Exclusive: Gunning for Early 2010 Moon Shot for Jake Gyllenhaal

Share on Facebook posted 08-18-09 by John Freeman Gill

Will Jake Gyllenhaal strap himself atop a three-stage rocket early next year and let director Doug Liman send him straight to the Moon in a big-budget Paramount action picture? Gyllenhaal is attached to the Untitled Moon Project and enthusiastically contributing ideas, while Simon Kinberg, Liman’s creative partner on Mr. & Mrs. Smith and a producer on the Moon film, has been hard at work developing the script. Recently, Kinberg sat down with 30 Ninjas Editor John Freeman Gill, who has been involved in the film project intermittently since 1997, to discuss the film’s progress. Here, Kinberg talks about what kind of action hero Jake wants to play, which famous heroic leads are the archetypes, and why Facebook and Google have as much to do with shaping the Moon-bound protagonist’s character as Apollo.

The Thinking Man’s Action Hero

JOHN FREEMAN GILL: For full disclosure for our readers, I have to say that this project is a labor of love for director Doug Liman — it goes back to 1997 or so — and I wrote the second and third drafts of the screenplay, which was then called Three Days Out, for Doug and Polygram Filmed Entertainment, and then also worked with you and Doug last year developing an updated version of the screenplay for Paramount. And it’s gone through a lot of iterations. What kind of action hero has Jake said that he’s interested in playing?

SIMON KINBERG: A smart action hero. Jake is an Oscar-nominated, great dramatic actor, who also has the physical body to play action. And the movies he loves are things like the Bourne movies; he loves a smart, cerebral, capable character, who doesn’t lead from muscles, who leads from intelligence, but when necessary can actually also rough it up. But this character is not so much what you would consider a traditional action character in the sense of a guy who shoots a gun and explodes things and beats up a crowd of people in a fistfight. He’s actually more somebody who has this dream of going to the Moon, and by hook or crook, and quite a bit of crook, is gonna get there, and so he’s a little bit more like us. A little bit less of a superhero.

JFG: Have you talked about different archetypes for heroic leads or male action heroes with Jake?

SK: We’ve definitely talked about a lot of archetypes for heroic leads. I think what we’re going to end up with is a movie that’s four guys, three guys, in a capsule and on the Moon together, so by its very nature it’s going to be The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; it’s not going to be Rocky. But the archetypes we talk about are The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, are The Bourne Identity, are Lawrence of Arabia, are characters who are a little larger than life but also still of this life, and who are not limitless in their powers, who are human, and grounded. The challenge on a movie like this is making sure it stays realistic, because Mr. & Mrs. Smith didn’t exist entirely in the real world, obviously, and superhero movies don’t, and this movie is a movie that ideally people will believe, “Oh shit, if I just put together the right parts and was a little bit more ambitious like this guy, I could do it, too.” I’ve been saying to Doug for the last few days, the model for this movie is not the guys in The Right Stuff, it’s the guys who created Facebook and Google. And those guys are more like us in a way, and certainly guys who rely more on their brains than their brawn.

Cutting Against Gyllenhaal’s Decency: “A Lot of Leeway to Fuck Him Up”

JFG: Jake is an actor with real depth, he’s got a real complexity behind his eyes. Does this affect the kind of character you can write for him? And also how great his character arc can be?

SK: For sure. Just the same way that you adjust a part to fit an actor’s vocal rhythms, you don’t want to write a part that you feel is going to be impossible for an actor to play. And Jake is, like [Robert] Downey, like Brad [Pitt] and Angie [Angelina Jolie], like a lot of incredibly skilled actors, he has the ability to go deep on a character. So we’re approaching it from, What is the broadest, most emotional — broadest in the sense of broadest spectrum from one place to another — for his character, most emotional version of this character. And that’s what excites him. He’s a guy who is drawn to dramas, who is drawn to Jim Sheridan and Sam Mendes and Ang Lee movies — those are some of the directors he’s worked with — so we’ve got to try to make our action movie about a mission to the Moon have as much drama and emotion and weight as Jarhead or Brokeback Mountain.

