Jake Gyllenhaal crosses out stage directions in scripts.
The 35-year-old actor has admitted he will get rid of any mentions of how his character is meant to feel when he comes across them in a script because Buddhism taught him to be more spontaneous.
He said: "I start off by crossing out stage direction in a script, anything that suggests in advance how you are supposed to be feeling or behaving. There is a scene in that Meryl Streep movie on a white water raft [‘The River Wild’]. Her family is kidnapped and a guy pulls out a gun and her first response to seeing the gun is to laugh. And then she gets terrified. I love those microcosmic honest details."
And the ‘Nightcrawler’ star has equally unusual methods of finding things to inspire the characters he plays, also revealing he based Louis Bloom, his character in the 2014 film, on a coyote.
He added to The Observer magazine: "When I started to learn the dialogue for Nightcrawler, the words and the punctuation were so particular that my body started to respond to it in a certain way.
"I had this animal idea, like a coyote. I grew up in Southern California, and at night you could hear them howling sometimes as they tore apart an innocent animal, so I thought it should be like that. Coyotes always look sickly and have crazy eyes and wander round in the shadows. I could see that worked as a concept, and so I shaped myself to that idea."
Jake Gyllenhaal’s script edits
