Fuqua directing Gyllenhaal from a van made ‘The Guilty’ possible
Jake Gyllenhaal was driving when a COVID-19 supervisor called and told him to pull the car over.
This was in November, when U.S. cases were skyrocketing and Gyllenhaal was days away from starting shooting on “The Guilty,” a thriller about a demoted Los Angeles police detective (played by Gyllenhaal) who takes a kidnapping call while working at the 911 dispatch center. The whole point of the contained production was to minimize COVID19 disruptions. Gyllenhaal is almost the only on-screen actor. There’s one setting. The entire shoot would take 11 days.
“So I pulled over and I was like: ‘Oh no.’ I had already had COVID, so I sort of knew it might not be me, but I didn’t know,” says Gyllenhaal.
No one on the production had the virus, but director Antoine Fuqua had been in close contact with someone who tested positive. Tests were negative for Fuqua, but regulations at that time required him to quarantine.
“You have a 10-day quarantine and an 11-day shoot, so it basically does your movie in,” says Gyllenhaal. “I just felt it kind of falling apart.”
But after Gyllenhaal, Fuqua and producers ran through their options, they settled on a novel one. Fuqua would direct “The Guilty” from a van parked down the street from set.
“We kicked it around, kicked it around, and I looked up a van that’s used for photography. I wondered if there was a way to use technology to our advantage,” says Fuqua. “Literally, I did the whole thing from this van.”
The coronavirus has forced Hollywood to adapt
in countless ways to keep productions running through the pandemic.
But few films have pivoted quite like “The Guilty” — now in theaters and on Netflix — a movie made without its director hardly ever stepping on set.
On their previous film together, 2015’s boxing drama “Southpaw,” Fuqua, a boxer, and Gyllenhaal intensely trained together twice a day. On “The Guilty,” they didn’t see each other for the duration of the shoot. They spoke by phone or FaceTime. Watching feeds of both the movie and from spy cameras place around the set, Fuqua communicated to the crew through a “God mic.”
Gyllenhaal and his producing partner, Riva Marker, first acquired the rights to “The Guilty,” an adaptation of Gustav Moller’s Danish thriller, at the 2018 Sundance
Film Festival. When the pandemic arrived and the film industry shut down, they returned to it, with Nic Pizzolatto (“True Detective”) penning the script. In the film, Gyllenhaal’s detective scrambles desperately to save a taken woman while also reconciling his own guilty conscience.
There were hiccups.
At first, Fuqua’s van was plugged into his house but everything was a halfsecond delayed. Gyllenhaal initially kept hearing his own voice played back in his earpiece. Zooms would glitch.
But the production eventually found its groove. And by the time Fuqua’s quarantine was over, he decided to stay in the van for the last two days. Surrounded by monitors and sound, he was positioned almost identically to the film’s main character. And it was working.
Both Fuqua and Gyllenhaal have since returned to more fully scaled movies as vaccines have made larger productions less difficult to mount. Gyllenhaal shot Michael Bay’s action movie “Ambulance”; Fuqua is making the pre-Civil War drama “Emancipation” in Louisiana with Will Smith.
Fuqua, though, has kept the van. He made a few modifications and brought it with him to Louisiana.
“In Hollywood, we’re funny. Certain things, we stick to, like putting up tents with sandbags,” says Fuqua. “When I got in the van, I said this is great. You can drive it up and that becomes my tent. Me and Will go in there and look at the scene.”