Jake Gyllenhaal can’t help but be competitive with his sister Maggie.

The ‘Brothers’ actor insists there is always rivalry in the movie industry but says he is used to it because of the nature of his relationship with his actress sibling, who at 32 is three years older than him.

He said: “The idea of competition, particularly in a creative atmosphere, is always there. And if you don’t acknowledge that, you are doing yourself and the process a disservice. That’s what brothers and sisters and family are like.

“For instance, my sister had a couple of years before I turned up, but I have been with her since the beginning of my life, so there is always going to be a great bond and always a little competition.”

The 29-year-old hunk has recently starred in drama war film ‘Brothers’, which tells the story of how two siblings fall in love with the same woman.

Jake and his 34-year-old co-star Tobey Maguire had a lot of “fun” working on the movie together because they were determined to ensure their on-screen relationship appeared realistic and competitive.

He explained: “What made it fun working on ‘Brothers’ with Tobey, who is my contemporary, was the acknowledgement of admiration and the acknowledgement of competition.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal is not just a lauded actress and an enthusiastic Brooklynite, she is also something of an expert on how indie movies get sold and marketed, as the Bagger discovered over a recent lunch (at a family-run restaurant in Brooklyn, of course). In Ms. Gyllenhaal’s latest, “Crazy Heart,” the directorial debut of Scott Cooper, an actor, she plays the love interest of Jeff Bridges’s alcoholic country singer; it also stars Robert Duvall as his old friend and features music by T-Bone Burnett. Yet it very nearly fell to the straight-to-DVD ranks before being scooped up and thrust into the Oscar race late in the year. Now Mr. Bridges is being touted as the best actor front-runner, and, in the year of the 10, the film itself is a dark horse for best picture. (But don’t expect the movie’s good fortune to be reflected in the fortunes of its couple. “Jeff always makes this joke,” Ms. Gyllenhaal said, “like, oh they’re going to get together in the sequel, and it’s going to be called ‘Crazy Liver.’ ”) Here is Part 2 of our conversation; Part 1, now updated with more answers, is here.

Did you follow the ins and outs of how the movie was released?

Mmm. I mean, I’ve done independent movies where I was like a constant part of getting it to distribution, you know, like ‘Sherrybaby,’ I had to go and get dressed up and have dinner with all the distributors, and get the money to begin with. And then go to the festivals, and wine and dine everybody, and chat everybody up, and do my job.

In this case, it wasn’t on my shoulders in that way. But still, of course, I loved the movie so much I followed everything that happened with it. In a way, it’s like a perfect picture of the financial climate of the movie industry.

We made it with a distribution deal, with Paramount Vantage. And now nobody would make a $7 million independent without a distributor. Nobody, you can’t sell it. Nobody is ever gonna buy that. At that time, you could have made a $2 million movie without a distributor. I know a lot about this actually, because I have made a lot of these tiny movies and cared a lot about how they get sold. But we made it thinking we had a distributor, but then Vantage fell apart, and then Paramount, big Paramount, it’s not a big Paramount movie, and they were great and let it go. And we didn’t take it to Cannes. Instead, after Cannes, when nobody bought anything at Cannes, they had a bunch of screenings, and Jeff Berg, who’s Scott’s agent, a fancy I.C.M. producer, kind of helmed it. It was a little bit of a scramble for a moment, because we were in that moment when nobody was buying anything.

When I started making movies, like when I made ‘Secretary,’ you could totally go and make a movie for $2 million with a good cast and a good script, and it would get bought, and you could count on it having some kind of a life. And that is completely not true now. At all. It’s just dead, because the whole financial structure for funding independent films has fallen apart.

So we got caught in this kind of moment where everything has been crumbling, and then thank God for Fox Searchlight, they have been incredible. I have to say, I watched the cut of the movie before they came in, and you know, it was very good, but it felt like an independent movie. It felt like, there were places that were too long, places that didn’t totally gel. They basically, according to Scott, they didn’t say, ‘O.K., we’re going to buy the movie and get rid of the director and do our own thing,’ they just gave him more time and money to finish editing the movie. And he did a beautiful job, and the cut is so much better.

