So, what should an actor do, when he or she doesn't want to make a full length feature film but they still want to remind all of us out here that they're still about while also impressing directors and earning points for looking cool? Music videos! Just as directors like Zodiac's David Fincher have honed their craft with music videos, actors too like to dabble, especially Jake Gyllenhaal.
(As it's Wimbledon time it seems fitting to lead with Giving up the Gun:)
Jake is no novice to music videos having featured in more than his fair share over the last few years (think The Shoes, Vampire Weekend and Jamie Foxx, not to mention appearances in SNL videos and Rufus Wainwright stage performances). The media is noticing that Jake is not alone and Jake was interested enough in an article appearing in Reuters and Chicago Tribune today that he chipped in with an email about why he appeared in Time to Dance. Of course, this particular video was a little different than most - it was extended and gave Jake plenty of scope to explore, without words, a character and a story.
'"I did the video because it exists alone, by itself. Like a question mark at the end of a sentence," Gyllenhaal wrote. In the video, directed by British filmmaker Daniel Wolfe, Gyllenhaal, 31, plays a homicidal fencer who stabs and beats people to death. The Shoes dreamed up the concept with Wolfe, who then called in Gyllenhaal. "We needed a great actor to do it as we didn't want (gratuitous) violence in our video. We wanted this as a piece of art and not a buzz video," band member Guillame Briere told Reuters. Briere said that for Gyllenhaal, the video was a "really different experience from what he is doing normally" and a chance for him to show people "how good he is" as an actor.'
Not bad for a product lasting a little over 8 minutes.
If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet - ticket information
All is quiet with Jake as he spends the final days on An Enemy before heading to Comic-Con in San Diego to publicise End of Watch. However, If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet, Jake's NYC stage debut, is getting closer.
I'm grateful to a source and reader who has informed me that you'll be able to buy tickets from the Roundabout Theatre website and Audience Services number: 212-719-1300 from (and including) 23 July.
We've heard a lot about Jake Gyllenhaal's Prince of Persia accent - Mike Newell and Sir Ben Kingsley have had a little disagreement over exactly which postal code in London it hails from, while Gemma Arterton confidently places it as Estuary. Jake, on the other hand, has admitted that it did have a tendency to wander due to the indluence of the multi-Brit crew, until Mike Newell would pull him south again. However, in this video from Lovefilm, Jake is informed that he sounds just like the bloke at the interviewer's local fish and chip shop.
I wonder if Jake's as handy with the deep fat frier.
Appropriately enough as we enter semi-final stages at Wimbledon, we've been hearing a little more about the filming up Vampire Weekend's Giving Up the Gun video. Apparently, its influence, as far as sticking it together went, was Jamie Foxx's Blame it. That's an interesting comparison because Ron Howard has said that he was in the Blame It video without actually knowing why he was in the video; it was something he'd sort of agreed to during the euphoria of the Obama inaguration ceremony.
Back to Vampire Weekend and the interview with the video's director Emmett Malloy: 'Jake Gyllenhaal literally had bought the record the day before. I knew him through a friend of a friend. He was driving down from San Francisco, and he literally just pulled over and did it. It was a combination of second-hand connections and timing. Joe Jonas was just a fan of the band, and my brother has done a few of the Jonas Brothers' videos... It's like that Jamie Foxx video where Ron Howard's in it. There's no rhyme or reason. But they all seem to work. They all came, and we found something for them to grab a hold of.'
'Pitchfork: Were all of these people hanging out with each other on set? EM: [laughs] No, man. That's the bullshit thing about cameos, I swear to God. Every time, I'd be like, "OK, we're going to shoot the fire effect," and then they'd be like, "Jake Gyllenhaal just showed up." I'd be like, "OK, we're not shooting the fire effect right now; we're shooting Jake Gyllenhaal."'
Jake 'literally just pulled over and did it'? Makes it sound like they filmed it in a layby.
And finally...
It seems that Russian audiences have been left nonplussed by Toy Story 3, preferring instead Disney's offering Prince of Persia. Read more here.
Chance for a quick catch up before Prince of Persia's first screening to the critics tomorrow at ShoWest in Viva Las Vegas (sounds like the perfect excuse to dig up some holiday snaps...). First off, PoP creator Jordan Mechner has confirmed the presence of Jake Gyllenhaal at San Francisco for WonderCon on 3 April. To be more precise, noon in the Esplanade Ballroom.
The Princess of Persia, Gemma Arterton, is currently appearing in London (at the Garrick, where Jake performed) in The Little Dog Laughed. She and her fellow thesps appeared on Radio 1 last night - fresh from the boards - and were interviewed by Edith Bowman. Not surprisingly - and rather pleasingly - Jake popped up.
