Some movies you just can’t quit. Jake Gyllenhaal recently sat down with Vanity Fair to talk through his career timeline—from his child-acting days in City Slickers to his bank-robbery-action flick Ambulance. During the chat, he also opened up about working with the late Heath Ledger on Brokeback Mountain.
“The relationship between me and Heath while we were making this movie was something that was based on a profound love for a lot of people that we knew and were raised by in our lives,” said Gyllenhaal. “A deep respect for their love and their relationship.”
Gyllenhaal went on to recall how seriously Ledger took the film and its subject matter. “There were many jokes being made about the movie, or poking fun at, things like that,” Gyllenhaal said. “And [Ledger’s] consummate devotion to how serious and important the relationship between these two characters was—it showed me how devoted he was as an actor and how devoted we both were to the story and the movie.”
Gyllenhaal described the experience of shooting Brokeback Mountain with Ledger as a “really deep and fun one.” “We spent three weeks shooting, making everyone coffee and then eating a little breakfast and then walking to work,” he said. ”It’s a technique of movie-making that I wished we did more of, where we all just powwowed and lived together in the space.”
Brokeback Mountain has stuck with Gyllenhaal ever since. “There’s a moment that I go back to a lot,” Gyllenhaal said. “Heath and I were at a Q&A at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles, and I remember us going to dinner while the movie was screening. And I remember us joking backstage, and I remember us coming on to stage in a humorous mode because we were just having fun with each other. We sat down, the lights came up, and a man stood up—and the movie had been out for a week and a half—and he said, ‘I just want to say, this is my 11th time seeing this movie, and I can’t stop watching it, and I just want to thank you all for making it.’ And I thought, 11 times in 10 days.”
“I remember the wash of that over us,” Gyllenhaal recalls. “We were poking fun at each other before we go on, and then the profound realization of—the profundity of this thing washed over us. It happens constantly to this day, and I can’t really express how proud I am of it. ”
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