Jake Gyllenhaal Quotes - Page 6

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.

I think, now, younger generations do take that for granted in a lot of ways. I don't think that takes away from the struggle of identity and what that is. But the struggle for identity is everybody's struggle. No matter what it is.

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

I like that when you create you really do create with a very small group of people, and in that space, before it goes out to all these people, that's what I love.

I'm a harsh critic, you know? I am.

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

Do I take care of my body and take conditioning seriously? Yes.

I wasn't really quite sure where Heath Ledger came from, and I think that's the feeling most people got when they were around him and why he was so extraordinary.

I've become obsessed with learning other languages in movies, because I was like, since I was like, but I learned how to box so why don't I just learn another language for a movie?

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.

At Columbia there's no performing arts department, so I was searching for it everywhere I could, and I took some photography classes and I ended up becoming fascinated with Eastern Religion, and ultimately it seemed to encompass the more abstract mind that I have.

I've never had sex with boxers on and it's an odd thing to watch actors do. That's not saying I haven't tried... I just don't recommend it!

It's funny to me that people find other people getting coffee really interesting, or walking their dog in the dog park.

I have always had a deep belief that every movie, every artistic expression, is political. Don't be fooled. Even ones that we wouldn't consider overtly political are political. When we spend time doing anything, whether it's distraction or whether it's something that we have to face, it is always political. That's my belief.

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 find theater writing like in the theater on film but it's realistic, it doesn't matter who the character is, you want to do it.

My parents taught me as a kid: do your work. Do it well. Try as hard as you can, whatever it is. It will one day, for the long run, it will make some sort of change somewhere.

I think that the idea of boundaries is being challenged everywhere. And I think our fascination with sci-fi is that it is a boundary-less world where we can kind of create the reality that we believe to be as opposed to the reality that is. It is about the beyond and the unknown in a different way than pretty much any type of storytelling is.

Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor.

As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.

I've decided as an actor the only, the power I have really is in the performance. It's the only real place I get to sort of communicate.

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

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.

We are all from different cultures. Heath's [Ledger] Australian, really. I'm from here. Ang's [Lee] from China. But I think Ang gets very close in preproduction and rehearsals. And then he allows his actors - I don't think scared of actors, but I think he's scared of getting in on the scenes he's watching. The space he's watching. So he just totally disconnects from you while you're shooting.