a sort of sense memory he has, one that allows him to recall with precision exact film takes — often one of several. "Sometimes I can feel in my bones takes I've done," he says, admitting that his favorite ones don't always make the final cut.

When it comes to the two Jake Gyllenhaals in "Enemy," the idea might appeal to some, especially his female fans. But to him, having a duplicate version of himself just sounds like a bad idea. "I feel like there's enough of me to handle in just one of me," he teased.



Jake Gyllenhaal is pretty much the ideal candidate for a film interview. For what I do for a living, there's nothing worse than an actor who sleepwalks his or her way through an interview (though, considering how many he or she are often subjected to in a given day, it is at least understandable), not giving any thought to what is actually being said, just spitting out rehearsed line after line of predetermined PR-speak. I'm honestly not sure if Gyllenhaal would even be capable of that. He's quick-witted, but also puts so much thought into his answers that often I just want to interrupt and tell him that everything will be okay. It's obvious that Jake Gyllenhaal cares -- which is almost unique in a world in which it's cool not to care.

He told the story that suggests you two got drunk and came up with this idea.
Well, we didn't know how potent the wine was -- let's just say it that way. There were some moments that happened in our conversation. Not only did we connect and just sort of have an amazing discussion, but this woman turned to me at one point who was sitting next to us with her husband and she said, "I hate to interrupt your dinner, but I just want you to know that everybody always says that you look like my son. Can I show you? You are an exact duplicate of my son." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And she showed me this picture and Denis was like, "It's crazy! You look exactly alike!" And we didn't, in my opinion. But, it was the movie! How you could you not do a movie? Unless Denis planted this woman there [laughs].

So you didn't know what "Enemy" would be until that happened?
No, I didn't know what it was going to be until we sat there.

She should have a credit on the poster.
The woman? Yeah, I know. I bet that he planted her. No, but those things happened in our conversation -- those sort of fateful moments and I realized it was something that I had to be involved in.

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The makeup team from Prisoners won an award over the weekend at the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild Awards. Mowat on Jake:

“There are only a handful of actresses that will go to the lengths Maria did for a role. Her transformation was very real, right down to the progressive hollowing of her eyes. Both her and Jake were lovely to work with. It was actually my first time working with Jake. He was like an old-fashioned movie star; you just can’t take your eyes off of him. When he arrived on set the first day, he had long hair and a beard, which I had to get rid of. His initial ideas for the neck tattoos also had me worried. They were intended to be peeking out above his collar, which would have called for constant touch ups. But when it all came together, they were made more visible and he almost had a retro Russian look to him. The tattoos added to the mystery of his character to the point where you are not sure whether or not he is the guilty one.”

Mowat also worked on Nightcrawler. I'd be curious to hear what he has to say about Jake in that flick!

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Today's blast from the past: More clean-shaven Jake during Love & Other Drugs filming days: