As we get closer to the releases this autumn of Jake Gyllenhaal's next films - Prisoners (starring with Hugh Jackman) and An Enemy or Enemy (starring with Jake Gyllenhaal), the line up for the season's Film Festivals emerge. Although one or both were pondered as possibles for Venice, neither was to be. However, Prisoners is among the line up for the Toronto International Film Festival and An Enemy for the San Sebastian Film festival. Appropriately, we have a new Prisoners poster to celebrate. This time the poster features both Hugh Jackman and Jake (via IHJ).
Toronto (5-15 September) - Prisoners has been listed as a Special Presentation. The schedule will be released on 20 August. The inclusion of another doppelgangar movie in the schedule, The Double, made the appearance of An Enemy less than likely.
San Sebastian (20-28 September) - An Enemy (a Canada and Spain co-production) will appear at the Spanish Festival instead where it will compete as part of the official selection. I'll be crossing all my fingers for Jake and Jake (image via the festival website).
Time to dust off that tux and give the red carpet a sweep. Fabulous.
Back from a few days camping in the wilds of Dorset in flaming heat, I've come home to a flood of news involving Jake Gyllenhaal. And so, without further ado, here's a bit of a catch up with the sand barely out of my socks and the last cream tea scarcely digested. You'll note that there are are elements from a previous post which ended up totally scuppered. I blame the heat. Just as well the rain's coming back...
End of Watch has a new release date in the USA. The date has shifted to 21 September, a week earlier than the last release date. This is no doubt associated with the decision to premiere End of Watch at the Toronto International Film Festival this September. However, the film is being shown as a 'Special Presentation' and not as a gala and so it's quite possible that Jake will not be making the trip, instead focusing on the play and on the US premiere.
Talking of the play, promotion images of the cast of If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet have been released. Thanks to IHJ for the images. There are more here.
Jake is definitely starting to get more attention in the media as all these projects converge. As well as being the cover boy for the September issue of Details, the New York Times fashion column has picked Jake as Man of the Moment and is holding him personally responsible for bringing back Bermuda Shorts.
WDW Cream Tea Interlude
After the wettest drought on record, last week we had a few days when it wasn't only very hot, there wasn't a single cloud in the sky. This meant a hastily-arranged and spontaneous camping trip to the beautiful Dorset and Devon coast - an idea that also occurred to three fifths of the entire British population. Never have so many cream teas been consumed by so many people. I even saw a man on a beach with a hankie on his head. And so a few pictures from Corfe Castle, Exmouth, Lulworth Cove and Lyme Regis.
On the way back we stopped at the splendid city of Bath, including its brilliantly presented Roman baths and the Georgian pump rooms. I did taste the waters and managed not to spit it out. Result.
Back to the Olympics! What a great job Danny Boyle did with the opening ceremony - spellbinding.
I don't think there's a film festival quite like it and I'm delighted to hear that Maggie Gyllenhaal will be back at the Toronto International Film Festival this Thursday to showcase her Victorian comedy Hysteria in the Roy Thomson Hall. Maggie and Jake have made regular appearances at TIFF over the years, together in 2002 (for Secretary and Moonlight Mile), and then Jake was there again for Brokeback Mountain and Proof in 2005 and for Rendition in 2007.
Looking back now to 2007, four whole years ago, it makes me realise how fast everything was moving, how quickly we followed Jake from Brokeback in 2005 to Zodiac (Cannes) and Rendition in (Toronto, Rome) in 2007. I hope more than a lot that it won't be too long before we see Jake charm the media and fans alike at another big international festival. Preferably TIFF because you don't have to be press or in the industry to enjoy the excitement of walking around Yorkville, mingling with stars and fellow movie lovers. Some decent cocktails too...And you just never know who you'll see around the next corner.
Back in 2007, on 7 September to be precise, Rendition had its gala premiere in Toronto. It also marked one of the most fantastic and incredible weekends of my life - who'd have thought I would ever have visited Canada from England for just a weekend?! I certainly wouldn't have. I got more than I ever could have dreamed - several close sightings of Jake (and Peter Sarsgaard), a seat in the theatre, meeting with good friends, exploring a new, beautiful city (no-one told me it was that hot in Toronto), and bumping into filmstars and filmlovers. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Ben Affleck, to name just a few.
I realise that quite a few WDW readers may not have enjoyed it all the first time around and so I hope you won't mind if I link to a couple of posts from that weekend as I sink into Jake Nostalgia mode! Here's my report of the gala day itself, a summary with more pictures and a report on what TIFF was like the day after Jake left and it was incredible. But before all that there was biggest thrill of my first night in Toronto, fresh off the plane, when I wanted to walk off my jetlag and I came across the biggest possible proof that Jake was in the city with me. At the end of 2007, I summed it all up.
Afterwards, I learned that other friends were at the Rendition screening including a bunch who were able to get Jake to sign one of his shirts from Brokeback Mountain.I don't think any of us will ever forget.
After the recent Brokeback post, and while we wait to see if we will ever learn in which continent Jake now finds himself, I thought I'd take a look at another film of Jake's in which chemistry is everything. For me, Moonlight Mile is right up there, knocking on the door of Brokeback, for the connection between Jake Gyllenhaal and Ellen Pompeo and for the other connections - between Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon and between both of these and the young Jake.
There is a contradiction about Moonlight Mile to my mind. The story is built upon the most awful tragedy, not just for Joe, but also for Bertie. But there is real humour in it - and hope. I feel that a very big part of why we feel this is because of what seems like genuine affection between the four main cast members and because of the family dynamic, especially between Jake and Dustin. With Jake getting top billing and with Dustin keen to clip Jake's feathers while littering him with advice, I get a sense of Jake's nervous rebelliousness. He agreed to do This is Our Youth, as strongly advised by Dustin, but stood firm against him to do a blockbuster movie.
Without doubt, Jake impressed both Susan and Dustin. Brad Silbering recounted (in the Detroit Free Press): '"It took Dusty six months to make up his mind, six months of us talking on the phone every day, working through detail, half the time talking about anything but the script. Finally I got him together with Jake, because I truly believed that would get him off the dime. And he just fell in love with him. He kept saying, `He's like a young Buster Keaton; he's like a young Keaton.'"
We've enjoyed Susan's flirtatious comments about Jake before, but I liked this description of him that she gave at the Toronto Film Festival: '"He's very bright," says Sarandon. "The emphasis is focus. He reminds me of Sean Penn. I love the fact that he grew up in a show-business family and still has great values."' Elsewhere in this article, Jake says of his role as Joe: 'I have regrets, but I will hopefully mend them in future things'.
Here is a lengthier extract: 'If Gyllenhaal mania arises, the actor admits that there are worse fates than Leonardo DiCaprio-style celebrity. "There's something alluring about it," says Gyllenhaal, whose entourage at Toronto consists of three longtime friends who've spent as much time accompanying him to movie theaters as they have to bars. "I would not be human to say that I don't fall for that. But it seems to me that ... if you're in that position, it's not really in your control, except in the choices that you make and the movies that you choose to do. The nice thing about that position, regardless of the entourage or the girls, is that you can do any movie you want, which is what's alluring to me." Gyllenhaal, who next stars with Dennis Quaid in the Roland Emmerich film The Day After Tomorrow, feels good about where he is. "I think I'm in a pretty OK position," he says. "It's hard to get perspective. ... It's so weird that I want more even though I have a ton."'
This comraderie between the cast was pretty clear for all to see at the Toronto press conference: 'The mood at the press conference yesterday for Moonlight Mile, about a bereaved husband-to-be coming to terms with his grief, was set when Susan Sarandon sat down, turned to her co-star Jake Gyllenhaal and asked, "Did you just pinch my ass?" Within two minutes, Dustin Hoffman had laid his head in the laps of both Sarandon and co-star Ellen Pompeo, played footsie with Sarandon and asked her for sexual favours. Then the cast launched into a rousing Happy Birthday for director Brad Silberling. It was, in Sarandon's words, "a bit of a love fest" on the set of this movie.'
And then there's Ellen... The story of her fairy tale meeting with Jake in an LA carpark is well known, but here is a fuller account of it: 'A guy tried to pick her up in the parking lot behind gourmet sandwich shop Joan's on Third. She says she had no idea he was actor Jake Gyllenhaal. "She walked by and I was just blown away by this energy," Gyllenhaal says. "She does this thing with her hair where she kind of jolts it back and forth. I thought it was so sexy." "He knocked on my [car] window in the parking lot," Pompeo says. "And he was standing there very nervous and shy. He said, 'I just want to tell you that you're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my entire life.' And he tried to run away. So I said, 'Wait a minute, come back here.' Normally, I would say, 'Thank you' and let it go. But there's something so interesting about his face, so soulful."
'"I looked down at her passenger seat," Gyllenhaal says, "and I saw that there were 'sides' on it," the parts of scripts actors are given to read for auditions, "and I was like, 'Oh God, this girl's an actor." Pompeo says she told him, "Maybe we'll work together someday. Thanks for the compliment. See ya. And that was it." But it wasn't. Three weeks later, under the urging of New York casting director Avy Kaufman, known for finding actors their breakthrough roles--like Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense" and Tobey Maguire in "The Ice Storm"--Pompeo auditioned for writer-director Brad Silberling's "Moonlight Mile" (at the time tentatively titled "Baby's in Black") and found herself reading with none other than Gyllenhaal. "I walked into the room and he turned pale. Then I turned pale. It was so bizarre," Pompeo says.'
'"In walks Ellen to the room and I was like, no way," Gyllenhaal says. "I guess she had burned her forehead with a curling iron. It was just like this big scabby thing on her forehead and she was trying to hide it the best she could. But finally she was like, 'I know it's really stupid but I was trying to straighten my hair.' And she blew the audition out of the water. She walked out of the room and Brad turned to me and said, 'There's our movie.'"'
Ellen says that she became used to being confused with Renee Zellwegger but she has Jake to back her up: '"With Ellen, besides that voice and the sense that people might think in a cliched way--God, I don't know. If you put Renee and her in the same room, I don't know who would come out standing."'
One can't forget Brad Silberling. His terrible personal tragedy tied the cast together and all of the actors endeavour to do it justice. Brad said of Jake (Star Tribune 2002): 'As young actors go, he's alone in his field. He's really open and sensitive. And he's passionate. He has his eye on doing things he can be proud of.'
Includes pictures from IHJ and articles from WDW archives.
Annie Proulx has published a new collection of short stories from the west: 'Many of the stories in Fine Just the Way It Is are breathtaking in their cool depiction of the hardships of that life and the astonishing amount of stubborn resolve it takes to survive it — or just try to.'
'They are also often breathtaking in their descriptions of the harsh beauty of the landscape, utterly indifferent to humans but irresistible to those who fall in love with its canyons and peaks, its soaring skies and singing rivers. For some of Proulx's characters, that love of the wild land is deeper than anything they feel for other people.'
Back in 2005, Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Ang Lee and the rest of the Brokeback crew took their film to Toronto, where it received a rapturous and deeply emotional welcome. Jake was also there to promote Proof, but it was Brokeback Mountain that Jake still talks about. Also there in 2005 was Gavin Hood, winning the People's Choice award for Tsotsi. The screening of Brokeback took place in Toronto almost three years ago exactly, on September 10. But one year ago today, on 7 September, Jake and Gavin (and Peter) were back in Toronto to present Rendition, on what was without doubt one of the days in my life I will remember always.
Here is a link (which hopefully works...) to the press conference that took place in my hotel, Sutton Place, during which we were waiting outside to see Jake and were not disappointed. We were also lucky enough to have seats in the theatre and to see Jake and all the others take their places, not to mention having them walk past us in the foyer.
These two interviews are a curiosity to me, because they are by the same interviewer - the first interview was back in 2005 and the second in 2007 (with a hot in more ways than one Jake) for Rendition.
I also enjoyed this anecdote from Toronto (unfortunately the link has now gone but I saved it here) and E! Online: ''Jake Gyllenhaal Is a Backpacker: Don't know what that means? It's a term used to describe die-hard hip-hop fans, and I call him that because he told me he is loving the new Talib Kweli album right now. Our interview for his latest film, Rendition (costarring Reese Witherspoon), got really intense because, let's face it, it's about a suspected terrorist who's detained and tortured. To lighten the mood, I asked Jake if he still had the Indigo Girls on his iPod, something he told me several years back. Didn't see that one coming, did ya!'
Includes picture from IHJ and WDW. A big hello and wave here to the three people with whom I was fortunate enough to share the whole wonderful experience, a year ago today. How time flies!
With a day to go before the end of what has been a fabulous year, today I'm remembering 7 September 2007, which was not only one of the best days I've ever experienced, it was also important and so memorable for more than one member of the community here. This post is dedicated to each of you.
The Toronto International Film Festival couldn't have come at a better time for me. Nothing helps you get over these little trials better than a Jake Gyllenhaal adventure and the company of some fellow Jakers. This flying visit was spectacular from the very beginning - although arriving at Toronto's airport probably no more than 10 minutes after Jake walked through it was a little... vexing. I saw the luggage carousel from his plane (as I later discovered) and it was just about empty. But that evening, while walking off the jetlag and enjoying the heat, I came across what turned out to be Jake's hotel - the Hazeldene - and I couldn't believe my luck that, just as I was about to head back to my hotel, I saw Jake leave his hotel and be driven out of the back in one of the festival's infamous SUVs.
Staying at the hotel where the press conferences were taking place was a bonus and, thanks to a kind Australian journalist, we found out when the Rendition press conference was and we were able to watch Jake and the others enter the side door. Even better, when they came out, we were close enough to speak to Jake and Peter, get an autograph or two, whilst almost being smothered by the paps behind.
I was papped too! Here is me (far right) talking to Peter, Jake having been driven off just a moment before.
