Jake on Zodiac 'an odd love letter to the destruction of these people'

With Jake away in New Mexico, combining filming with visits to the Santa Fe Film Festival, it gives me a chance to be indulgent and focus again on one of my favourite events from a great year - Cannes. Seven months later, on a cold and wet December Sunday, it does me good to remember that hot sunshine, blue skies, white tents and red carpets.

Jake Gyllenhaal à Cannes (Hebdo Cinéma)
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Jake, along with the rest of the Zodiac party, stayed at the fabulous Hotel du Cap in Antibes, providing a stunning setting for some of the best interviews we've seen from Jake this year. It's interesting to read, though, what this glamorous scene, with its fragrant gardens and views over the sea, for the journalists who were shepherded over to do the interviewing. Andrew Pulver recalls the experience of interviewing David Fincher for the Guardian in the Cannes equivalent of Fort Knox (you can read the interview that resulted here).


'Upon reporting to Warner Bros' office in central Cannes, I and two other journalists, are led to a minibus and driven for 20 minutes along the winding coast road. After negotiating a couple of posts manned by headset-wearing security types, our driver is given a punchcode that then enables him to get the bus past yet another security point blocked by a retractable metal villa. Half a mile down another narrow lane, we are deposited outside the gate where a couple of official-looking women are waiting.


'These, it turns out, are from Warner Bros, and they lead us, moist and perspiring from our trip, into the airy enclave within. We wend our way through a jasmine- and acacia-scented garden, with your correspondent, at least, feeling like a chimney sweep about to be presented to the town beadle. Suddenly we come out on to the rocky coastline, and it's back to business.

'A dozen or so plastic marquees (the kind you might set up for a beach barbecue are scattered along the shoreline. (The Med, not having a tidal flow, doesn't really have much in the way of sandy beaches.) We three interlopers are corralled in the "hospitality" tent; we are candidly told by our minder that "we don't want you wandering about". A map on a nearby table reveals that each tent has been assigned a specific purpose: "Jake Gyllenhaal photo/TV" or "Chloe Sevigny print". I am led towards the tent designated "David Fincher print", and sit down. I am left alone for 10 minutes while Fincher is called down from the hotel itself, some distance away.'


At this site, you can listen to a podcast during which Jake is interviewed by Ambrose Heron about Zodiac, which, rather strangely, Jake describes as an 'odd love letter to the destruction of these people, if that makes any sense.' He goes on to describe the experience of working with David Fincher and expresses his admiration with his director for pulling the ensemble together. 'It takes a lot of balls from a filmmaker to establish three lead characters and then leave some of those lead characters out of the film for long stretches of time.' This interview is worth listening to if only to hear Jake say Tsotsi.


You can read more about David Fincher's impressive attention for detail here. 'I wanted it to be a movie about people, and I wanted it to be about the '70s in San Francisco that I knew growing up. So when in doubt, I would reference old photos and go, like, "Yeah, that's about how many Volkswagen Bugs you'd see on the street, so that's what we'll do."'

As for the surreal aspect of Cannes, we've read this before, but it seems apt to remember it here - an account of the Zodiac press conference.


'[The press conferences] are usually presided over by Henri Behar, a veteran French journalist with swept-back silver hair who looks out from the podium at his fellows with what seems like ill-disguised disdain, and they generally amount to a search for a sound bite in a tide of banality. The stars and directors of the films are shamelessly flattered and they seem to do their best, but illuminating answers are at a premium. Do you think that Jake is considered one of the most promising actors of his generation? someone asked David Fincher, director of the serial killer movie Zodiac of his star Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal, sitting alongside, responded with a creditable show of self- mockery and he had fulsome, if impenetrable, praise for his co-star Robert Downey Jr. Working with Robert is like working in the eighth dimension, he said. He tells a Chinese journalist: “I love your shirt”.

'Perhaps none of it is supposed to mean anything anyway since much of the time the press conferences seem to be about establishing a mood rather than conveying information. Even so, the spectacle of journalists applauding, asking for autographs and taking pictures with their mobile phones is a strange one.'


Pictures from IHJ and Just Jared.