Jake's lovely and amazing, and Paramount's shoddy Zodiac games

I saw Lovely and Amazing for - I'm ashamed to say - the very first time on this wet and dark Sunday afternoon and I rather enjoyed meeting Jake's Jordan. Apparently this was the film that made a certain young actress Kirsten Dunst sit up and take notice: "I saw this film Jake was in, Lovely and Amazing, and I was like, 'He is so hot! He's gorgeous.' I think I told her [Maggie, of course], 'I have a crush on your brother'."


Director Nicola Holofcener, in all her publicity interviews for Lovely and Amazing, never had enough good words to say about the young Jake. 'Jeanne McCarthy, the casting director, brought in Jake Gyllenhaal - she has great taste and really understood the script. He came in with this big pouf of hair and his big blue eyes and I was sold. He was sexy but awkward - the perfect combination for the role of Jordan. He had to be young and gawky enough so that we feel the affair is weird and uncomfortable, yet he had to be just manly enough so it would believable' (source).


In an interview recorded on the set of the film, Nicola said '"Jeanne McCarthy was the casting director, she introduced me to Jake Gyllenhaal, I didn't know who he was," says Holofcener. Gyllenhaal turns in a pitch-perfect performance as Jordan, a coworker of Catherine Keener's much older Michelle in the film. Again I dig myself deeper into the trench of a flatterer, telling her how great Gyllenhaal was in the film. "Wasn't he? But it's funny," says Holofcener, "I felt the same way, like once I met him I couldn't picture anybody else in the role." "Right, because who else can pull off the kind of geeky young kid but –" "- be sexy enough. Not very many people. It was just between him and a few others and I was so crazy for him, I was so afraid it wouldn't work out. You know, when you're negotiating the contract and stuff, it's up in the air." Luckily for Holofcener, things worked out with Gyllenhaal, as well as first choices Brenda Blethyn, Emily Mortimer, and Catherine Keener, for whom the part of Michelle was written.'


When interviewed by fellow Lovely actress Emily Blunt, Jake's older woman Catherine Keener said of Jake: I had a blast with him. People have asked was it weird because he was so much younger. I guess I was so in the mindset of Michelle and the story and she is so immature it seemed sort of an appropriate guy for her [laughter]. It wasn't freakish at all to me. And so therefore if it's going to be a guy who's only seventeen why not Jake Gyllenhaal ! It was fantastic! He's adorable, fun, enthusiastic. We were laughing all the time. It was three o'clock in the morning the first night we're working and we are kissing in the back of the car, freezing it was just silly. It wasn't like one of those standard uncomfortable love scenes were you feel weird enough. We had no time, no money and no time. He's so gifted and a really nice guy. Everybody was. This movie was really a great time everyone was unbelievable.'


At around this time, the young and exciting actor was featured in an article in the Guardian. In it, Jake discussed the differences between his two quite similar roles (at least on the surface) in Lovely and Amazing and The Good Girl: 'Although they both have affairs with older women, the two characters are completely different. The guy in Lovely & Amazing is just a sweet kid who isn't aware of what he's getting into. The guy in The Good Girl has a dire need to be loved and is clearly disturbed. But it was the complicated relationships that I responded to. The way relationships are usually painted in films is bullshit. In my experience relationships are really complicated, especially when you're young: you're just flailing around and hurting each other. I haven't yet found a relationship in a movie that is true to that.'


Paramount gave up on Zodiac

I came across an old, very interesting interview with David Fincher in which he discussed the reasons for that long delay that we all had to endure between the original opening date of Zodiac and its final release. It seemed to last forever. Now that we have seen the film and can appreciate its intricacy, detail and length, the delay is less surprising but it appears Paramount had not been happy with the length of the version initially delivered but Fincher would not back down. As a result, Paramount decided to not bother promoting the film for the Oscars but we got a better film.


'But according to some accounts, distributor Paramount balked at releasing the even longer version delivered by Fincher, who contractually had final cut, and, asked him to make changes. When he declined, they elected not to mount an Oscar campaign and release the film in March, traditionally a time when movie attendance is low and the studios unload films they consider to be lacking in commercial potential. Fincher, who admits to “doing my best to avoid those kind of political games and all the speculation that goes with it,” is somewhat coy with the subject, saying he is “really all not that certain what was going through those guys’ heads.”


“Truth is, I really didn’t have the film in the shape I wanted it in December anyway,” he says. “I don’t know what their thinking is, but I assume they have research and experts in this field... After all,” Fincher adds with obvious sarcasm, “these are the guys who were working `Nacho Libre.’”.

Includes pictures from IHJ.