BROTHERS
Press conference interview with Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, and Tobey Maguire
by Wilson Morales

November 30, 2009



Coming out on December 4 is drama/war film ‘Brothers,’ which is directed by Jim Sheridan and is based on Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film. The film partially takes place in Afghanistan, replacing Denmark.

Starring in the film are Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman

The film tells the story of two siblings, Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) and younger brother Tommy Cahill (Jake Gyllenhaal), who are polar opposites. A Marine about to embark on his fourth tour of duty, Sam is a steadfast family man married to his high school sweetheart, Grace (Natalie Portman), with whom he has two young daughters, Isabelle and Maggie (Bailee Madison, Taylor Grace Geare). Tommy, his charismatic younger brother, is a drifter just out of jail who’s always gotten by on wit and charm. When Sam goes missing, Tommy moves in to take care of the family, and eventually begins a relationship with Grace. Sam eventually returns home, however, beginning a confrontation with Tommy and Grace.

At a press conference in NYC, Sheridan along with Gyllenhaal, Portman, and Maguire spoke about the film, it being a remake, and the issue of war.

Jim Sheridan

Jim, can you talk about how you went about creating this and how close you stayed to the original and also casting the young actress who played Isabelle? Jim Sheridan: Yeah. Bailee Madison. She’s a sweet kid and I liked Taylor [Geare who plays the other daughter], too. Natalie stole her and put her in her next movie. She’s the lead in her next movie (Portman’s short film in “New York I Love You” which has already been released). So the kids were great. It’s hard to know what you do to be original because David Benioff wrote the script and then we all got together and kept changing it and reworking it. You have to get into imagining that you’re doing something original otherwise you’d go nuts, I think. There used to be things in Ireland called ‘Show Bands’ and they used to imitate American songs. They’d always record the hits again. So I didn’t want to try and do the show band version, do you know what I mean? I think in watching the movie over and over a kind of thing reveals itself. My daughter is always saying that I don’t understand the movie she’s writing because it’s a woman’s movie and my other daughter goes to college here. So at the end I got afraid and I said, ‘Why don’t you do an analysis of both movies,’ because at times we do a few re-shoots, not many, and she did an analysis of what the difference was and it was something like Susanne’s (Bier) movie is more romantic and is more about, I suppose, the love relationship and ours was more about a family. I think the thing that I do is put families together. I think what she’s (Bier’s) doing is telling stories about inappropriate love. They’re just different approaches. It doesn’t feel like a remake to me anymore.

It feels like an original?

JS: Well, it’s not so much that. I was really in this position like a doctor where you don’t want to do any more damage than you can. I had a joke about this movie. I said it made about $200,000 or $300,000 at the American box office and if the critics would’ve ever paid in it would’ve made a $500 million. Like every critic saw it.

How was it working with each other?

Natalie Portman: It was actually really exciting 'cause this is the first time I've ever worked with actors that I knew before. "I met Tobey when I was 14, I met Jake when I was 18, so there was a level of familiarity from the first day, which was really a nice way to enter into it. We also had a nice rehearsal period for a few weeks before we started, where we got to go over each other's houses and talk about it and try things out.

Tobey Maguire: I had heard about this project happening a while before anybody was talking to me about it and then I heard about it again when Jim and Jake was involved. I got really excited about working with these guys and getting to play that relationship with Jake. It was something that really attracted me to it, other than the subject matter. The idea of working with Natalie, like she said. I remember the day that I met her, she taught me a valuable lesson, which was the "three block rule." We were at a screening of a movie and I don't think I liked the movie that much and I was going to talk about it and she said, 'Wait a second, you don't know the three-block rule. You don't talk about the movie until you're three blocks away, cause you never know who is listening.' I've remembered that since then.

Jake Gyllenhaal: Because we've known each other, I found making the movie had some fascinating complications and interactions just as the people that we are. People have often said to me that I look like Tobey, so I thought it was a perfect casting thing that Jim put us together. We really just made the movie so I could say that I look a little different from Tobey. For all those cab drivers in New York, I am NOT Spider-Man! I think that watching Tobey in the movie is the most extraordinary piece of it. I have been blessed to watch actors who people didn't feel could perform a certain thing or were a sort of way, and I've been honored to watch that. It's always nice to see when people, like journalists, have never thought of someone one way can see them in another way. I watched Tobey go from the first part of the movie, then we had a Christmas break in between and when he came back, he was another person from who he was in the first couple weeks we started shooting. That was an extraordinary transformation, not only to watch as an actor, but now watching the movie as an audience member, I now feel that way, too.

How much research did you do for the role?

JS: From my point of view, these are all landmine questions. You step on the wrong f—ing landmine and – But from my point of view I’m not having a liberal attitude to this war. When you’re in a war everything is propaganda so you just have to be very careful what you say. My attitude in making the movie, what made me interested was that the main character comes to a decision where he has to chose between heroic suicide and life and he chooses life because the people who choose suicide, to me, are a bit nuts. So I was more interested in the guy who chooses life and has to live with the consequences. That’s the politics as far as I’m concerned with the movie.

