David Fincher is touching upon the tensions he and Jake Gyllenhaal faced while making 2007′s Zodiac.
In a former interview, Jake previously said that the famed director “paints with people” and “it’s tough to be a color.”
Fincher is now responding in a new interview, where he called their drama on set an “extremely simple” situation.
“Jake was in the unenviable position of being very young and having a lot of people vie for his attention, while working for someone who does not allow you to take a day off,” David told the New York Times. “I believe you have to have everything out of your peripheral vision….I don’t think he’d ever been asked to concentrate on minutiae, and I think he was very distracted. He had a lot of people whispering that Jarhead was going to be this massive movie and put him in this other league, and every weekend he was being pulled to go to the Santa Barbara film festival and the Palm Springs film festival and the [expletive] Catalina film festival. And when he’d show up for work, he was very scattered.”
David continued, adding that the tension died down by the end of filming and Jake even apologized. “I don’t want to make excuses for my behavior. There are definitely times when I can be confrontational if I see someone slacking. People go through rough patches all the time. I do. So I try to be compassionate about it. But. It’s: Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day. And we might not get a chance to come back and do it again,” he added.
“I tell actors all the time: I’m not going to cut around your hangover, I’m not going to cut around your dog dying, I’m not going to cut around the fact that you just fired your agent or your agent just fired you,” he added. “Once you get here, the only thing I care about is, Did we tell the story?”
David also just criticized one of the biggest films of the past few years.
