Moviefone Editorial

Tag: okja

  • Best Jake Gyllenhaal Movies

    We look back at 11 of Jake Gyllenhaal‘s most essential performances.

    ‘Velvet Buzzsaw’ (2019)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Velvet Buzzsaw movie
    Netflix

    “Velvet Buzzsaw” (now playing on Netflix), Jake Gyllenhaal confirms his place as one of the most exciting and unpredictable actors working today. The art world satire/blood-and-guts horror thriller is another left turn from an actor whose career is made almost entirely of left turns.

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    ‘Donnie Darko’ (2001)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko movie
    Flower Films

    Gyllenhaal’s big breakthrough came in the form of Richard Kelly’s instant cult classic, a movie that never gained commercial success but is one of the most quotable midnight movies in recent memory. Gyllenhaal plays the titular character, a schizophrenic teen haunted by visions of the end of the world … and it just gets weirder from there. In a less assured actor’s hands, Kelly’s metaphysical tangents and apocalyptic conundrums would have been gobbledygook. But Gyllenhaal didn’t make you believe; he made you feel.

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    ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (2005)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain movie
    Focus Features

    Just four years after “Donnie Darko,” Gyllenhaal cemented his place as one of the most exciting American actors of his generation in Ang Lee‘s soulful, Oscar-winning “Brokeback Mountain.” As a cowboy grappling with his romance with another cowboy (an equally impressive Heath Ledger), Gyllenhaal pulled off a daring feat that he made look positively easy. This is a character who was rugged, conflicted and ultimately tragic, a character whose power lied in the symbolic as much as the personal. (Gyllenhaal was rightfully nominated for the Academy Award for his performance.)

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    ‘Zodiac’ (2007)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac movie
    Paramount/WB

    David Fincher’s 2007 is a stone-cold masterpiece and Gyllenhaal’s performance is its beating heart. As San Fransisco cartoonist Robert Graysmith, Gyllenhaal brings a much-needed warmth to the epic saga of how a single serial killer consumed countless lives in California in the late 60s and early 70s. Gyllenhaal’s experience on the film wasn’t a pleasant one (he told the NY Times that Fincher likes to “paint with actors”) but it ultimately produced one of Gyllenhaal’s funniest, most lived-in performances ever.

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    ‘Source Code’ (2011)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Source Code movie
    Summit

    Gyllenhaal is in fully buggy-eyed sci-fi mode for Duncan Jones’ follow-up to his hugely influential debut “Moon.” In “Source Code,” Gyllenhaal plays a US Army pilot who, upon boarding a commuter train outside of Chicago, is involved in a terrorist bombing. He is then, through mysterious circumstances, asked to relive the bombing again and again and again in an attempt to locate the terrorist responsible. Despite a cumbersome high concept and dopey twist ending, you always believe what you’re seeing, largely thanks to Gyllenhaal’s commitment to the role.

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    ‘Prisoners’ (2013)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners movie
    Warner Bros.

    One of Gyllenhaal’s great strengths is that he’s a character actor burdened with leading man looks. This lets him take charge of any movie he’s in but also gives him a chameleonic ability to also slip into the background of a larger ensemble. In Denis Villeneuve‘s breathless thriller, Gyllenhaal plays a twitchy detective assigned to a child abduction case. Not only is Gyllenhaal’s storyline somewhat secondary (to the main plot about a pair of parents exacting their own biblical revenge against who they think are responsible) but he still manages to steal the show.

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    ‘Enemy’ (2013)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Enemy movie
    A24

    The same year that the big-budget “Prisoners” was released, Gyllenhaal’s other team-up with Villeneuve came out, a much smaller, much stranger affair that was just as thrilling. In “Enemy,” Gyllenhaal plays a straight-laced father-to-be who discovers a man who is his exact double. When they decide to swap lives, things get even more metaphysically unglued, leading to one of the most final arresting final shots in recent memory. The less you know going into it, the better … but just watch it. You won’t be sorry.

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    ‘Nightcrawler’ (2014)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler movie
    Open Road Films

    In Dan Gilroy’s audacious directorial debut, Gyllenhaal (who also produced) plays a stringer who chases after accidents and violent crimes to sell the footage to local television broadcasts. It’s a testament to Gyllenhaal’s inherent likability that you go on this dark odyssey with him, never once questioning why you’re watching such morally reprehensible stuff. As the movie veers into its third act, it becomes almost uncomfortably bleak, but don’t worry, Jake is there for you.

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    ‘Nocturnal Animals’ (2016)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Nocturnal Animals movie
    Focus Features

    Tom Ford’s sophomore feature isn’t for everybody, that’s for damn sure. But for those adventurous enough to take the ride, well, chances are they’ll be rewarded. Gyllenhaal plays Amy Adams’ estranged husband, who works through the death of their relationship by writing a sensationalistic, very violent novel, which he sends to Adams. “Nocturnal Animals” is delineated by the world of the story and the “real world,” with Gyllenhaal portraying characters in both. It’s his inherent emotionality that gives the story weight. He leads you through the gore.

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    ‘Okja’ (2017)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Okja movie
    Netflix

    Bong-joon Ho’s Netflix sensation, about a genetically modified “super-pig” and the evil forces surrounding its creation and exploitation, is a sometimes-gentle, sometimes-horrifying story of a young girl and her creature companion. (Think “E.T.,” with a strong PETA bent.) But nothing will prepare you for Gyllenhaal’s performance as Johnny Wilcox, a kind of Jack Hanna-on-amphetamines zoologist/TV personality, who is drawn into Okja’s story. Everything about the character, from his clothes to his mustache to his squeaky, high-pitched voice is a choice, and Gyllenhaal commits brilliantly. This might be the most full-on performance of his entire career.