And the way that, I mean, they’ve worked us, like Jeff and Scott, and even T-Bone and Duvall, and I have been at like a thousand Q. and A.’s for the past little while, but I think they know if actors love their movie, they’ll go. I went to the Angelika and just randomly did a Q. and A. after the first Friday night screening, and that helps get people into the first weekend. You know, when you’re working on a movie you’re not that crazy about, you might not do that. Peter [Sarsgaard] was joking with me, my husband, like, are they going to have you with a big sign, standing on Broadway, handing out fliers, trying to get people to go see ‘Crazy Heart?’ Because you would, wouldn’t you.

As both a mother and an actress, Maggie Gyllenhaal — mother to 3-year-old Ramona with husband Peter Sarsgaard, 38 — has felt torn in two very different directions.

“I had been so focused on Ramona — and she’s been everything to me — but I’m also an actress,” the star, 32, tells UsMagazine.com. “It’s not possible to do it perfectly.”

Gyllenhaal, who stars in Crazy Horse (out now), says that she took the role as a single mom because “I wanted to do something for me.”

Still, this isn’t her first gig since giving birth to her daughter in October 2006.

“I made The Dark Knight and Away We Go, but I was only on set for a few days,” she recalls. “So, in a sense, [Crazy Horse] is the first thing that felt like the kind of work that I’m really used to.”

Although she was able to put her child-rearing experience to work for her in her latest drama, she isn’t opposed to taking a bigger leap with her next character.

“Being a mom is so present in my mind and my work,” she tells Us. “It’s the most important thing about me, but next I’d like to play someone who’s not a mother. Really!”

But it’s what her character Jean does, with catastrophic consequences, in the drama Crazy Heart, now in theaters.

“Being a mother forces me to be so responsible. I’m very protective, and I try to keep (Ramona) out of this Hollywood stuff,” says Gyllenhaal, 32. “But I make mistakes. I have that tug of wanting things that feel good to me and trying to figure out in what ways I have to sacrifice and what ways she has to sacrifice. I haven’t been perfect at that.”

Gyllenhaal, whose last major film role was in 2008 hit The Dark Knight, says she’s torn between her family life in Brooklyn, where she resides with her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, and Ramona, and the desire to work. It’s why she felt compelled to play novice reporter and single mom Jean in the drama, co-starring Jeff Bridges as a boozing country singer who meets Jean during an interview and ends up bedding her.

… read more »

Before I went on christmas holidays I promised that I would upload all the Crazy Heart related videos to the media archive when I got back home. I’m home now and I have just uploaded 10 videos to the media archive. Enjoy!

Video Links:
Crazy Heart Interview (1)
Crazy Heart Interview (2)
Crazy Heart Interview (3)
Crazy Heart Interview (4)
Crazy Heart Interview (5)
Crazy Heart Interview (6)
Crazy Heart Interview (7)
Crazy Heart Interview (8)
Crazy Heart Interview (9)
Late Show with David Letterman – December 21, 2009

Maggie Gyllenhaal lives on Sesame Street, otherwise known as a Park Slope byway. The four-story brownstone she shares with husband Peter Sarsgaard and their 3-year-old, Ramona, has emission-free “fireplaces” and an overabundance of couches in the parlor, but the first thing you notice is a pile of well-loved paperbacks waiting to be deposited on the sidewalk. “In Brooklyn—maybe it’s the same in the city—you’re kind of allowed to put things in front of your house, and they’ll always get taken,” she says with such awe it’s hard to believe she moved to New York from L.A. fifteen years ago, at 17. From upstairs comes the sound of Ramona having a grand time doing toddler things. This is the home that’s teaching Gyllenhaal to be an adult, she explains. She gave birth and closed on the brownstone within the space of two days and learned that “when you have a child, life becomes impossible if you’re not organized. Like, to take the subway with a huge diaper bag full of all sorts of shit is awful.” Same with homeowning. “I had no idea what I was taking on: a brownstone that hadn’t been touched since the seventies. We made huge mistakes. At first, when we got bids on work, we said, ‘Of course we’ll take the cheapest bid.’ Which I would not do anymore at all.”

