Jake Gyllenhaal Quotes

I could draw ideas. I remember writing a paper for a seminar class. I remember writing a paper about - and this is going to sound really sort of pretentious, but that's where my mind was at the time - how acting and the performing artist can really be like a Bodhisattva, how they can communicate ultimately an idea in a way that can move and shift things. And that was wonderful. I didn't know many classes where I could try and relate the thing that I really loved and wanted to do into an intellectual idea, and that happened to be one of them.

I think my strength is to do a take all the way through. I am definitely not someone who can do a sprint. Maybe I am not that smart, but it takes me a while to find the moment, and I like to be pushed toward it.

As a producer, it starts when I talk about privacy and silence. It starts before anybody believes in it. And I think that's, you have to have a real sense of self, and in order to push things through. And so often, what's interesting, is how many people dismiss an idea that eventually everybody [gloms] onto. So to me it's, that's what I mean by hard.

There are standards. I like to be prepared, I guess I should say - that type of pressure of, "All right, now you go with abandon," you know. Now when you're in it, you let go of all the things - that's what happens when you're onstage.

Do you know what fear stands for? False Evidence Appearing Real.

I promise that, one day, everything's going to be better for you.

I like the idea of the adventurer's spirit. I think that is very much what a man searches for, in a certain way.

Every journey starts with fear.

We were talking about the kissing in the movie just recently. Clearly, it's pretty challenging material, but Ang said two men herding sheep was far more sexual than two men having sex on screen.

I had been brought up in an elementary school where, my first few grades, I remember being specifically told that my teachers were gay. I was just that age and that was just how it was, and my parents were very... You know, that's how I was raised. Like super-progressive.

My experience on 'Jarhead' was life changing.

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.

You run your plays, you know your plays, you study your plays, you study the other team, you do as much as you can, you go to practice, you get in shape, you do what you need to do, and then by the time you get to the game, you know your plays, but they have to feel like they're in your bones. That has to be an unconscious thing, it cannot be conscious. That is everything to me.

I can't not have something attached to like what actually happens in real life. Like I can't do a romantic comedy without there being something where like, in the case of Annie Hathaway's character, her character ends up having Parkinson's, you know? To me, I feel like that's love, you know? Like to me. So every movie has to have that kind of sense of that.

I try and find and access the parts of myself that still blindly believe and have faith in a lot of things. I don't mean to be cynical, but I've also discovered that I still have a lot of those. And they may not be where I expected them to be. Maybe I've been in relationships, and this is a movie about relationships, like romance relationships - so maybe I've been in some that have sort of made me lose my faith. But deep down inside, I still have blind faith.

By cool, I don't mean cool. I mean vulnerable and a mess.

'Brokeback Mountain' takes all your conceptions of America, and the Western, and cowboys, and sexuality, and love, and it stirs them all up.

Heath [Ledger] would walk up to a horse and could like silence the horse. Just literally he'd be like, 'Shh. Shh.' And then he'd get on the horse. I'd be like, 'I'm going to get on you.' They'd be like, 'F - off!' I didn't really have that style.

When I was 19, I thought [Brokeback Mountain] was going to be the best movie ever made. And everyone was going to see it and it was just going to be incredible. And then nobody saw it and it didn't get bought at Sundance. And it was a really great experience. Humbling. And then it's since found its way.

As an actor, no matter what, you're at the whim of so many other people all the time.

Sometimes love is calm and easy and sometimes it's just plain dirty.

Being a star doesn't last. That's not what life should be about. It's a complete illusion that really has nothing to do with you. For me, finding out about life is the most important thing.

Everybody is an actor in one way or another. We are all performing certain things.

I love movies that are saying things that people might find odd at times. I don't find them odd at all. They give me comfort.

I love artists. I love watching other people work.

I think that we all have within us the potential for almost anything. If we play close attention to our lives, then we can get at it somehow.

In that way, as an actor in particular, you're powerless. And so in that way as an actor in particular you can't make mistakes.

I'm superstitious a little bit.

But you need to strive to try and communicate and try and change things in a similar way. And then people can think that's pretentious or whatever, but it's your life's work, and you've decided that. That's what they made us believe. So we have a pretty high standard, which is at times great and at times not.

When I look at that now, all I think about is what a master [David Fincher] I was working with, and all of the things I could have watched and learned - and I didn't. And how, now, in my career, how I would love to have a ton of takes.

I had not spent a ton of time around animals as a kid.

I grew up on movie sets, so it was something I just found familiar. When I was growing up also, in high school, I would audition for things and my parents let me audition for things - with the thought that I wouldn't get them. And then I would get them... sometimes, and it would surprise them.

There are lines that just stick with me, like I mean I still can remember it's like every line that I say from Nightcrawler, I mean it's just always there.

To me Donnie Darko was about adolescence. And about how, as soon as you start to grow up and you sort of move out into the world, you realize everything is so trippy. That anything can be anything.

When you have the opportunity to choose projects, inevitably you start being moved towards the things that you're moved by, right? And that changes over time, as we change, right?

I have a profound respect for cinematographers. That is my secret sauce. Like they are everything to me.

My mum and dad are pretty amazing chefs and they spent most of my childhood cooking really extravagant things for my sister and me.

I walk around thinking job to job, trying to not have regrets.

Sometimes what I actually love to do is go to a farm and get fresh milk or watch a pig get slaughtered.

One of the things that I'm so proud of [about] that movie [Brokeback Mountain], was to see, within the past basically 10 years, how much has changed. When the Supreme Court [issued a ruling] just a little while ago, I felt like we had been part, a little part and parcel of that movement.

I was working with Michael Shannon and I was like, "Oh man I'm having trouble with this scene." And he's like, "Well, then just open it up." I was like, "But, the mark?" And I was like, what's wrong with me? And he was like, "Dude, what's wrong with you?"

I hope I'm a spiritual person. I'm trying to be a spiritual person.

As an actor, I feel like I'm somebody who, when somebody gives me a mark, I don't want to hit it. I don't like that. But then, without even knowing it, I just hit it.

You have formal rehearsal, a lot of things you don't have in movies - which is, you have to formally rehearse. You have to know your back story, discuss it, and almost everybody onstage has to know each other's [story], so that when it comes time to actually do it, you can throw it all away. That's the way I like to - and I didn't realize until very recently - that's the way I like to prepare for movies.

Ang Lee just allowed me to make what we would call mistakes and had no judgment of them. He also empowered me. You know, he's like, "You're my actor. I chose you. Whatever you do is right." Right? "I made the decision, I'm complicit in choosing you. And I went through everything I could to choose you, so I feel good and whatever you're going to do I'm going to give you this space." And so it was very empowering.

I always say about that movie [ Brokeback mountain], which I think maybe over time is more understood, is that this is about two people desperately looking for love. To be loved. And who were probably capable of it. And they just found it with someone of the same sex.that does not dismiss the fact that it is about, really, primarily, the first kind of very profound gay love story. Hopefully it can create an equality of an idea: that is, it's possible that you can find love anywhere.

Working with Robert, Robert [Elswit] is a storyteller. He's not a cinematographer, he's a storyteller. And to me, that's the graduation I hope to get to in my profession. That I'm not just an actor, I'm a storyteller. And I think that takes a long time in, when you have one job on a movie set. Makeup artists, actor, whatever. To graduate from just that to storyteller.

To me I just, I'm a geek when it comes to cinematographers . And when it comes to Robert and when it comes to someone like Roger Deakins who shot Prisoners and he shot Jarhead.