That night we went down to the Roy Thomson Hall and waited inside the foyer for Jake to walk through to the lift. The attendants were great, by the way. They seemed to realise what all this meant to us. Jake's friend Chris came through first and then Jake turned the corner (the cries of 'Jake! Jake!' were a clue he was on the way) and he walked smiling past us, being rushed and pulled along by the lady we saw at the Baftas and in Cannes. We then ran to get our seats in the balcony - in the rush I noticed Reese walking past me to the right and managed to get a photograph of the back of her head - this goes nicely with the other picture I took of the back of Reese's head in Rome. She doesn't half walk quickly.
Watching Gavin Hood, Kelley Sane and the actors come on stage one at a time, was a wonderful moment. It did mean though that I didn't get to see too much of the film. It was overwhelming and I was grateful to the friends on either side. The film received a standing ovation. We went back to Yorkville to enjoy the party atmosphere. Later that night, I saw Peter and Chris again in the street and heard that Jake and Reese were at George Clooney's party round the corner. An amazing day and I have to thank Bobbyanna, her lovely daughter, Becky and Felicia for their wonderful company. In the picture below, the other ticket is from the Rome gala.
As we were having our amazing experience, so too were another trio, Em, Missy and Thomas from EnnisJack. I am so grateful to Em for her account of their adventure, which she sent me to share here. I also know how much their account of the whole encounter meant to everyone at EJ; both Christie and Rosie have said that to me. Em, Missy and Tomas' Jake encounter made the frontpages of the Toronto papers and, it's hardly surprising because they got Jake to sign one of his Brokeback shirts, which he did, above the heart. Here are Em's words and, as many of us know, Em is a fine, fine writer and she just took me write back with this. The video follows.
'My favourite Jake moment of 2007 is at the Rendition World Premiere at the TIFF. No surprise, because I can be heard screaming Jake's name in a manner that would make even a banshee cringe in horror in the vid I shot of the event. I remember standing there amidst a crowd of people, what must have been a sea of nameless faces to Jake, and feeling like, for a brief moment, he knew me. Such a fanciful notion, I know, but it seemed like all around me was chaos and the only time everything became quiet and still was when Jake was standing in front of me.'
'I went with two EJ friends, MississaugaRed and Thomas. We also had one of the shirts Jake wore for the confrontation scene in BBM, a piece of clothing Thomas had purchased at an auction. We had no idea what we were doing because this was our first time at the TIFF. But, somehow, we stumbled upon the perfect spot to catch a glimpse of Jake because we were surrounded by TIFF veterans who knew some of the senior volunteers and officials. When those around us realized we had Jake's BBM shirt they were determined to help us in getting it signed. When Jake showed up, the TIFF veterans around us called out to one of the officials, Cheryl, and told her we had one of Jake's shirts from BBM and could he come over and sign it?'
[I love this 'wow' moment from Jake - WDW]
'I could feel my dear Thomas trembling beside me when Jake came within sight of us. Thomas asked Jake to sign the shirt and Jake immediately said, "Yeah, sure." Jake looked down at the shirt and he mouthed "Wow" and carefully signed the shirt on the left side, above where his heart would have been if he wore it. Thomas said "Thank you" and Jake kind of nodded and gave a little smile but his eyes were very soft and solemn. And, you know, he didn't say "You're welcome" but, standing there, I felt welcomed. I felt like Jake had invited us in, just for a few intimate seconds, into his world.'
'As soon as Jake was whisked away we ran across the street to get in line for the screening with only fifteen minutes to spare. While we were in line I showed both Thomas and Missy the vid I just took and we still couldn't quite believe what we had experienced just minutes before. We couldn't wait to tell our friends that Jake had signed the shirt. Little did we know that while we were watching Rendition, Associated Press released a picture of Jake getting his picture taken with one of the TIFF veterans beside us and in that picture both Thomas and Missy are beaming at Jake in adoration!' 'So that's my favourite Jake moment of 2007. In fact, one of my favourite moments EVER in 2007. Thomas said it best when he said there are so many things to love about Jake. But the best thing is...Jake brought us all together. At the TIFF. At EJ. At WDW. Whether he's doing Snakes On a Plane, calling himself Jake Gooberballs, or simply signing an autograph...there's a very real sense of hospitality within him that seems to invite us into parts of his world. Through that, he becomes ours... and we become his. And being in Jake's world is a good place to be.'
This picture of mine below is another of my famous nearmiss photographs. Except for showing Jake's feet, this could well be just before the event described by Em.
I discovered afterwards that two others were there that night - Chillinwitgyllen and Get Real. CWG can have been no more than a few feet away from me in the theatre foyer and it's such a pleasant feeling thinking both CWG and Get Real were also in the auditorium. Here are a couple of pictures that CWG sent me from that incredible time. Next time, I trust we can all do it together!