Natalie Portman

NP: I spoke to some Marine wives and talked to them about their experiences and how their kids reacted when their father was away and the kinds of things husbands would do before they left and what it was like when they came back and how everything changed. I think the most interesting thing was that they viewed it as the home being their own front; that they had to really keep everything under control at home so their husbands could do their job. Even if there was something going on (like) the kids were acting up or it was hard to pay the bills, you never ever tell your husband, because they need to focus on their job and there's nothing they can do because they're away. They're tough because they're soldiers in their own right. Tobey Maguire: I did speak with some military psychologists and I read some articles and went online and read about the families of (soldiers) who suffered psychological traumas and spent some time with both Marines and Army.

JG: I can say that in researching the character that I played Jim and I went to a lot of different jails all over L.A. County and to juvenile halls and what happened totally, separately from the movie, I met these kids in this writing program at this juvenile hall and they were extraordinary kids. I mean if you want to get into politics we can talk about the kids that I met in this juvi. One of them that we met was this incredible storyteller that Jim ended up putting in the movie as one of the guys in the helicopter with Tobey. I have never been to the prison system, particularly in California or any place really, to see young men. This is a whole other type of young men being put in jail and to see how extraordinary many of them were and how many of them would never get out, that was an amazing thing. It was terrifying. Fourteen year olds to 18 year olds. I still go back to visit them. I still go back to that writing program because they’re pretty extraordinary kids and many of them have moved on, but they’re still coming in. We should think about that, too.

Jake Gyllenhaal

Tobey, I understand you lost some weight during filming? TM: The role requires what it requires. I think I lost around 20 pounds, and I started out where I am now, so to lose 20 pounds was challenging but I went from about 156 to about 136 pounds in 5 weeks. I've had to do it before actually, and it's not the most fun to do.

What are your feelings about remakes and how do they apply to this one in particular?

JG: I think that we all felt a tremendous responsibility and a little bit of a burden to remake a film. I think because the first version of the film was so extraordinary. I think that Jim [Sheridan], all of us, everyone approached each character – I don’t want to speak for everybody but I think we all did watch the movie and each one of the actors gave an extraordinary performance. I think in transposing it to America I think you clearly start to see that there are differences, cultural differences and reactions to situations that are different depending on the culture, and I think we all looked at that as a great opportunity and then having Jim was…where are you from again? [he laughed at his own joke about the very Irish filmmaker]. Just coming from Ireland, it was interesting in terms of how he would say behaviorally, he’d say or expect the character to act and then how in America an American would respond to a situation. There was one moment where – I don’t know if you remember this, Jim – where Natalie’s character tells my character that Tobey has been killed. We did talk for a little while about me falling in the snow and making snow angels. I don’t know if you remember that?

JS: No.

JG: I said, ‘I don’t know if an American would react that way.’ But I don’t really think in that situation that has nothing to do with culture or society. Being in a remake though is great fun [laughs]. I suggest it for everyone. Any actor in the room and any actor out there, really, pick your favorite movie and redo it.

Was it hard to get this film made, given that it’s a war movie and did it take a long time? TM: People don't like to talk about that stuff so much. I mean, people will, but these folks go over there and suffer these traumas and feel alone. They don't feel like people can relate. I'm generalizing obviously. Some people can talk about it, some people do get help, but a lot of folks go over and feel like their worldview has changed. They can't relate to us, the civilians, and it's very challenging for them. There's a lot of shame and embarrassment and they try to take it on themselves and they're suffering. They're dealing with some really complicated psychological problems. They need us to be a little more proactive in society to reach out to them and to lend a hand and to have a conversation about it."

Tobey Maguire

JG: Can I say something real quick? It’s funny that people are saying that this is a war movie and I’ve been involved in a movie where people have said that to me in press conferences over and over again. I think as a result of obviously trying to sell the movie there’s an inclination – to just talk about your question – to not talk about that. I think you’re going to back into a corner but I don’t think that anyone is trying to pretend that we’re in some corner. We’re not in a corner. I think the movie is a journey and how they’re selling the movie is fascinating because the most extraordinary part of the movie is not given away at all in any of these ads or how they’re selling it. It’s the journey that Tobey’s character makes to get back home. I think that is kind of being…personally, that’s your job to say that that’s what the movie is about because that’s what it’s about. It is intertwined with a lot of other complications but mostly it’s about what this man does to get back to the people that he loves and to his life.

JS: When you’re making a movie of Ireland one of the real difficulties is getting the audience to engage because they’re a foreign people. So I kind of got used to trying to get over the hurdle of making the audience get up on the screen and live there with the characters. So this movie, I think there’s a denial that there’s a war going on at all for the audience. So the act of going is an act of denial and they don’t want to do it. I think in this instance it’s not at all about that. I think they will engage sympathetically with someone who’s fought on their behalf, whether right or wrong, and has come back injured. I think the audience has a character that they can love and worry about in a way that they can live through him. Whereas, if they’re in a situation where they’re going to win something that’s not on TV, they’re like, ‘We don’t even want to be there.’ But I think they want them to get home.