Making it real - Jake Gyllenhaal on how the cast gave Brothers its special reality

In an interview with Inside Reel, Jake Gyllenhaal talks about his research for playing the part of Tommy Cahill in Brothers and how having known Natalie Portman Tobey Maguire for years prior to the filming helped to base Brothers in a reality.



In addition to talking about how he visited young people in jails and juvenile halls and how he put on weight to 'give a realistic sense of what this person would go through', Jake tells us more about his friendships with Natalie and Tobey: 'In the case of Natalie and I, we knew each other for ten years before we started making this movie. So we have a relationship that spans enought time that you can't really getaway with anything fake. Tobey and I knew each other for a few years before that too. So it's just inevitable that when you're working with people that you know already there's a realism to it, and I think the type of actors that we all are, we want to bring the reality of our lives to the work that we do. And I think that makes for a different kind of subtlety and the characters exist based in a reality as well as in the world that they're being shown in in the movie. So that kind of balance of all that stuff makes it, I think, more real than you would expect.'


And finally, from Variety and thanks to IHJ, this is Jake's response to being asked the inevitable merkin question.