"Gyllenhaal is good at subverting expectations and asserting control. The first time the world sat up and took notice of her, as Lee Holloway in Secretary, she was bent over a desk in a pencil skirt, playing a submissive in a warped but oddly tender sadomasochistic relationship with her boss. Gyllenhaal breathed life into the role, making a character who could have been played as a passive sex object into something much more subtle and intriguing. Her latest film, "Sherrybaby", begins the day 22-year-old Sherry Swanson walks out, free and sober, from the prison she entered three years before as a heroin addict, determined to regain custody of her young daughter. Shot in 25 days over a hot New Jersey summer, it's a relatively small-scale project for Gyllenhaal who, since Secretary, has enjoyed considerable clout in Hollywood. Her connection to the film began six years ago, in 2001, when Laurie Collyer, who wrote and directed it, took the script to Sundance. There she met Naomi Foner, screenwriter and mother of Maggie (and Jake) Gyllenhaal. "My mum told me at the time that she'd read a great script and I should take a look. When I got it, I read it in one sitting. It's a script that's honest about the complicated way in which human beings behave."
She brings a sympathetic earthiness to risky roles and a complexity to more mainstream choices, thanks to the input and control over her films that she assumes as her professional right. Her most difficult experience as an actress, she says, was when she "realised very early on in a shoot that I was at odds with the director, and I had to go through the whole shoot trying to figure out how to stay alive as an actress, when I was being squashed by the director." She says of her roles in "Secretary" and "Sherrybaby" that "when you are in every scene of a movie - which I must say I really much prefer - you have more control over the film that you're making. Because the choices you make as an actor can't help but change what the movie is saying." For all that, "Secretary", the film that made her a star, was a huge gamble. "I'd just graduated when I read the script. I thought, 'Great, I'm interested in gender and power and sex; I'm interested in exploring different kinds of love. Let's collaborate!' I did get scared when we started making the film. I said to Steve [Shainberg, the director], 'What do you think this movie is about?' Because I could see that, in the wrong hands, in even slightly the wrong hands, even in just slightly less intelligent hands, this movie could say something really weird. And Steve said, 'I don't know what this movie is about. If I knew, I wouldn't have to make it.' " This does not sound to me like a particularly reassuring answer, but Gyllenhaal clearly embraced the challenge. "He was daring me to take a risk, and I did."
She talks about the making of "Secretary" the way some people reminisce about a happy childhood. "It was really an idyllic experience," she says. By idyllic I don't think she means that shooting scenes of spanking, self-harm and being manacled to steel bars was easy, but rather that it was an environment where she felt safe enough to test boundaries. In an interview she gave soon after the film came out, she talked of the complicated psycho-dynamics of that shoot, with James Spader theatrically wooing her with expensive chocolates on set while keeping her at arm's length from his real life. 
"College gave me validation: I gained a lot of confidence, just from once or twice saying something in class and the professor saying, 'Great idea.' That experience has certainly helped me say to a director, 'Actually, I think my idea is at least worth talking about.' " Because directors do not always want to listen. "After making "Secretary", it was a real shock to me to learn that some directors just aren't interested in what actors have to say. They just don't want to collaborate." She names the ill-received "World Trade Center" as one of the films she most enjoyed making, because she loved working with Oliver Stone, whom she describes as "nuts, but totally inspiring". Her praise for Stone runs, as so often with Gyllenhaal, rather against the grain of American mainstream culture, which tends to portray the director as a dangerous, and possibly unhinged, conspiracy theorist.
Her favourite roles, she says, are "troubled women. The ones that are a real challenge. They really need me." Ana Pascal, the anarchist baker she plays opposite Will Ferrell in "Stranger Than Fiction", she dismisses, saying, "That girl is so healthy. She's fine!" as if disappointed in the lack of a challenge. There is a kind of raw feminism in the way she brings such characters to life: these are women who think for themselves, and fight for themselves, rather than sobbing prettily and waiting to be rescued. In "Mona Lisa Smile" (Dead Poets Society for girls, with Julia Roberts in the Robin Williams role), she moulded her character, Giselle Levy, into a quite different girl from the one in the script. She didn't want the fact that Giselle was promiscuous to be seen as something she necessarily hated herself for, Gyllenhaal has said; who says she couldn't be enjoying herself?