'What's Jake like?' she was asked. 'He is funny and he's a really, really talented actor.' Gemma could say no more because that perennial favourite of a question popped up: 'Is he tall?'.
'He's a couple of inches taller.... We worked together for 6 months and it was just me and him and so we have good chemistry in the film, I think... I really wanted to see his play... (laughter).' Edith then gives Gemma the news that Jake is in the new Vampire Weekend video - 'Is he?!' - and tells her to watch it straight away because it's so funny. Brits can listen to the interview on iPlayer for the time being. It sounds like the cast were definitely... unwinding.
Talking of people talking of Jake...Fran Healey and Andy Hislop of Travis have recently completed their acoustic tour of the US - which featured slideshows of Jake - and now the tour is available to buy (plug). The Moonlight Mile (a film about 'death and people dying and remorse and sadness') track Love Will Come Through is preceded by an appreciative discussion of 'a very sexy man', which includes another important question: 'Is he shaving his chest?'.
While Duncan Jones has tweeted today that he's been spending the day blowing up trains (that's one way to spend a Wednesday), Jake has been spotted at the bakery Olive and Gourmando in Montreal. Thanks very much to the tweeter for grabbing the pic of a smiling (and hungry) Jake.
Just in case you missed it, do take a look at the new Prince of Persia featurette on Young Dastan - aka William Foster - which also includes Big Dastan - aka Jake Gyllenhaal.
Jake Gyllenhaal rips his trousers off, swigs booze, wears skimpy shorts, models a headband, falls over, gets fallen on - this can mean only one thing! The Vampire Weekend video for Giving Up The Gun is here and I will never watch Wimbledon the same way again.
The updated bit...
You too can own 60 re-usable full-colour Prince of Persia stickers! And because there's only three weeks until this is out, you just about have time to plan what you will do with 60 re-usable full-colour PoP stickers. I'm already imagining what the dashboard of my car would look like. I wonder what thoughts Jake was channelling when he posed for this one. Thanks to Steph!
We have much to be grateful for with Duncan Jones. Not only is he enormously talented, geeky and fun (he's also not bad on the wii), there's a good chance that he will tweet his way through directing Source Code. Just after tweeting 'Lovely snow falling in Montreal this morning. Doing camera test today, then catching flight to London for weekend! Fun awaits!' Duncan gave us our very first Source Code set pic.
Of course, there is a downside to being a director and that is that your star may give you this stuff: 'Jake G just gave me a packet of something called "maple almond butter." I dont like the sounds of it. Hope this is not a Brokeback moment.' Give me beans, any day of the week.
Good luck to Duncan on BAFTA Sunday.
There's been so much going on today but I don't want this to be lost in it all because it is fantastic! And I could watch it over and over...
Yesterday's New York Times video in which stars described their favourite movie moments of the decade is today followed by a magnificent gallery of actors who have contributed key performances to cinema over the last year - and there amongst them is Jake Gyllenhaal in studded leather and moody black and white. I believe that Tobey Maguire is next to him but I'm having trouble dragging my eyes that far left. It's well worth looking through the other photographs. Many thanks to IHJ for the heads up!
And speaking of the video from yesterday, some of you may have experienced the same troubles as me watching it, so try this instead.
These are glorious PoP days and here are more new images from the film. At the risk of sounding like a parrot stuck in a groove - stunning. To accompany them, here are some excerpts from other articles in April's Total Film. In addition to the main PoP feature on Jake Gyllenhaal, there are also interviews with his co-stars the feisty Gemma Arterton and the sultry Toby Kebbell.
On Gemma: 'Cascading tresses also feature prominently in Jerry Bruckheimer's sand-blasted videogame adaptation Prince of Persia, in which Arterton's Princess Tamina is paired opposite Jake Gyllenhaal's Prince Dastan. Their squabbling, banterish relationship is, says Arterton, 'like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.' Contrasting her two blockbuster heroines, Arterton describes Tamina as 'a lot more fesity, a lot more comic than Io. She's funny and it's a full-on action role. I have to do loads of fighting, although there wasn't a particular style to my fighting because it's quite wild - she's not been trained. But I did stage combat at drama school so I had quite a bit of experience. I shoud have been a stuntwoman...'
