Thomas Bidegain, one of the more famous French screenwriters, and longtime collaborator of Jacques Audiard (he also wrote Tom McCarthy’s “Stillwater”), recently released his second film as a director in France, titled “Soudain Seuls.”
Although the film was shot in French, with French actors, it was originally supposed to be shot in 2021, in English, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Vanessa Kirby as the main couple. It was a hot project that even had the likes of Margot Robbie eyeing to star.
As chronicled in the latest issue of Technikart, this $30 million film collapsed, mainly due to a paranoid, capricious and power-hungry Gyllenhaal — who was not just the lead actor, but also producer on the film. This story is wild.
It turns out Gylenhaal was very keen on rewriting and rethinking the whole project a mere 8 weeks before production was scheduled to begin, and as the sets were being built. It led to some major power moves on his part.
The report states how the film broke down as the crew was working hard on it in Iceland. The way Gyllenhaal is portrayed is rather, shall we say, unpleasant, bordering on psychopathic behavior.
Gyllenhaal had some incomprehensible whims (he demanded to drive a car "neither red nor white") to paranoia (asking the set constructors to sleep in their cars because he feared they'd bring covid to the hotel he shared with the crew) to many episodes of yelling at his director (he supposedly did the first reading rehearsal in the accent of Pepe Le Pew).
The strangest anecdote has Gyllenhaal, while visiting set locations, deciding to strip to his underwear and diving into the freezing ocean because "When I see the sea, I swim in the sea.” This bewildered the crew, which included Bidegain.
The nightmare finally ended when Bidegain had to make a “heartbreaking” call to producer Alain Attal, conceding defeat, “Our visions diverge too much. We won’t be able to shoot in September. … It’s all over, and the €26 million is gone!”
It’s not like this story is coming from a dubious source either. It’s been talked about heavily in France the last week, having been covered in some of the biggest media outlets in the country. I’m actually surprised nobody in the U.S. has picked up on this yet.