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LOS ANGELES -- Jake Gyllenhaal and I are standing waiting for an elevator at the Four Seasons Hotel. And, prize racehorse that he is, he's showing me his teeth.
"Right there, you can hardly tell," he says, pointing to the front tooth he broke with a gun barrel in a particularly psychotic scene in the Marine film Jarhead.
Scrutiny reveals a subtle line where the reconstruction was performed. But there it is, evidence of a shooting day that got so out of hand, he and scene partner Brian Geraghty didn't speak to each other for a month.
Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) talks of a kind of "group insanity" that took over this tale of trained Marine snipers who went crazy in the Saudi desert during the first Gulf War, waiting 120-plus days to kill people, and ultimately never getting the opportunity.
Granted, the movie was shot, not in Saudi Arabia, but in the desert near Palm Springs. "But it's 115 degrees, you're away from trees, cars, everything; you can't hear anything because the wind's blowing; you don't have your clothes, your car, your girlfriend anything. And I really think Jake forgot he was acting a lot of times."
The movie Jarhead -- which also features Jamie Foxx as a crazed sergeant and Peter Sarsgaard as Gyllenhaal's "spotter" -- is taken from the best-selling book of the same name by Anthony Swofford. It's a record of his frustrating Marine experience, of trained killers denied a kill (when they finally were ordered to move, their targets were usually obliterated in advance by bombers). They hazed each other, picked sadistically at the emotional scabs left by wives' and girlfriends' infidelities, played gas-attack-suit football, bet on scorpion fights and pulled guns on fellow Marines (hence the scene between Gyllenhaal and Geraghty). It was adapted by William Broyles Jr., a Vietnam-era Marine, best known as creator of the series China Beach and scripter of films like Apollo 13 and The Polar Express.
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On the lookout for someone who could go from boy-next-door to psychotic man in the course of a film, Mendes knew he had the first part in Gyllenhaal.
"We all know him as soft and puppyish and doe-eyed and sensitive and floppy-haired and all those sorts of things," he says of the actor best known for indie films like Lovely & Amazing, The Good Girl and Donnie Darko. "But he also needed to be angry, obsessive, frustrated, difficult, dark, doubting, all sorts of things I'd never seen him do before."
Gyllenhaal awkwardly laughs off Mendes' suggestion that he entered Jarhead a boy and came out a man. "It's true. I started the movie with no hair on my body, and now I have hair all over my body,"he says.
But he's aware of the talk and shifting perceptions that surround him now, not just from Jarhead, but from Ang Lee's controversial, still-to-be-released "gay cowboy" movie Brokeback Mountain with Heath Ledger, which played the Toronto International Film Festival. At the very least, they should elevate him above his status as the guy who got parts Tobey Maguire turned down. But if you believe the buzz, either film could be Gyllenhaal's ticket to an Oscar nomination.
Maybe because he's from a movie family (dad Stephen is a director, mom Naomi Foner is a scriptwriter and sister Maggie is an actor of no small repute), but Gyllenhaal knows how to deconstruct such talk.
"There's inevitably a lot of talk about things like that," Gyllenhaal says, "when you're working with a director like Ang Lee and a director like Sam Mendes, that's two Oscar-winning directors. When you're working with (Oscar winner) Jamie Foxx, when you're working with (Oscar winner) Chris Cooper ... it's inevitable people will attach that to the project. I feel all I have as an actor is the process. This is really exciting, talking about the movie and being proud of it.
"Frankly you don't say no to Ang Lee, and you don't say no to Sam Mendes. And you thank both of them for giving you the opportunity -- whether you're wearing a Santa cap over your dick (a reference to an over-the-top Christmas party scene in Jarhead) or making love to Heath Ledger. But both Sam and Ang have changed my life, regardless of the result of any of these films.
"On top of that there was the physical stuff, just pushing my body to a limit where it had not been pushed before. And just being around a lot of people I really respected, Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard.
"And also our military advisers who were, to me, people who had seen and done some really incredible, awful things and are still kind, caring and cool people. I tried to emulate that, and the whole movie really just became a process of growing up -- which is weird, because on movie sets, people tend to act immaturely."
Raised in a liberal family, Gyllenhaal suggests his opinions on a lot of things military have changed, but that they haven't necessarily changed as far as the U.S. president.
"I started off with a judgment as probably anybody does who doesn't have any experience in something but has a point of view about it. And I think I always connected the military with the administration. And after being involved with a lot of guys ... and I can only speak for Marines really 'cause that's who we played ... I mean, now if anybody says, 'Oh wow, you're in an Army film!' that upsets me. Before it'd be like, 'Yeah, Army, whatever.' And now it's, 'No, I played a Marine. There's a difference!'
"I once thought there was a sort of innocence or non-choice about being a Marine, and it's very clear that there is a choice in it, and it's actually pretty extraordinary. That's just from being on the periphery, being near the people who've been involved, just what I learned from them and about myself. It's a shock to my mother. She has her own judgments, and everybody should."
Gyllenhaal met Swofford several times, but chose not to study his mannerisms, reasoning that how he was 14 years ago might not be how he is now.
It's a different story with his next project, the similarly challenging Zodiac, a movie about the Bay Area's infamous Zodiac Killer directed by David Fincher (Seven) and co-starring Robert Downey Jr. Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith, an eccentric cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Graysmith became obsessed with Zodiac, wrote books and even "identified" him (though the case remains officially unsolved). "He (Graysmith), out of pure obsession, oddness and passion, solved the case. I'm actually videotaping him right now."
And as usual, the payoff is far off. "Peter (Sarsgaard) said something to me after we finished Jarhead. He said, 'It's a very odd profession where you give a performance and a year later people commend you for it.' "