Jake Gyllenhaal Quotations | Page 3

I try and find and access the parts of myself that still blindly believe and have faith in a lot of things. I don't mean to be cynical, but I've also discovered that I still have a lot of those. And they may not be where I expected them to be. Maybe I've been in relationships, and this is a movie about relationships, like romance relationships - so maybe I've been in some that have sort of made me lose my faith. But deep down inside, I still have blind faith.

I don't think I've made a mistake. I think I have behaved in ways that I am proud of; I think I've behaved in ways I'm not.

I like the conscious manipulation that a great director can have. When you're both complicit in the manipulation of an emotion.

We are all from different cultures. Heath's [Ledger] Australian, really. I'm from here. Ang's [Lee] from China. But I think Ang gets very close in preproduction and rehearsals. And then he allows his actors - I don't think scared of actors, but I think he's scared of getting in on the scenes he's watching. The space he's watching. So he just totally disconnects from you while you're shooting.

We all develop relationships with each other based on our first relationships, and then how we experience them. But inevitably they are echoes of earlier on. In my belief.

Ang [Lee] gave us a lot of books about cowboys who had been gay or stories about it and all that stuff. And I just talked to a lot of my friends - who [was] their first, particularly same-sex, first situation. That was fascinating to me - trying to learn what that was in a certain period of time. Certain age. The secrecy involved in it. All those things.

I had not spent a ton of time around animals as a kid.

I think I work as hard as I do now, because of a lot of lessons I've learned early on.

The amount of preparation I saw from someone like [David] Fincher, and how aware he is of everybody else's job on the set, and how much respect he has for every aspect of the film, and every aspect of the frame - that's the type of actor I am now; it's not the type of actor I was then. But without understanding his process, and then coming to learn it later on, I would never be the actor I am now.

I walk around thinking job to job, trying to not have regrets.