Jake Gyllenhaal on Backstories and Emotional Baggage: “I think regardless of what any of us say, I think we’ve all had pretty interesting, if not say rough, childhoods. So to me, in terms of changing my life in a way, it made me go like, this struggle to try and present something, this struggle as an actor to go, ‘This is what I’m feeling right now.’ I think you see that in performances a lot. I think I’ve done that a lot. In this movie it was like, ‘I’m going to show up and what baggage I carry with me I’m bringing with me. I’m not going to try and create new baggage to somehow play a character. I’m showing up every day and this is what I bring with me.’ That, to me, is why it’s been really nice the response that ‘Jarhead’s’ gotten, as well as tough from people too. It’s like, ‘Wow, yeah, it is complicated and it is okay to be complicated.’ So, no, I had a very interesting childhood in a lot of ways and I brought that with me, and somehow Jack and I parallel somewhere.”
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Next Project – “Zodiac:” “It’s a movie about the serial killer. The Zodiac was a serial killer in Marin County, Vallejo County, San Francisco area in the late 60’s, early 70’s. He would send these letters to the San Francisco Chronicle, different newspapers around town. It’s a true story about three people on the case, the detective, the journalist and then there’s a random cartoonist who becomes obsessed with the case. And after the other two fell off, he kind of picked it up where they left off, and solved the case. But they never really found the Zodiac…”
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Role in “Zodiac:” “I play the cartoonist. And they could never really get the guy, so he’s still out there supposedly, and [said in a joking manner] I feel very safe making a movie about it.”
Gyllenhaal’s character is Robert Graysmith, the cartoonist who became obsessed with the case. “We met many times and he’s been to the set. He was just on set the other day, my last day of work,” said Gyllenhaal.
Jake Gyllenhaal on the Special Challenge of Playing a Real Person: “It’s easy now. The challenge I think is…it’s different with every story, and it’s different with how every director approaches it. I’ve considered characters that I’ve played that aren’t necessarily real people to be people that are still living out there, or have lived, who have struggled with the same things.
I think Jack Twist is just as much of a real person as Tony Swofford [from ‘Jarhead’]. I approached both in the same way. They’re aspects of every person, everybody’s personality, particularly with something like Jack Twist. I went and I met with a lot of different cowboys and rode horses and learned how to pack mules and do all those things, and that became a big part of that character for me. With Robert Graysmith it’s a different style, because David Fincher is very much into the reality of what happened. He’s filming the murders exactly inch by the inch, literally how it happened and where the bodies were, and how they moved, and all those things. It’s based in a real reality, things that really happened, things they really said. So for me it’s very important to get the idiosyncrasies of Robert Graysmith.”
Jake Gyllenhaal Responds to “Jarhead” Critics: There were critics and others who said it wasn’t appropriate to do a movie about the Gulf War at this point in time. Gyllenhaal said, “My response is, to me what’s interesting is, I think that people tend to want to politicize so many things. I think that films on their own, just by the nature of what they are, are political. But to need something, to want something, I feel like it’s interesting… It’s like I’ve noticed people asking Sam [Mendes, the director of “Jarhead”] for a sense of leadership, to take some side or something. And maybe it’s because they feel some sort of lack of leadership themselves or something. I don’t know what that is.
To me it’s one Marine’s experience, the film, and we’ve had enough perspective I think on the first Gulf War, and it is a very different war. My character in that movie says, ‘Every war is different, every war is the same.’ And I think it’s really important to acknowledge that the soldiers that fought in the first war had a very different war from the war that’s going on right now. It lasted four days, and the casualties were nowhere near the same. Their experience of warfare is completely different, and it is a different war. I understand that the topography is the same, and the geography is the same, and all of those things, but to me experiencing it and talking with the men who fought in that war, it’s very special to them. I think it kind of upsets me to know that all wars get blurred into one somehow. It’s a very special, intense experience for all of them, and that to me is why I think it’s such an interesting film, and so different from – and yet, at the same time, so the same as - what’s going on now.”
