TORONTO – It’s the little things that break Prisoners out of the standard whodunnit formula, says star Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays a relentless cop on the hunt for two missing girls.
The dark thriller centres on a clash between Gyllenhaal’s by-the-book officer and an enraged father, played by Hugh Jackman, but its larger themes on torture, morality, individuality and fear are what earned it raves at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.
Gyllenhaal credited Quebec director Denis Villeneuve with mining rich themes from the script and pushing each cast member to find the unique ways in which their character embodies various threads.
“He’s obsessed with that type of detail and the themes running through the movie, that they connect to what he first felt in his heart when he read (the script),” Gyllenhaal said at a press conference during the festival while seated next to Villeneuve.
The Zodiac star decided early on to add a unique mannerism to his role — a sort of eye twitch that makes physical the inner stresses and frustrations boiling inside his conflicted character.
“I just started feeling things and that physical tic of being kind of lost and confused — but also highly intelligent as a character — came out in that way,” said Gyllenhaal, noting that Villeneuve supported him immediately.
“He really loved it and he was such a champion of those types of mannerisms where I think so many other directors would be afraid and say, ‘Oh God, where are we going here?’ He was so loving and encouraging and I think that’s why everybody here is, or should be, very proud of the work they’ve done.”
Jackman and Gyllenhaal share just a handful of scenes, but Jackman noted they are crucial in establishing the opposing forces at play.
While Gyllenhaal’s dedicated Det. Loki fights hard to maintain a sense of protocol as things spin wildly out of control, Jackman’s anguished Keller Dover is whole-heartedly determined to do whatever it takes to get his daughter and her friend back alive.
Keller focuses his fury on a mysterious lead suspect Alex, played by Paul Dano, whose curious outbursts make Keller convinced the young man is involved in the crime.
Meanwhile, the other girl’s father Franklin Birch, played by Terrence Howard, is horrified when Keller draws him into the escalating violence, but settles into a reluctant complacency as he realizes every second counts.
“This movie exists in that fact that there’s no right answer,” Jackman said of the dilemmas facing these characters.
“That there is always collateral damage, that it is not easy, there is moral ambiguity and this is life. And very rarely do we see it in cinema. And very rarely do we get an opportunity, in a thriller particularly, where you get a chance to ruminate on that long after you leave the cinema.”
Jackman said he studied cases of real-life child abductions to gain insight into what a parent goes through. When it came time to put that experience on the big screen, a lot of his interpretation focused on exploring the effects of sleep deprivation.
“The most maddening part of the whole thing is the powerlessness of a parent knowing that your child is waiting for you and can’t understand why you’re not there every second of every day,” said Jackman, who notes his crazed character can barely comprehend basic concepts as the days pass.
“They’re not waiting for the police to come rescue them. And the police the entire time are saying, ‘Please let us do our jobs, just relax.’ And it’s maddening…. To sleep is to fail your child in a way, it’s impossible to just go and rest.”
As Keller’s devastated wife Grace, Maria Bello said she suggested her character never change her clothes.
“She’s stuck in this moment, in this day. It’s a week and you see my hair get greasier and I really did sort of not shower and such,” said Bello.
Meanwhile, Melissa Leo, who plays Alex’s elderly aunt Holly, insisted on wearing dirty eyeglasses.
“It was a last second thought but as the property department would hand me the glasses and … wipe them quite nice and clean, both for the camera and for the actor, (I would say) ‘Don’t touch them!’ ” said Leo, an Oscar-winner for her supporting role in The Fighter.
“I liked to have the fingerprints all over her glasses and have them be a little cloudy and hard to see through.”
For Dano, the gateway into his character was nailing the voice — imbuing a strange childlike quality that alternatingly came off as creepy and sympathetic.
“I think that that was the one thing I said to you,” Dano said, turning to Villeneuve. “‘If I’m doing to do this I’m going to have this impression of somebody who stopped at a certain age and almost everything stopped then.'”
Producer Broderick Johnson said he saw the tale as an allegory for how individuals and institutions react when tragedy strikes. He extended the analogy to the U.S. government’s so-called “war on terror.”
“(Sept. 11) happened and the world reacted and things that you wouldn’t ordinarily do you either would do — in the case of the Hugh Jackman character — or you would allow to be done,” said Johnson.
“That was a very much a lot of people’s reaction post-9/11 with things that were going on by the government.”
Prisoners opens Friday.
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