The director of a foreign indie film titled Soudain Seuls has accused actor Jake Gyllenhaal of tanking the project due to his “erratic” behaviour on set.
In a new interview with French film magazine Technikart, director Thomas Bidegain made a series of allegations about Gyllenhaal and his co-star Vanessa Kirby, which both actors have since denied.
According to A.V Club, Bidegain spent 10 months working on the script with the actors, but filming lasted just four days before the director ended up pulling the plug.
While on location in Iceland for the film, he claims to have had immediate disagreements with Gyllenhaal about the direction of the movie.
Gyllenhaal and Bidegain reportedly first disagreed about the overall meaning of the movie. Bidegain says he wanted the movie to be about how love can save the world, while Gyllenhaal wanted it to be about having a “love of nature”.
The director alleged that one night Gyllenhaal walked into the woods, played with a horse, then returned to the writer’s room and put on Greta Thunberg videos over rock music as he cried. Again, all alleged!
He also claimed that Gyllenhaal demanded he be supplied with a car that was “neither red nor white”, after refusing to fly due to COVID concerns.
The director went on to share an alleged incident in which Gyllenhaal stripped to his underwear and jumped into the freezing cold ocean of Iceland. Literally, ICEland. Not exactly conducive to swimming! Especially in the evening.
After four days of this, the director says he decided the movie was a lost cause and made a “heartbreaking” call to producer Alain Attal and said: “Our visions diverge too much. We won’t be able to shoot in September. It’s all over, and the $26 million is gone!”
Meanwhile, insiders told A.V Club that the movie fell to pieces because “neither Kirby or Gyllenhaal were happy with the script”.
Reps for both Gyllenhaal and STUDIOCANAL have since responded, claiming the English-version of the film was never actually greenlit. They confirmed that Gyllenhaal and Kirby spent time in Iceland over the four days the director outlined, but insisted it was just “part of the development process” and filming never actually took place.
“Creative differences are very normal, if unfortunate, regularities in film development. In this case, there were concerns which simply could not be overcome despite great efforts on both sides,” a representative told A.V. Club.
“We greatly value all our relationships at STUDIOCANAL and are happy that Thomas Bidegain was able to fulfill his vision on the French language version of SUDDENLY. We remain deeply committed to our working partnerships with both Thomas Bidegain and Jake Gyllenhaal, with whom we have always enjoyed a very strong creative relationship.”
I’m so fine with this movie never seeing the light of day, but can we at least get a movie about the making of the movie? Those four days sound… wild.