On Toby: 'In Prince of Persia Kebbell plays Prince Garsiv, head of the Persian Army and rival of Jake Gyllenhaal's Dastan. 'He hates Jake Gyllenhaal's character because Dastan is more skilled than he is. Garsiv is battle-hardened in a different way. he has great skill in fighting and great education of war but he ends up being a dunce because he's so aggressive,' says Kebbell. Shooting took place in Morocco over three and a half months in temperatures of around 50 degrees centigrade. 'I was in a leather cape and 18 kilos of armour with a battle guard underneath and my sword belt, which made my armour 23 kilos. Then there was the helmet with chain mail down the back of my neck with a wig underneath, my plaited hair, my beard. It was unventilated.'
'Fighting with axes, horse riding, 'drinking three a half litres of water and not having a piss all day' - all part of being in a Jerry Bruckheimer franchise starter. And these weren't even the toughest things he had to get to grips with. 'Save the empire, the sword is still strong' says Kebbell, slowly, deliberately, concentrating hard, frowning slightly. 'Save the empire, the sword is still strong', man! I lost a lot of sleep thinking how on earth am I going to say that line?' Still he loved the experience. 'To work on that was genuinely spectacular,' he enthuses. 'If they do a sequel, I'm in, absolutely. I'm dying to, in fact.'
IGN has been publishing some of its interviews with other PoP stars from its visit to the Pinewood set last year, including Sir Ben Kingsley: 'I really liked the character. Because of my years in Shakespeare, I really enjoy mining into the character, digging into the character to find out why he is what he is. How he became. So in my portrayal of the uncle, Nizam, I was able -- very happily and enjoyably with Mike Newell -- to go into the script and speculate, 'I see why he is this way. I see why his behavior is that way. I see how he's motivated and what drives him.' So Mike Newell, being the lovely director he is, turned a plot-driven piece into a character-driven piece. It was very, very appealing to me and then it becomes, honestly, like any other film that one is enjoying making. You didn't feel the crushing weight of franchise, of Jerry Bruckheimer who really let us go, let us get on with it. We just got on with the job of telling a straight story with Mike Newell. It became a character-driven piece, which was tremendously enjoyable for me.'
Gemma reveals that Tamina is a high priestess: 'It's a real full-on action role, although she's a high priestess so she's not your typical kind of gun-wielding [heroine]. She's very spiritual, so it's an interesting take to have someone that's action-driven but that has got religious beliefs. It's an interesting character.'
There is also a new interview with Jordan Mechner, the creator of the Prince of Persia - or PoP's pop, as he is called here.
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time will first premiere at ShoWest, a movie trade event in Las Vegas. PoP will show to some of the industry's most influential figures on 18 March. I think it may be fair to declare, then, that PoP is finished.
And that is the PoP update... but there is much more going on than PoP!
Source Code
Jake has revealed a few words about his next role 'that "'Source Code' is a kind of sci-fi thriller based in different time continuums. I play Colter Stevens and he's a helicopter pilot who finds himself in a very unlikely and disoriented situation."' The buzz builds...
We heard yesterday about Jeffrey Wright joining the cast of Source Code. Stand up comedian Russell Peters is also attached, demonstrated by his explanation for the cancellation of his March gigs: 'The reason for the re-scheduling is that Russell has landed a role in the Sci-fi action movie, Source Code. The film is set to be directed by Duncan Jones (Moon) and star Jake Gyllenhaal (Jarhead), Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air) and Michelle Monaghan (Eagle Eye). Originally scheduled to start shooting after the Australian tour, Russell's shoot dates were moved-up when the producers decided to expand his role in the film with additional scenes and dialogue. Russell must now report to set on February 23rd until the end of March.'
Jake's other video cameo career...
Tomorrow night on Channel 4, Vampire Weekend premiere the video of their new single Giving Up the Gun on Rude Tube at 23:50. This will give Jake chance to continue his other job of music video star cameo artiste. The band has been discussing the shoot (in Hollywood) and how Jake was already a fan of their music before he got the call. We also get an idea of Jake's role and I can't wait to see it!
'I certainly can’t speak for everybody, but Joe Jonas and Jake Gyllenhaal were through connections of mine. I was making calls saying, “Hey, I want to get some people to come down and be in this video!” One of my friends was like, “Oh, I was just with Jake and he was listening to the new Vampire Weekend record.” The next thing you know, there he is. I don’t think he even knew what he was doing, but he absolutely slayed it and was a lot of fun to work with. He did a great job in the video and brought a lot to it, which was fantastic.... We lit shit on fire. We had RZA presiding over the tennis match. Lil Jon came down to give some tennis tips. Jake Gyllenhaal drank himself out of the competition; Joe Jonas tried, but did not succeed. There was a lot of rigorous competition, pyrotechnics, and a little bit of milk to cap it all off.'
