Jake Gyllenhaal Explains His Passion for “Jarhead:” “I first read the book and I was like, ‘ Well the prose in the book are just extraordinary.’ The way Tony writes sentence after sentence is just, even when I read them in the book, the opening quotes of the movie over black are Tony’s words. They’re direct; they’re lifted from the book directly. We were in the last day of shooting, Sam brought me into the ADR stage, we read some excerpts from the book and we read the voiceover that had already been written in the script.
The book itself just spoke to me somehow. It was like a generation, I think, of people. A style in the same way that Dave Eggers has defined a sort of generation of writers…
‘Jarhead’ the book didn’t have that much of [structure] and I just related to it somehow, that idea of like, it wasn’t like a clear through line. I don’t think the movie really has that either. I mean you’re looking forth to war most of the time, but if I was to ask you what scene came before another scene you probably wouldn’t be able to tell me, as I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. I’ve seen the movie now three or four times and I’ve shot the movie for five months and there’s a style to that that I really responded to.
Then just in the character… I think I hit it at a perfect time where I was just the right age, where that’s the age where all the guys who’re going over there now, and went over there in the Desert Shield and Desert Storm time, that’s when [they went].
There’s something about the aggression and harnessing that aggression. Being able to have a part where you don’t have to do your hair or have wardrobe. You don’t have to deal with any of that stuff. You know you’re in…you basically have no wardrobe or anything. You’re basically you. And that to me seemed like it could have either been a place where you weren’t allowed to do anything and you were controlled, or some place where you could do anything and whatever. And it ended up being the latter. So that’s what I was into. It’s just like none of the trappings and going to a place where I could at least deal with a lot of feelings that I think are in me, but that I hadn’t really paid a lot of attention to. And Tony’s book really expressed those feelings pretty passionately so I was just down to get angry and shoot at people.”
Jake Gyllenhaal Sacrifices His Tooth for “Jarhead:” “It fell off actually a month ago and I had to get it put back on. A really, really, very weird experience. Well, the day that I lost my tooth was ahhh...it sounds like a children’s book, doesn’t it? The day that I lost my tooth was a very, it was a really interesting day. It was a point at which I realized that, I had told Sam before we started, I was like ‘I’ll throw up in the sand for you. I’m going to do anything I can for you, but I never thought I would chip off my tooth for you because that’s permanent.’ Vomit’s vomit but your tooth’s gone.
The scene is a scene with Fergus in the tent where I put the rifle up to my mouth and I asked Brian [Geraghty] in one take, in one of the last takes, if he could not hold the rifle so tight because I really felt like he didn’t want to. He was really holding on to it tight and I really had to pull at him to get the rifle. I just said, ‘Can you not pull it?’ and I forgot [about it] because the scene’s a long scene. We ran through it and I asked him at the beginning of the scene. Then I was like at the very [end], it just went like ‘bam! into my mouth when I pulled it. I remember I looked down and I saw that my tooth had come off. I had it in my hand and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, I could stop the scene or I could keep going and I should probably keep going,’ you know?
Sam had told me before we did the take, this was in one of the closer takes, he said, ‘Think about boot camp in this take.’ So I just, for some reason, just started hitting him. And I just got so angry that he had chipped my tooth, and I just started hitting him and we didn’t talk for like a month actually after that. Yeah, we didn’t talk for a while - Brian and I. It’s actually a testament to Brian because Brian is nothing like the character that he plays. If you meet him in person…I’m sure you’ll all meet him at some point because he is a fantastic actor - he’s going to be…he’s just in that scene, he’s just amazing in that scene. We didn’t talk and Sam actually said after that scene, we hadn’t had a scene written where I apologized to him, and after that scene Sam said, ‘We really need to make a scene where he apologizes to him, where he says he’s sorry. We need to see that because it’s just too…’
Page 3: Jake Gyllenhaal on Playing Tony Swofford in "Jarhead"
