During the making of the 2007 film Zodiac, there was talk of Jake Gyllenhaal and director David Fincher having some tense times on set. Well Fincher has some out and confirmed it indeed had to do with Jake being distracted by his burgeoning career as a star. David talked openly about their disagreements in a new interview:
“Jake was in the unenviable position of being very young and having a lot of people vie for his attention, while working for someone who does not allow you to take a day off… I don’t think he’d ever been asked to concentrate on minutiae, and I think he was very distracted.”
“He had a lot of people whispering that ‘Jarhead’ was going to be this massive movie and put him in this other league, and every weekend he was being pulled to go to the Santa Barbara film festival and the Palm Springs film festival and the Catalina film festival. And when he’d show up for work, he was very scattered.”
“His managers and his silly agents who were all coming to his trailer at lunch to talk to him about the cover of GQ and this and that… it was hard for him to hit the fastball.”
“There are definitely times when I can be confrontational if I see someone slacking… I try to be compassionate about it. But. It’s. Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day.”
“I tell actors all the time: I’m not going to cut around your hangover, I’m not going to cut around your dog dying, I’m not going to cut around the fact that you just fired your agent or your agent just fired you.”
[via theinsider]
David Fincher is well-known as a perfectionist. He’ll shoot take after take until he gets exactly what he wants.
Director sounds like a dick. Team Jake.
Well, there’s nothing to distract him now. Except for a natural fit in ‘Brokeback’, nobody else has been able to get JG to “concentrate on the minutiae” either.