JFG: It seems like it has to work as a drama, because at least some chunk of the movie, even if you try to limit it, is three guys in a capsule. While they’re in that capsule, they’d better have some drama to work out.

SK: For sure, they will. And even when they get to the Moon, as much as the visual environment of the Moon is amazing, it’s also not particularly crowded. So you still have three guys in a totally desolate landscape interacting among themselves with space helmets on a lot of the time. So the dynamic between them, as it can express itself in dialogue, better be pretty damn compelling, or you’re gonna be watching a bunch of anonymous guys walking around a dark desert.

JFG: What particular strengths of Jake’s as an actor are you hoping to draw on?

SK: I think he has an innate kindness to him, as a person and as an actor. And what’s interesting about that is when you play against that he becomes even more interesting, because you’re never going to feel like he’s evil; you’re always going to understand that there’s a fundamental kindness at the core of his being. So you can allow him to do things that feel like the wrong things, or are motivated by the wrong motive, because you do feel at the end of the day that there’s some kindness that will overcome whatever his personal issues are. So that’s one thing. You have a lot of leeway to actually fuck him up, because he feels so decent at the core. And he’s also an actor who, because of his big eyes, and because it feels like there’s a lot going on behind his eyes, he doesn’t have to talk much about his emotions. There are some actors who don’t feel as penetrable. So you sort of have to overcompensate for that by giving them some scene where someone says, you know, “I remember when you were seven years old and your mom died.” With Jake, because there’s so much emotion he carries just as a good actor and as someone who has these very expressive eyes, you don’t have to do a lot of work to make us feel that he is an emotive character. He just gives you a lot of flexibility as a writer.

JFG: That should allow you to give him a bigger character arc.

SK: For sure.

JFG: Some of the conversations we’ve had, I’ve been concerned with the challenge of how to make sure Jake’s character is likable, and you make a good point that a character who on the page might not seem as likable, once Jake’s performance animates that character, the character is going to have a lot more depth.

SK: Yeah. I do believe he will bring a lot of that to the character and not all of it has to be on the page. I really believe that with Jake. I mean, I think that about a lot of good actors, but I think what’s really special about Jake is that he has this innate goodness to him. And it’s in everything. Every movie you watch of his, you feel it, and the more interesting way to go with that is to bury it a little bit. And to take for granted it’s there, and to give him a different thing to play.

All Hands on Deck

JFG: How many design people do you have working on Moon, thus far?

SK: We have a production designer we’re working with, we have a conceptual artist we’re working with, we have a storyboard artist, we have research people, a couple of other people sort of casually on the movie, so it adds up to a fair amount of folks, a good ten people who, more than that, whose brains are really thinking about this film. And on a movie like Moon, it’s especially important because we’re creating an environment that obviously exists in the real world, but we’re trying to make it look and feel different from anything we’ve seen in cinema before. You can’t just reboot Apollo 13. You’ve got to try to find … you know, there’s a cinematographer that we’re working with as well.

JFG: Who’s that?

SK: We’ve been talking to the Director of Photography from Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Bojan Bazelli. And so we’re trying to create a world that people have never seen that does happen to exist. It’s things like, What does light look like on the Moon. What does soil look like? It’s the physics of what we’re actually constructing.

JFG: Where does the film stand now?

SK: We’re hoping that the movie shoots the beginning of next year. And it has been through many iterations, which I think is Doug’s process, to some extent, where he wants to look at a lot of different versions of something to make sure it’s the exact right version, and I think we’re starting to close in on the exact right version. Like you say, it’s been a labor of love for Doug, and I’ve worked with him on two movies and a TV pilot now, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as passionate about a project as he is about this.

JFG: It’s the longest he’s been on a project.

SK: For sure. Which is telling. So it’s an ongoing — as you know, since you’re part of the conversation still — it is an ongoing conversation, it’s a group dialogue, it’s all these people involved giving ideas, and our trying to synthesize them … I just spent time with Jake, who is also a producer on the movie, and hopefully the star of the movie, and he’s doing research, and thinking about it, and has all kinds of good ideas, and — like all Dougie’s movies, but maybe more than the others — it’s an all-hands-on-deck, everybody’s-contributing-ideas process.