Why Jake Gyllenhaal will never work with David Fincher again
Cinema is full of successful partnerships between actors and directors. Think Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, or Sofia Coppola and Kirstin Dunst – partners who, through their ability to communicate effectively, have given birth to cinematic magic. Cinema is equally teeming with unsuccessful actor-director partnerships, those countless collaborations that, for one reason or another, didn’t work out. Jake Gyllenhaal and David Fincher are a duo who realised their incompatibility on the set of 2007’s Zodiac.
Zodiac stars Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith, a newspaper cartoonist who becomes obsessed with catching the Zodiac Killer. With the help of police investigators and an ace reporter played by Robert Downey Jr., Graysmith slowly pieces together a case while the killer stalks the streets of ’70s San Fransico, picking off victims one by one. In an interview for The New York Times ahead of the film’s release Gyllenhaal noted how director David Fincher “paints with people,” confessing that it was “tough to be a colour.”
The actor was obliquely criticising Fincher’s directorial style, which required the actor to perform a huge number of takes – sometimes up to 70 – for important scenes. It wasn’t until Fincher sat down with The New York Times ahead of the release of Mank that he was given the opportunity to fight back. “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,” Fincher began. “I believe you have to have everything out of your peripheral vision. I think Jake’s philosophy was informed by — look, he’d made a bunch of movies, even as a child, but I don’t think he’d ever been asked to concentrate on minutiae, and I think he was very distracted.”
With the release of Jarhead on the horizon, Gyllenhaal was being told that he was about to become a very big star indeed. Fincher recognised the damaging influence of CEOs and agents, so did all he could to hit the “scatterbrained” actor with “the fastball”. This led to frequent confrontations on set.
“There are definitely times when I can be confrontational if I see someone slacking,” Fincher said, admitting: “People go through rough patches all the time. I do. So I try to be compassionate about it. But. It’s. Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day. And we might not get a chance to come back and do it again.” Fincher went on to note that tensions had decreased by the end of the shoot, with Gyllenhall even offering an apology.
Despite the understanding shared between the two artists, and the reconciliation they have perceivable enjoyed privately, the pair haven’t worked together since, and we wouldn’t bet on that fact changing soon.
