Jake is featured on the cover of the September issue of L’Uomo Vogue (Italy) magazine. The spread includes a brand new photoshoot and interview with Jake. Digital scans have been added to our gallery!
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Magazine Scans > 2015 > L’Uomo Vogue (Italy) | September
It’s been 10 years since the first time Jake Gyllenhaal was in Venice. At the time it was for Brokeback Mountain, the film by Ang Lee that would win the Golden Lion and for which the actor was nominated for an Oscar. This year, he’s here for the opening film, Everest by Baltasar Kormákur, based on the true story of two disastrous Himalayan expeditions in 1996. Jake plays Scott Fischer, American mountaineering legend, who died in a snowstorm after ma- naging to rescue his entire team.
“Bringing a real person to the screen is a huge responsibility. I tried to give Fischer the most realistic interpretation possible. I read, watched, listened to any document, video and interview about him. I spoke with many people who had known him, to the point where I felt I knew him for real, thanks above all to the recollections of his children. Climbing Everest was my childhood dream, so shooting the film in the Dolomites was a wonderful experience, living in contact with the elements is exhilarating. Plus Baltasar is a director who’s easy to tune into, thanks to his background as an actor he instinctively knows how to put you in a position to give the best of yourself”.
Two days after the Venice premiere of Everest, Gyllenhaal will be in Toronto to open the festival with another of his films, Demolition by Jean-Marc Vallée, in which he stars opposite Naomi Watts. Also this month is the Italian release of Southpaw by Antoine Fuqua, where he plays a boxer in an (all too predictable) story of defeat and redemption. If the initial declarations of producer Harvey Weinstein, who has been advocating an Oscar for Jake, already seem a little out of place given by the lukewarm reactions of American audiences and critics, his transformation into a boxer, putting on 15 pounds of extra muscle, has been a fixation of American infotainment, which spent months analyzing his training in minute detail. “In general, I am never satisfied with my interpretation. Basically because the character I see on the screen is the result of the work of a year before, when I was a different person than who I’ve since become in the meantime. This is why I never take on really long-term commitments. On set my emotional commitment is very strong, I can barely manage to dive into in the next film I’m doing, more than that I can’t do. In any case, Billy Hope is a role I’m proud of, a character I miss. Boxing forces you to live in the moment, to center yourself totally in the present. Fuqua and I understood each other from the beginning, we trained together in the ring, he spent months with me before shooting. He’s one of those direc- tors that gives actors a much more focused and enhanced perception of themselves. There are directors who are afraid of ac- tors, he was not: just look at what could got out of 50 Cent, who’s not an actor. From the beginning he never intended Southpaw as a genre film. He didn’t ask me to study De Niro in Raging Bull. We watched Ken Loach’s My name is Joe together, however, and it exerted a great influence on the film even if it’s perhaps not immediately obvious”.
In the fall he starts filming Nocturnal Animals, the new film by Tom Ford based on a book by Austin Wright, alongside Amy Adams. “It’s a beautiful story about love and the regrets of leaving. When years ago I saw A Single Man I was very impressed. I thought that it was really extraordinary as a first film, especially considering the prejudices that Tom must have struggled against. Plus he’s a real gentleman, and I am sure that working with him will be very interesting”.
Son of a mother nominated for a screenwriting Oscar and a director father, younger brother of the talented Maggie, Gyllenhaal made his film debut at 10 years old, and was labeled as “someone to keep an eye on” at 21, thanks to the cult success of Donnie Darko. In addition to Brokeback Mountain, is career has been marked by interesting films (Jarhead by Sam Mendes, Zodiac by David Fincher, Brothers by Jim Sheridan), by media-hyped missteps (Prince of Persia from Disney, Love and Other Drugs opposite Anne Hathaway when at the height of his fame, probably the two films in which he also looks his best), and the recent success of Nightcrawler, which he also produced. “Producing interests me, I see it as a very real prospect for the future: putting together a film is like a puzzle, it becomes a kind of drug”.
Gyllenhaal does not consider himself an intellectual (“I enrolled at Columbia and attended courses in Tibetan Buddhism by Robert Thurman, which seemed the most interesting given that I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I left college after two years”) nor a movie buff: “I don’t see a lot of movies, only the ones that come recommended by people I respect. I like making films more than watching them. I choose them by instinct, when I was younger I was very insecure and let myself be influenced by the opinions of others. Now I decide by myself”. And while he cites Almodóvar as the direc- tor he dreams of working with in the future, he sees himself more and more in the theater, given that his performance of Constellations opposite Ruth Wilson, first at the Royal Court Theatre in London, then on Broadway, was as successful as his previous collaboration with Nick Payne, If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, not to mention his three performances of The Little Shop of Horrors at Lincoln Center in July. “I want to get back on stage more than anything else. I don’t intend to spend another entire year of my life without dedicating myself to the theater: compared to film, I find it a powerful tool of recharging one’s batteries”. And he doesn’t rule out directing: “I know how much determination it requires and what it means to focus on a project to the exclusion of everything else. But when I find a story that’s worth I’ll give it a try”.
