Jake Gyllenhaal Kicks Off TIFF 2015 With ‘Demolition’

Jake Gyllenhaal opened the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday with the premiere of Demolition.

Jake Gyllenhaal Talks Working With Jean-Marc Vallee

Demolition marks director Jean-Marc Vallee’s third film at TIFF in that many years — he previously directed last year’s Oscar-bait Wild and the previous year’s Oscar-winning The Dallas Buyers Club. True to form, Vallee’s Demolition is a similarly personal character study, this time of Davis Mitchell, a Wall Street investment banker whose life is upended after his wife dies in a car crash.

The film follows Davis as he struggles with his grief, which may sound like a pretty conventional plot, but Gyllenhaal assured viewers that this film treats grief in a very unconventional way.

“It’s a story about a guy who begins the movie in a conventional way and ends the movie through an unconventional journey, feeling however he supposed to feel, and not how society tells him to feel. … That’s uncomfortable as an actor. It’s not what you’ve been told grief is supposed to be,” Gyllenhaal added at a press conference for the film on Friday.

In his grief, Davis meets Karen Moreno, a single mother played by Naomi Watts, and ends up tearing down his home to work through losing his wife — something the actor really did on set.

“We always did something physical. He [Vallee] built half of a house and he gave us the tools to basically destroy the house ourselves,” Gyllenhaal said.

In an effort to truly capture the physical reflection of grief in Gyllenhaal’s character, Vallee arranged production so that they could shoot Demolition in chronological order, something rarely done in Hollywood.

“We start with Jake the way he is. But then he starts to grow his beard, his hair, he starts to dress differently. He becomes this other guy as he tries to find himself,” Vallee revealed.

After the film’s premiere, Gyllenhaal opened up about what it was like shooting with Vallee, a director known for his fast, independent style, saying that Vallee would throw him into a scene. “He came to me and said, ‘We’re going to do a scene in a car and you’re going to basically have a break down.’ I said, ‘What? We’re on 86th street and Madison Avenue,’” Gyllenhaal recounted.

“That’s his spirit. Feelings don’t come when we expect them too, so shoot the movie in the same way,” he added.

Demolition is set to hit theaters on April 6, 2016.