‘Demolition’ director Jean-Marc Vallee is a Quebecois questioner

HEMPSTEAD GARDENS, N.Y. —  In a driveway of this sleepy suburb, Jake Gyllenhaal was going wild.

As cameras rolled, he clambered up a luxury sports car, began air-drumming to the rhythm of an off-camera character (or maybe just to the beat in his own head), then jumped off the car and hung on a basketball rim, Blake Griffin-style. This tableaux continued nearly a full minute, the actor bobbing and shaking like the world’s most trance-y air musician.

“Cut,” came a French Canadian accent off to the side, then, “Let’s go again.”

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The scene from the new movie “Demolition” — Fox Searchlight opens it in theaters Friday — demonstrates the exploratory cravings of its star. Somewhat guarded and calibrated in real life, the Gyllenhaal one encountered roaming the set gave in to his most improvisational impulses.

But it also shows the style of the man directing him. That would be the aforesaid Quebecois, Jean-Marc Vallee, also the helmer of “Wild” and “Dallas Buyers Club.” If late-night talk-show interviewees are to be believed, an actor’s director comes along every other movie. But it’s rare to find the director who gives space, and license, to actors to wander through a scene as if they were a possessed goblin — who allows, in this era of overbearing studios and nervous filmmakers, performers to simply do what feels right.

“If we were shooting in a high-rise office and I said we could get this great shot in a friend’s apartment, he’d say, ‘Let me see a photo’ and then turn on the camera and follow me down the elevator,” Gyllenhaal said in an interview later. “So much of what you want to do as an actor is follow your instincts, and Jean-Marc wants to follow it with you.”

Or as David Greenbaum, the co-head of production at Fox Searchlight who worked with Vallee on “Wild” and “Demolition,” puts it: “It’s like the jazz great who learns the formal style, then rejects it all in favor of his own.”

The idea of going instinctual and off-script suits “Demolition,” a movie that’s at heart about forging an identity with the simple admission that none of us really knows where we’re going.

Gyllenhaal — continuing a career renaissance fueled by playing off-kilter but watchable outsiders (“Prisoners,” “Nightcrawler”) — stars as investment banker Davis Mitchell. An overachieving Wall Street type, he has married young, to the daughter of the scion (Chris Cooper) of a white-shoe Wall Street firm, where Davis is being groomed. As the movie opens, Davis’ wife is killed in a car accident. But rather than sending the repressed Davis further into himself, it prompts a free-spirited lashing out.

Jolted from his benumbed existence, the banker, as scripted by writer Bryan Sipe, seeks connection in an unusual place: a customer-service operator and virtual stranger (Naomi Watts). Soon Davis is finding himself via a) working construction pro bono; b) jamming solitarily and ear-budded down a crowded Manhattan street; c) asking a teenage boy to shoot him in the chest; and d) demolishing his own glitzy Westchester County, N.Y., home.

“It’s such a beautiful metaphor of embracing life, under the guise of a meditation on love and loss,” said Vallee, who says his decision to make Sipe’s script was partly inspired by his own divorce. “How many decisions do we take in life because they’re too easy? How many because we decided not to wake up?”

Though “Demolition” divided audiences at festivals in Toronto and Austin — some applauded its offbeat take on a familiar cinematic tragedy; others derided it for inauthenticity — one would be hard-pressed to quarrel with Vallee’s triumph in a certain regard. With French-language pieces such as “C.R.A.Z.Y.” a decade ago and Oscar-nominated work more recently, the director consistently draws sharp and unexpected performances from his actors.

Vallee, 53, can flash an intensity during shooting. (“What you see as that quick Quebecois outburst is Jean-Marc putting positive energy back in the room, keeping things heated and alive,” Greenbaum said). It has not diminished the filmmaker’s reputation as a go-to option for performers seeking their own reinvention. Stars long defined as an actor of a certain type can, on a Vallee set, demonstrate the folly of such pigeonholing — and then ride that to Oscar glory, as Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto did in “Dallas Buyers Club.” Vallee’s next project, directing all seven episodes of the HBO series “Big Little Lies,” features a dream cast of Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern.

“There’s an interesting balance between absolute freedom and absolute control [when] making a movie with Jean-Marc,” Gyllenhaal said. “And what’s amazing is to watch him dance back and forth between the two.” (

One way he’s able to give actors the space is by eschewing most artificial lighting, which speeds up production. It was a decision he made to get “Dallas Buyers” made quickly on a tight budget, and he’s embraced it since. (Not hurting is his decision to make a number of his movies, including this one, with independent financing; even the prestige Fox Searchlight boarded “Demolition” after it wrapped.)

As he’s fostered actor reinventions, Vallee has often chosen material with built-in themes of rebirth — think the remaking of the homophobe Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers” or the post-addiction revival of Cheryl Strayed in “Wild.”

In Davis he has perhaps his most imperfect character. And if parts of the audience are put off by the man’s outbursts or his potentially left-field redemption, Vallee seems unperturbed by their reaction.

“There are some people who will not accept this [message of change],” the director noted. “It was not an easy film — it wasn’t easy to make; it wasn’t easy to get financed. It can be provocative to talk about grief and death. But I wanted to show Bryan’s work to the world. I just wanted to celebrate those who can expose themselves emotionally.”

He continued, “I’m not aiming for happiness. Life is hard’ it’s dark. I’m aiming for beauty.”

Sipe wrote the script, his first produced film, over a period of several bleak years of his own, when he was broke and questioning his life direction. Tens of thousands dollars in debt as a bartender in Los Angeles, he quit his job and drove north to British Columbia, then maxed out a few more credits cards on a soul-finding trip to Europe before returning to complete “Demolition.”

Of Vallee’s secret to capturing actor subtleties, he said, “Jean-Marc is a big music guy, as I am. And to me what he’s doing on set is a little like getting everyone in the room, a ‘bring your instruments so we can play’ [vibe]. Sometimes it sounds like a racket. And sometimes it becomes a band.”

Back on the suburban set, Gyllenhaal is now, camera rolling, doing pull-ups off an outdoor beam. The act may make him the first person to do driveway exercise in bespoke suspenders to the beat of a garage drummer, and certainly the first Hollywood star to do so.

“I think in movies we have this tendency to experience change in an extraordinarily profound way, as if a massive emotional bomb has gone off,” Gyllenhaal said of the movie’s arcs and rhythms. “It’s not. It’s the sound of the light switch being turned on. I think that’s the beauty of what Jean-Marc does. The ultimate catharsis is often very quiet. And Jean-Marc wants us to hear the pin drop.”

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com