THE SWEET SCIENCE
Jake Gyllenhaal bulks up for his turn in the ring.
Jake Gyllenhaal compares boxing with playing Simon, the ’80s electronic memory game. The metaphor needs a little unpacking. He’s just been asked whether there was improvisation on the set of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, in which he plays a troubled boxer trying to put his life back together for the sake of his daughter (played by Oona Laurence. London, Ont.born Rachel McAdams also co-stars).
“Absolutely, yes,” he says. For the fight scenes, they would have choreography worked out for several rounds, and then be free to improvise.
“I’d say stuff like, I’m going to throw two jabs and a right hand. And they’d say: OK, I’m going to split the right hand and I’m going to block those two jabs. And then we’d add on that. Double jab, right hand, left hook. Followed by two right hands thrown at the same time, both of us get hit. It’s sort of like playing — what’s that game with the colours?”
Mind you, the stakes were higher than in a game of Simon. “Occasionally, we’d forget and we’d get hit or we’d hit somebody,” he says.
“It’s hard to make the movie in the way that Antoine wanted … and not sustain injury. You’re going to get hurt, and we both wanted that. I really don’t feel like you could successfully play a boxer without really knowing what that feels like and what that experience is.”
Southpaw was originally intended as a vehicle for rapper Eminem, who dropped out to concentrate on his music but remains on the film’s soundtrack with the powerful single Phenomenal.
“I didn’t know how to box before I started preparation for the movie,” Gyllenhaal says. “So I was primarily motivated by fear. I had about five months and decided if I trained twice a day that it would make five months into 10. I just tried to make the best use of my time.”
Sometimes t hat meant unlearning prior assumptions about the sport.
“The simple aspect of where a punch comes from, which at first I thought was brute force and strength,” he says. “Ultimately, it came out of an ease and grace and breaking down all that tension that you would assume is where a punch is thrown from.”
And while he was familiar with such pugilistic touchstones as Raging Bull and “all the Rockys,” Gyllenhaal says he found inspiration further afield, including Ken Loach’s 1998 drama My Name Is Joe, about a Glaswegian recovering alcoholic.
“I don’t go into a boxing movie thinking of other boxing movies,” he says. “I’m inspired by a million different things, a million different films. So the more I can actually move away and contradict the boxing movie genre, particularly in behaviour, the more successful it will be. Movies are only interesting when there are cross-currents happening.”
Gyllenhaal has a number of other projects on the go. Next up, opening in September, is Everest, directed by Iceland’s Baltasar Kormákur. Gyllenhaal plays mountaineer Scott Fischer in the story of the 1996 tragedy in which 12 people died trying to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain during a blizzard. After that, Demolition, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and co-starring Naomi Watts.
He’s currently shooting Nocturnal Animals, directed by Tom Ford and based on the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. The film also stars Amy Adams and Michael Shannon.
Asked to name some directors with whom he’d like to work, Gyllenhaal lists the Coen brothers and Guillermo del Toro — not surprisingly, since he recently spent two weeks with them as part of the Cannes Film Festival jury. But he also mentions Spike Jonze and Pedro Almodóvar. “I know he’s not done an Englishlanguage film, but I would learn Spanish for that man.”
And despite an Oscar nomination for 2005’s Brokeback Mountain and a Golden Globe nomination last year for his astounding turn in Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal says he still has to fight for roles. Of filling in for Eminem in Southpaw, he says: “I have been, as every actor is, the replacement for the original guy, in almost every film I’ve ever done.”
He adds: “Most of the work that I want to do, I have to convince people that I’m capable of doing it, and that’s where I want to be. I was literally just on the phone with a producer saying, ‘Well, if this guy doesn’t want to do it, I’d love to.’ ”
Southpaw Rating:
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel McAdams, Oona Laurence Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
Running time: 123 minutes
Sometimes a name sounds like it belongs on an old person. Oona Laurence is one of those monikers, but the person in question is a 12-year-old acting phenom who comes into the movie Southpaw with a Tony win and Grammy nomination under her belt.
She plays Leila, a pivotal role in the story of boxer Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal). Billy begins the movie as the reigning World Light Heavyweight Boxing Champion, but what follows is a roller-coaster emotional ride in which most of the early curves track downward.
Billy’s story is the typical rags-to-wrist-wraps tale. “The product of a Hell’s Kitchen orphanage,” as one of the ringside announcers helpfully points out in the opening scene, the kid made a name for himself as Billy “the Great” Hope, lurching to a 43-0 record with the help of his childhood sweetheart, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), and longtime manager Jordan (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson).
There is a fair bit of on-the-nose dialogue in the screenplay by Kurt Sutter (TV’s Sons of Anarchy), including the inevitable moment where someone compares boxing to chess. But the screenplay soars in its broader strokes, helped by superb editing (by John Refoua, Oscar-nominated for Avatar), and by one of the last scores of James Horner, a man who truly deserved a “great” in his name. He died when his single-engine plane crashed in June.
It’s a bit by-the-boxing-movie-book, but director Antoine Fuqua (The Equalizer, Olympus Has Fallen), manages to make the whole thing feel fresh. Even the match scenes, with their judicious use of the boxer’s POV cam, have an original snap and crackle in their pop.
It helps that Gyllenhaal commits so fully to the part, carrying his physical and emotional scars from scene to scene as though afraid that to lose them would leave him with nothing. And Laurence can’t be praised too highly for her role as his daughter, going through her own turmoil even as Billy tries to reconnect with her. Who would have guessed the movie’s knockout punch would be delivered by a kid?