Jake Gyllenhaal: “Do you think masculinity lacks sensitivity?”
From a skinny sociopath in Nightcrawler to a jacked boxer in Southpaw, the last few years have seen Jake Gyllenhaal go to extremes for his art. He's at it again with true-life disaster flick Everest – we catch up with the star at the Venice Film Festival
Thankfully, there’s no driving snow, 70mph winds or sub-zero temperatures when The Skinny sits down – at sea level – to speak with Jake Gyllenhaal about his new film Everest. Quite the contrary: late summer Italian sun is shining down in Venice the morning after the world premiere of Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s spectacular account of the 1996 climbing disaster on the eponymous peak, which opened the city’s film festival in epic style.
Gyllenhaal plays Scott Fischer, an experienced mountaineer and founder of Mountain Madness, one of two companies – the other being Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants – guiding fee-paying clients to the summit of the world’s highest mountain. During the ill-fated expedition depicted in the film, a series of technical hitches and a surprise storm ended in eight climbers dying in the space of 48 hours. The incident was recounted in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and the bestseller also stirred some ugly finger-pointing in the climbing community, but Gyllenhaal is keen to steer clear of the blame game. “There were varying accounts, based on the need to have, in various versions of the story, an antagonist of sorts,” he tells us. “I found that actually this was not the case.”
The film is in agreement. In the aftermath of the tragedy many decisions by Hall, Fischer and Fischer’s lead climber Anatoli Boukreev, played by Ingvar Sigurdsson, have been picked over, but Everest refuses to judge, showing instead how a series of small mistakes in the most dangerous place on Earth can build to tragedy. As Kormákur told us, “If people want villains, they should go and see The Avengers.”
Jake Gyllenhaal jacked up in Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw
We note to Gyllenhaal that both he as Fischer and Jason Clarke as Rob Hall avoid the stereotypical machismo that extreme sports, like mountaineering, might attract, but Gyllenhaal is not keen on this premise. “Do you think masculinity lacks sensitivity?” he asks. “Being able to be good at any job requires great sensitivity. What makes Rob and Scott so good at their job is they have to have a sensitivity not only to the people they are guiding but also to the mountain and the weather. They have to make choices moment-to-moment based not only on experience but also on what they feel. It’s not just trudging up the mountain, or some clichéd idea of being tough.”
In the film, Hall tells his clients that climbing Everest is about “pain, pain, pain” and this suffering and the extremes of the production – filming in Nepal on the mountain itself and in the Italian Dolomites – tie in with other recent performances by the 34-year-old actor. After thinning down for Nightcrawler and beefing up for Southpaw, the role of Fischer required intensive preparation – “I didn’t know the skill and I’m playing an expert in it so I had to learn it” – but Gyllenhaal downplays the method approach. “In all of the stories I don’t think it’s about the idea of pain, or the pain of preparation. Every story has its own idea. For me, Southpaw was about a father and a daughter, about the love between two people and I wanted to do Everest for the same reason. The most extraordinary part of this movie is that phone call [between Rob Hall and his wife Jan Arnold] and this guy who doesn’t often emote, the last thing he says is ‘I love you.’ Ultimately, all that we leave behind is the wake of our love.”
Rather than the written accounts on the expedition, Gyllenhaal says: “Meeting [Scott’s] children was the best preparation in terms of understanding his character.”
So it is the emotional heart of the film that you responded to? “I’ll push myself as much as I need to, to make sure the character is clear enough and specific enough, where who I am disappears in order to play the part and that is the story trumping everything. We tell stories; we’re storytellers. I don’t think I am in the business of playing characters as much as I am helping storytellers tell stories.”
“Do you think masculinity lacks sensitivity? Being able to be good at any job requires great sensitivity” – Jake Gyllenhaal
Early on in the film, Krakauer (played by House of Cards regular Michael Kelly) asks the inevitable “Why?” question: Why climb Everest? Why endanger your life? It’s the question that in 1923 drove an exasperated George Mallory to come up with the most famous three words in mountaineering: “Because it’s there!” When Josh Brolin, who plays Beck Weathers, a doctor and one of Hall’s clients aiming for the summit, is asked “Why?” he fires back: “There are a million different answers and they’re all false.’”
Gyllenhaal agrees: “I don’t think you can speak in generalisations about why anybody climbs Everest, but the fascinating thing about this story is that most of the climbers are equally running away as running towards something. So there’s the isolation of being up there, the beauty of being up there on your own, running from the reality you come from and you live in every day; as well as running towards something you think will allow you to understand yourself in a deeper way and make you feel strong. There’s an equality to those feelings – something pulling, something pushing – and sometimes Mother Nature comes from the opposite end and overpowers all of that.”
Brolin also praises Gyllenhaal’s commitment: “Balt[asar] said he wanted to climb Everest so I was more prepared and Jake was too, because when you have a director who turns up and says I want this to be real, you take it seriously – whereas some people would turn up on the set with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other.”
Clarke did a series of ice climbs and is outstanding and utterly credible as Rob Hall. When speaking of his co-stars, Gyllenhaal lights up with genuine enthusiasm: “I came home one night after work and Jason and Josh were in the corner of the stairwell, I walked by on my way to take a shower and then walked back an hour later to go to dinner and they were still there arguing about where the oxygen bottles had been left and when Rob had told Beck to stay and how many people had passed, and these are like major details but minor details. These are the type of things that actors who are here because they deeply love and are devoted to the story do. And those are the type of actors who did this movie, no matter how big or small their roles: they love this story and they’ll do anything to make sure that reality was touched just a little bit.”
And yet the responsibility to the true story and the men who ultimately lost their lives, and the families left behind also exerts a pressure. “Looking at Sarah [Hall, Rob Hall’s daughter who he never met] last night [at the premiere] for instance. Nothing can match everything she’s experienced in her life, no movie, no story at all.”
Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom in Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler
Speaking of a key scene, Gyllenhaal revels in the work of his fellow actor: “Jason listened to tapes of Rob and I know that it wasn’t just mimicry – it was something coming from him, his love of detail, the character. I could feel what he heard in Rob’s voice to Jan in that moment and also, as an actor, I appreciate the technique of what he was doing. As an actor you watch other actors working and you can see the strings being pulled. You go, ‘oh how beautifully strung!’ and that’s how I felt watching it last night.”
How difficult was it to leave the role behind after filming was over?
“I don’t think you ever do… I’m so thankful I grew up in a family that understands my job but there’s definitely a worry at times about how far you push it. Ultimately, you never leave. Sometimes you do something during the day and you say, ‘Whoa, that was not me. Where did that come from?’ Because you’ve honed it and worked with this one area of yourself and something spurs it and all of a sudden you’re there. I was watching a performance with Leonardo DiCaprio and I said ‘Oh, that was Gilbert Grape,’ just for one second. Or Tom Hanks you see something from ‘Forrest Gump,’ just for a moment, and that’s interesting too. These things don’t leave you, every experience you have stays with you. You watch a movie, but as an actor it exists somewhere else for you.”
Which character comes back to you the most? “The character that is really close to me, which is not far from my personality at all, is Lou Bloom from Nightcrawler. I’m constantly having to suppress that.” For a moment, there’s Lou Bloom’s cold stare and then a grin. “No, there isn’t one or another. They go out into the world and people say I like that one better, or that one, but to me they all exist on an equal plane. They all come from the same place.”