The ambitious shoot that defined movie-making for Jake Gyllenhaal
Jake Gyllenhaal has had a particularly interesting career trajectory. After finding early success through his moody performance as the titular Donnie Darko and the Academy Award-winning Brokeback Mountain, he became a go-to casting for dramatic directors in the early 2010s. He completed a couple of collaborations with visionaries like Denis Villeneuve and Bong Joon-Ho and delivered a career-defining performance in Nightcrawler, but his focus seems to have somewhat shifted since then.
Between an appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a string of action flicks, Gyllenhaal has adopted a new typecast which endears him more to the likes of Guy Ritchie and Michael Bay. But Gyllenhaal’s experience with big-budget blockbusters isn’t limited to his more recent projects. Back in the early 2000s, he took on a leading role in Roland Emmerich’s disaster picture, The Day After Tomorrow.
Delving into issues of climate change through epic set pieces, the film followed Gyllenhaal as Jack Hall, a father who embarks upon a quest to retrieve his son despite the extreme weather occurring around him. Though it wouldn’t receive quite as much critical acclaim as some of Gyllenhaal’s more considered projects, it excelled at the box office, and it also provided a particularly memorable on-set experience for its star.
While reflecting on projects from throughout his career during a conversation with Vanity Fair, Gyllenhaal spoke fondly about The Day After Tomorrow. Beyond introducing him to some long-standing friendships, the scale of shooting left him in awe at the privilege and power of movie-making. “I think there are these great moments of the size that a movie can be,” he explained, “like the grand nature of making movies, that is just so beautiful.
The particular example Gyllenhaal cited as “defining movie-making” was the strange experience of shooting some of the snow scenes. Though they shot in winter in Canada, which may well have provided the right conditions for the story, they didn’t utilise the actual weather around them. Rather, they shot on a stage that Gyllenhaal remembers being “heated to 80 degrees” yet was adorned with fake snow.
“We were shooting in fake snow inside that stage, pretending like we were freezing cold,” Gyllenhaal explained, “And that just sort of just encapsulates the absurdity of what movies are and how you desperately need your imagination in order to make these things work.” It certainly does sound like a strange experience to create a fake version of something that exists on the other side of a door, to pretend to be feeling the exact opposite of reality.
The Day After Tomorrow certainly still stands up as a film that demonstrates the mammoth potential of filmmaking. Coordinating so many cast members, creating cities and climate events all within the restrictions of a set, is an impressive feat. It’s easy to see why Gyllenhaal saw the shoot as defining movie-making for him, opening his eyes to its scope as a medium.
It also makes sense that Gyllenhaal then went on to work with more filmmakers with similarly ambitious scope. While his work with Villeneuve pre-dated his expansive entries into the Dune universe, the director has always focused on impressive visuals, such as the spiders in Enemy. In his more recent endeavours in the action genre, too, Gyllenhaal seems to be exercising his interest in those more extravagant shoots.
