Maggie Gyllenhaal’s six most important filmmaking influences
Watching Maggie Gyllenhaal rise up the ranks from promising young star to established Hollywood name has been a joy.
After appearing alongside her brother Jake in the cult hit Donnie Darko, she found solo success with films like Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Secretary. Now, she’s best known for the likes of Crazy Heart, Stranger Than Fiction, and for absorbing Katie Holmes’ lifeforce in The Dark Knight Trilogy.
After establishing herself as an actor, Gyllenhaal decided to follow in the footsteps of so many other thespians and get behind the camera instead. While most people would be happy to just direct a film, she aimed right for the top and landed there. Her debut feature, The Lost Daughter, was met with rave reviews. Olivia Colman was nominated at the Oscars for her performance, and Gyllenhaal was put up for a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Director’. Not bad for a first timer.
There were enough reasons why the Mona Lisa Smile star felt the pull of the director’s seat. In an interview with The New York Times, she highlighted six filmmakers from across the broad spectrum of cinema that inspired her to take the plunge.
“[Federico] Fellini and Lucrecia Martel, who is also not ever literal,” she said. “I love Claire Denis, I’ve talked a lot about Jane Campion, and David Lynch. And then I didn’t really work with him, but I did a weeklong reading of a play with Mike Nichols. He loved his actors, and he taught me. I remember reading [in the recent biography [Mike Nichols: A Life] about him saying, I’m so sorry if you don’t want to shoot Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in black and white. Then you should find another director. I’m going to leave. There were a couple of times with this film where I had to say this is wrong.”
There’s an even split in Gyllenhaal’s picks between directors who work primarily in English and those who don’t. Most film buffs should know all about Fellini and his bizarre, surreal approach to storytelling. Check out his film Satyricon to find out for yourself. Denis is a French director who made the 1999’s seminal Beau Travail, a film that was unique in that it portrayed male soldiers as sensitive human beings. Men talking about their feelings might be all the rage these days, but in the late 1990s, this approach was years ahead. Finally, there’s Martel, an Argentinian who provided a much-needed South American perspective on Spanish-language cinema when she burst onto the scene in the early 2000s.
Campion, Lynch, and Nichols are much more well-known to Western moviegoers, with the first of those names being an absolute legend in blazing a trail for women in filmmaking. Directing is still a male-dominated art form, but when Campion first started, it was even rarer for a woman to be behind the camera, making her impact on the business beyond understated.
The late Mr Lynch is obviously best known for his uniquely bizarre world-building and zany characters that have lead to a whole universe and style being termed Lynchian, which might be more prevalent in Gyllenhaal’s upcoming feature, The Bride! As for Nichols, well, he’s the guy who made The Graduate, Silkwood, Working Girl, and more, so you’d be a fool not to take lessons from him.
As her directing career continues to go from strength to strength, we’ll have more chances to see this eclectic array of influences play out in her work, and it should be a wild ride ahead.
