'Oh, look, there's Jake Gyllenhaal running after a mammoth'

'At a certain point, the climate starts to shift' - don't ask me why, but in this video interview (a much extended version of an interview I posted some time ago), I love the way Jake says this. It seems only fitting, with Jake in NYC (or at least he was yesterday) and with Roland Emmerich's latest movie 10,000 BC stampeding its way to the theatres, to have a look at Jake Gyllenhaal's experience of New York City as Sam Hall - when the weather was bad.


In 10,000 BC, a young warrior has to save the world against vindictive gods, while running the gammit of a whole range of hostile weathers, not to mention a load of animals with big fangs and beaks. I think there's a girl (in distress) involved too. In other words, this is the tale of another Sam Hall, but one without the benefit of phones and fax machines, or a climatologist father for that matter.


As a fan of this type of blockbuster, I like to think that Jake likes them too and that he had fun making a film that I always love to watch, even if it was completely alien to everything Jake was used to: 'It's a very different beast. As an actor you play a secondary role to the special effects and to the movie and Roland's vision'. Also, Jake was only in a quarter of the film (although admittedly the best quarter) 'and that quarter even of the film, I don't know half of what's going on in that!'


But as far as the action goes, the hardest thing Jake had to endure was faking heat as cold: 'When you're burning up in layers and layers of clothing and everyone around the set's wearing t-shirts and everyone's like [clutching himself], you're supposed to fake it, and shake, and pretend like you have hypothermia - that's the biggest thing that I've braved.'


It's interesting to hear Jake discuss Dennis Quaid's role: 'It's nice when you respect somebody's work to be working with somebody like that - it's a lot nicer than when you don't respect their work and you have to feign it!... There's something about the work that he does and the way he does it that I would love to aspire to'. Dennis is 'the lead man of the film - That's something I look up to and hopefully one day I would like to become in the future.'


Rather ironically, Jake is now too famous to be Roland Emmerich's leading man, however much Roland might want him for the job. In an interview today about casting unknowns in his new movie, Roland said: "I knew I wanted to have good actors who had some talent. But I didn't want someone to say, 'Oh, look, there's Jake Gyllenhaal running after a mammoth.' So we went through the hard job of trying to find unknowns." Speaking for myself, I'd be quite happy to watch Jake Gyllenhaal run after anything.

This review for 10,000 BC reminded me that Roland Emmerich also directed The Patriot, which featured another father-son relationship with, of course, Heath Ledger as the son.

The picture below is a gratuitous picture of Jake's new bag, which I love and covet.


Pictures from IHJ.