This point-blank refusal of pity was central to how Gyllenhaal saw the character of Sherry Swanson. The sex scenes in "Sherrybaby" are painfully unromantic. "Now, I find those scenes hard to watch," Gyllenhaal says. "But when I was making them, I was thinking how Sherry would be thinking: 'I've been in prison for three years, I want to come.'" When Sherry visits a job counsellor, she realises that to get the job she wants, she has to give him a blow job. "I didn't want to play that scene all, you know, sad eyes and this-is-so-hard-for-me. I thought the fact that she toughs it out, that she won't let it make her sad - when you watch it, that makes it even more sad, somehow." Laurie Collyer based Sherrybaby on the story of a close childhood friend who went to prison the year Collyer graduated from college. "We used to party together in high school and I always looked up to her," Collyer says. "I think I became obsessed with her story because in the back of my mind I knew that it could have been me going down that path." 
Laurie Collyer and child actress Ryan Simpkins. Gyllenhaal, likewise, acknowledges a fascination with the road not taken, with exploring in her characters the sliding-doors moments where life could have turned out differently. "What really interests me most at the moment is that idea: there but for the grace of God go I." But for all her fascination with troubled women, she is reluctant to claim the quirky indie actress tag. "Yes, I want to do good work. But just because a movie is small, it doesn't make it better. In fact, there are a lot of really horrible independent movies made."
Gyllenhaal is currently shooting "The Dark Knight" (otherwise known as Batman 6) in which she has taken over from Katie Holmes the role of lawyer Rachel Dawes. "Doing Batman has shocked me at every turn. When I started, I thought, 'Well, it's a huge movie, I'll just do my best to put what I can into it.' But, in fact, they've been really hungry for my ideas, for my views. It's great! They've been asking for more!" When faced with a question they have no intention of answering, the usual tactic among certain stars is to deflect the probe with faux intimacies. So, the interviewer poses a question about, say, relationships, and they fob them off with some inanity about their favourite perfume or what they eat for breakfast on Sundays. It's a polite little two-step dance. Gyllenhaal, however, doesn't play this game. When she doesn't want to answer a question, her fluid chattiness comes to an abrupt halt. [...] She has every reason to be wary. Not long before we meet, long-lens paparazzi photographs of her breastfeeding Ramona in a Manhattan park appeared in celebrity pages and on internet sites - accompanied, in some cases, by outraged criticism of Gyllenhaal for exposing her breast. 
"Looking back, I think not being a mother when I made that movie really helped. Because it's only right at the end that Sherry even begins to realise what being a mother means. For most of the movie she has a fantasy of what it is to be a mother, which is what I had at the time." Days after she had given birth, an American tabloid published a gossip item reporting how Gyllenhaal had already lost all her pregnancy weight. "Totally ridiculous. I was really shocked that they would write that. At that point I was 25 or 30lb heavier than I had been before I got pregnant. I had literally just given birth! It's so unhelpful to everybody, to print stupid stuff like that." She is not immune, she says, to the pressure on young women in the public eye to look a certain way. "It would be dishonest and unhelpful to say I haven't felt that pressure. I do feel it - just not enough to change what I'm doing very much. I mean, I still go out to dinner all the time."She is something of a New York style icon, a Marc Jacobs front-rower with a nice line in just-quirky-enough red carpet dresses by slightly offbeat labels such as Jovovich-Hawk or Proenza Schouler. On a trip to Paris a few months ago, she says, she bought "all these beautiful clothes. But it was right before my daughter started eating solids, and I didn't realise how messy that would be. Now I know I have to lay off the cream silk blouses for a while," she laughs.
Today she is in a relatively puréed carrot-proof check shirt and (fashionably wide-legged) jeans. She has, she says, "always loved clothes. And I think it's fine to think about clothes. They can be a fun little sliver of your life. I don't think it's fine to think about them all the time, though." Gyllenhaal's mother was very political, "and raised us to value being engaged, to believe that it's important to stay as informed as you can." A politically active Democrat herself, Gyllenhaal drove people to the polls in Florida during the last presidential election, but, "as a new mom, I have to admit I'm struggling to keep up with everything. We stopped getting the New York Times delivered, because we thought it would be more environmental to read it online, but I find I don't. I've got to do something about that." Gyllenhaal seems entirely unruffled by the prospect of turning 30 later this year. "I'm ready for it," she says. Indeed, she seems older than 30 already. Before she even started in the movie business, she says, she was wise to it. "One thing I learned, from watching my parents, is that you can be on top of the world and then the next year you can be nowhere. And then, later, you're interesting again; and then, suddenly, you're not. I watched that happen to them, and I watched it hurt them. I think I'm a bit armed by having seen that." Hence the feet firmly on the ground."."Source: Guardian.co.uk.