Work almost sounds like a vacation. She and Ramona romped around Santa Fe and hippie-filled hot springs while filming Crazy Heart, with Jeff Bridges in an Oscar-baiting role as an alcoholic country-and-western singer and Gyllenhaal as the rookie reporter who falls for him. And they just returned from a four-month shoot in London, where she was playing a harried WWII mother of three opposite Emma Thompson’s magical governess in Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang.

But now Gyllenhaal’s ready for more domestic improvement. She’s already got cooking down, but she’s actually been reading an instruction manual, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, to figure out the rest. “Honestly, I grew up with a mom who was a writer, and her mom was a doctor, and I wasn’t handed down a lot of housekeeping tips.” In a few days, a nervous Gyllenhaal will be having a group of fifteen over for a “ Russ & Daughters Christmas morning”—a compromise between her Jewish upbringing and Sarsgaard’s Catholic one—and she has a mess of shopping to do. So she suggests a trek down snowy concrete to “beautiful” gourmet shop Bklyn Larder.

On the way, Gyllenhaal marvels at the quaint little life she’s managed to carve out in this place she doesn’t really consider to be New York City (as in, “I thought I would have kids in New York City, but I’m glad I’m out of there”). She tells how, after the recent blizzard, everyone got up to shovel, except for the nightclub Southpaw. But she wasn’t mad. “I just thought, Aw, they’re still sleeping.” She raves about her favorite coffee shop, Gorilla, “though they’re a little tough there. One time Peter was like, ‘Do you think we could come over and get 20 to-go cups for a little party?’ I mean, we go there every day. And they were like, ‘Uh, I don’t think so.’?” A garbage man waves and she waves back. “I mean, you’ve got to thank the garbage man, right?” she says, though she refuses to speculate with me on which of her movies he’s seen. “Our block, it’s like Sesame Street. It really is. There are people who live in one room, and people who own the whole brownstone. There are people of all colors. When we were living in the West Village, there was that whole black-tranny-hooker contingent, which is completely wiped out now. Here, everything converges.”

Picking out her cheese plate at Larder, Gyllenhaal already knows she wants Petit Agour and Stichelton. Vacherin Mont d’Or is too “holiday season; they’re very sophisticated, my friends.” She dislikes a particularly earthy-tasting Pecorino Gregoriano she tries, but decides to get it anyway: “My husband will love that kind of dirty-whore cheese.” In search of something soft and gooey, she calls her mother, screenwriter Naomi Foner. “Hi, I’m doing an interview, but I have a quick question because we’re, like, fake-cheese-shopping in the interview, but I am actually buying cheese. What is that kind you used to buy, with the ceramic dish and the cream, that was so delicious?” The counterman, listening in, says he’ll get in some Saint Marcellin tomorrow for her, and the shopping—fake and real—is finished.

On the way back, I ask Gyllenhaal if she has any lowbrow guilty pleasures. Does she watch reality TV? “No! Do you?” Does she want to see Avatar? “Peter really wants to go. Oh, I saw Up in the Air last night. It was sort of a guilty pleasure. Different from watching an Almodóvar movie.” And later on, she’s getting Sarsgaard to take her to Ikea. “We read a lot of novels, and we have boxes and boxes of books we’ve given away, but we have eight more to sort through, and at this point, I just want them off of the floor. I don’t care if the bookshelves are beautiful.”

Source.

A Maggie Gyllenhaal dialogue in Away We Go has made it number 1 on The New York Post list of 10 best Hollywood movie lines of 2009

Compiled by The New York Post, the list of Best Movie Lines of ’09 is as follows:

1 “I love my babies. Why would I want to push them away from me?” – hippie mom Maggie Gyllenhaal explaining why she’s opposed to strollers in Away We Go

Source.

The Dark Knight actress explains, “I could see how it would be awful for some people. For us it was like bliss. It was sexy and I felt like doing a Chekhov play, there are going to be times when you struggle, there are going to be times when you get things wrong, when you’re flailing, and I felt like he respected me every minute.

Merry Christmas!

We here at Maggie Gyllenhaal Online wants to wish everybody a merry christmas and I hope you all have a really a festive evening tonight/tomorrow. Updates with return after christmas, I’ll be off the until the 27th so don’t expect any updates the following days.

But you’re not going without updates today, I have added HQs of Maggie visiting David Letterman. The video of the interview plus other Crazy Heart related interviews will be added after christmas.