Jake Gyllenhaal is opening up about working with director Guy Ritchie and having to “let go” and “figure it out together” for their upcoming film The Covenant.
When Hot Ones host Sean Evans asked the Nightcrawler actor during Thursday’s episode if he found it “more daunting, more challenging or more liberating” to work with a director who allows “a lot of space to explore,” Gyllenhaal replied, “The thing I love about my job is that you get to work with so many different minds.”
Ritchie helms the action-thriller that sees Gyllenhaal as US Army Sgt. John Kinley taking on Taliban forces with Afghan interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim).
“With Guy, it was unlike anything I’ve ever done,” he recalled. “He said to me, ‘Don’t memorize any of your lines,’ and the script came in 50 pages. It wasn’t even a fully written script.”
The Prisoners actor continued, “Usually, scripts are like 110 pages, and I was like, ‘What is this?’ when he first sent it, and then he said, ‘You come to set, and we’ll work on it on the day, and then you’ll go shoot your thing.’ And it was one of the most inspiring, creative experiences I’ve ever had because it asked for total let go.”
Later in the interview, when talking about past projects, Gyllenhaal shut down theories that real human and animal feces were used in the 2005 film Jarhead “as a way to give you like a real authentic reaction in the scene.”
But he said production did have “fly wranglers” on set “to put fucking flies in it to make it look like real shit.”
He also recalled working on other movies where they would put sugar on him and “throw flies at your face to make them look like, you know, like if you’re like playing dead or something, that the flies are flying on you.”
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant is set to hit theaters April 21.
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