Two little girls disappear in Prisoners, a masterwork of suspense from Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve.
The crime thriller, which has its world premiere at the Toronto International film festival this Friday, stars Hugh Jackman and Terrence Howard as the fathers of the children, Paul Dano as the prime suspect and Jake Gyllenhaal as the detective trying to solve the case.
In Prisoners, one crime prompts another in the way of vigilante justice.
"We're often shown in stories that revenge will somehow resolve a situation that's an internal struggle," Gyllenhaal tells QMI Agency. "In a situation like this, revenge is your first inclination, but this movie shows that revenge just brings upon people more revenge — and the journey is that this can be a prison."
Gyllenhaal's character in Prisoners is somewhat unreadable, and one of several in the story who will intrigue you. He's a cop, but he has the tattoos and the mannerisms to suggest he might just as easily have wound up on the other side of the law. There are good guys and bad guys in Prisoners, but tragedy makes it harder to discern just exactly who's who.
"There are a lot of mysteries to him," says Gyllenhaal of his detective character, "and to me, that's what the movie is all about — how we're imprisoned in a way by our pasts, by our tendencies, by our judgements and assumptions, by our ability to listen or our inability to listen. Sometimes things are right in front of us and we have no idea that they are. The clues happen to be directly in front of a certain character, or really, in front of the audience, and we have no idea they're there until we get to the end."
He adds, "I liked the mystery of knowing about him, a guy nobody really knows."
Gyllenhaal has worked with Villeneuve before (on the film Enemy, which is also at TIFF) and he and the director agreed that, "We'll both have a lot of fun knowing who this guy is and all his secrets, when nobody else will know."
Perhaps the character's name, then — Detective Loki — is a little joke between the two of them, as the Norse god is such an ambiguous figure. Sometimes Loki is an ally of the other gods. And sometimes he isn't.
Gyllenhaal's character is an outsider in the story, caught between his need to understand the criminal mind and his sympathy for the wounded families. In a roundabout way, the actor's affection for the children in his real life — he has called his sister Maggie's two daughters, "The best thing that happened to my family probably ever" — helped him connect with the character.
"In every scene where there was a sort of fire underneath him, and particularly a couple of them toward the end, all I was thinking about was how fast, how hard and how hopefully superhuman I would be, if anything even close ever happened to the children that I love in my life," says Gyllenhaal. "So that was an entree of sorts. I don't even know if I would say inspiration, 'cause that's the wrong word. Because the idea is not inspiring. But it was a fire, and it was visceral."
Both Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal are Academy-Award nominated actors. Their parents are filmmaker Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter/producer Naomi Foner, so they grew up around the entertainment business; Jake made his film debut, aged 11, in City Slickers and Maggie in Waterland, one of her father's movies, at 15.
Given the family background, were those acting careers inevitable?
"There's no inevitability in the acting profession," says Gyllenhaal, laughing, "No matter how much you're driven." It's interesting work, he adds, and movies have always inspired him, but no — it's not acting that was inevitable.
It's the storytelling.
"More and more as I get older, I search out people who can tell stories well … It's in the way we grew up. I remember there always being conversation about story, and books — and, this is going to sound a little unbelievable, but it's similar to the way people talk about growing up with professors in your house. Because there were always books, and discussions of stories, and conversations about literature and source material and stories that were inspiring. So I grew up in a household like that. I think that was, and always continues to be, what was interesting."
The business side, or the glamor of the business, says Gyllenhaal, "Is not the world we grew up in. We grew up with a magical sense of storytelling. My parents were really devoted, and my dad is a great storyteller who's always telling us crazy stories and making things up.
"Our imaginations were always at work, and encouraged to be so."
Jake Gyllenhaal moves between small films and blockbusters
Jake Gyllenhaal was at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, playing a cop in the excellent drama, End of Watch. He's back in 2013 playing a cop again, in Prisoners.
"People say, 'Wait — you just played someone in law enforcement. Why would you want to do it again?" There's a common misconception, says the actor, about playing a profession, when in fact, an actor portrays a person, not his job.
And everybody's different.
"That's like saying, 'You just played a journalist. Why would you want to play one again? They're all the same!" he says, and he laughs.
On the performance front in the Hollywood system, there are movie stars and there are character actors. Gyllenhaal is one of the very few who manages to be both.
The same actor who appears in the sort of blockbuster movies that made him a household name — The Day After Tomorrow, for example, or Prince Of Persia — is also the guy who turns up in smaller, smarter movies such as The Good Girl or Proof.
He also showed his stage chops when he made his debut a decade ago on the London stage in Kenneth Lonergan's revival of This Is Our Youth.
Gyllenhaal once said, "The truth is, most of the films that make a lot of money no one remembers, and I'm not interested in making films that no one remembers."
Clever of him, then, to pick movies that manage to be both memorable and money-makers. Of Gyllenhaal's two dozen movies, here are our picks for his 10 best:
Brokeback Mountain
End of Watch
Zodiac
Proof
Donnie Darko
Lovely & Amazing
Jarhead
The Good Girl
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