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    ‘Stronger’ (2017)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Stronger movie
    Roadside/Lionsgate

    It’s absolutely shocking that Gyllenhaal didn’t an Oscar nomination for this weirdly overlooked film. As Jeff Bauman, an average Boston schlub who becomes a symbol of the Boston Strong movement after the marathon bombing took both if his legs, Gyllenhaal gives an incredibly real, incredibly vulnerable performance that is all the more impressive for being based on a real-life person. Emotionally gripping and deeply felt, this is one of his greatest performances and one of his most criminally under-seen.

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    ‘The Sisters Brothers’ (2018)

    Jake Gyllenhaal in The Sisters Brothers movie
    Annapurna

    Unusual western “The Sisters Brothers” made headlines last year but not for the reasons you’d expect. This was a movie that cost $40 million to make and earned back an infinitesimal fraction of that back. And it’s a shame, too, because the movie is brilliant. “The Sisters Brothers” found Gyllenhaal back in supporting man role, this time playing a confederate of a pair of killers (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly), who are tracking a man who supposedly has the ability to locate gold (Riz Ahmed). Gyllenhaal brings his usual sensitivity to a role that could have just been played as an old timey weirdo.

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    New Jake Gyllenhaal Movies

    Here are the recent movies from Jake Gyllenhaal.

    Watch the interview of Jake Gyllenhaal & director Antoine Fuqua about their new movie ‘The Guilty’.

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    The action thriller movie ‘Ambulance’ will be coming out on Feb 18th, 2022.

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  • The 27 Best Netflix Original Movies, Ranked From ‘Okja’ to ‘Mudbound’

    The 27 Best Netflix Original Movies, Ranked From ‘Okja’ to ‘Mudbound’

  • Jake Gyllenhaal’s 8 Essential Performances

    Jake Gyllenhaal’s 8 Essential Performances

    From “City Slickers” to the upcoming “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” it feels like Jake Gyllenhaal has been in our lives as an actor for, well, as long as we can remember. (Do you remember him in “City Slickers?” He played Billy Crystal’s son.)

    There’s something about those dreamy, droopy eyelids and that impish grin that have burned themselves into the pop culture firmament, long before the days he was shuffling across the heartland in “Bubble Boy” and even through when he was floating through space, trying to escape a mysterious alien entity in “Life.” There’s also “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which we’ve all agreed that it’s best to try and forget ever happened. But with the 37-year-old actor’s birthday coming up on December 19, we decided to celebrate his greatest achievements as an actor, those performances where he transformed himself — or our expectations of him — into something better, bigger or more unexpected than ever before.

    “Donnie Darko” (2001)

    Flower Films

    Richard Kelly’s debut film spawned a cult following and two wildly different versions, but the thing that unified both (and audiences) was Gyllenhaal’s turn in the title role. Lumbering through the film as an ordinary teenager prone to mysterious, psychedelic visions, he proved that his fresh-scrubbed good looks could hide deeper complexities that he’d only begun to explore as an actor.

    “Brokeback Mountain” (2005)

    Universal

    Ang Lee’s adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story of the same name changed a lot in Hollywood about perceptions of gay characters, not to mention their stories. It also demonstrated what gifted actors Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger were.

    As the erstwhile focus of the film, Ledger’s Ennis is consumed by the torment of his feelings and the society that condemns them. And Gyllenhaal provides a wonderful, equally tragic counterpoint as Jack Twist, whose juggling of the life he must pretend to lead, and the one he truly wants, ultimately fuels Ennis’ epiphany about what their love truly meant to him.

    “Zodiac” (2007)

    Paramount/WB

    When David Fincher asks you to play a role in one of his films, you don’t refuse.

    Gyllenhaal’s turn as Robert Graysmith in “Zodiac” offered a devastatingly believable portrait of obsession as the cartoonist who becomes consumed by his investigation of the real-life San Francisco serial killer. It’s a movie of deliberate and often understated technique, but Gyllenhaal’s performance mirrors Fincher’s cool precision and its inescapable absorption into a criminal case that remains enigmatic even today.

    “Enemy” (2013)

    Entertainment One

    Gyllenhaal worked with director Denis Villenueve twice in the span of little more than a year on the films “Prisoner” and Enemy.” But the latter proved to be the bigger challenge of the two, a psychological thriller about a man who believes that he’s encountered his own doppelganger. He soon becomes consumed by imitating, and integrating, their lives into one another. Mirroring himself in ways almost imperceptible, Gyllenhaal conjures a vivid portrait of two men whose identities converge into one.

    “Nightcrawler” (2014)

    Universal

    Dan Gilroy wrote for decades before making his directorial debut with this story of a freelance videographer who ruthlessly facilitates and even stages violent scenarios in order to make his name with local news stations. Gyllenhaal stars and co-produces the film, a revelatory, poisonous portrait of ambition run amuck in a profession disinclined to embrace morality in its pursuit of the best headlines. For my money, Gyllenhaal has never been better — or more frightening.

    “Southpaw” (2015)

    TWC

    Eminem was reportedly once considered for the role Gyllenhaal played in this film, Billy Hope, a boxer working towards redemption after the death of his wife. But in addition to transforming himself physically to play a believable and threatening prize fighter, Gyllenhaal lays himself bare in the scenes where his rage and desperation threaten to ruin not only his financial success, but his relationship with his daughter — the last vestige of his connection to his late wife.

    “Stronger” (2017)

    Bold Films

    Jeff Bauman, a real-life survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing who lost both his legs, is an all-timer role for the actor. The emotional and physical trauma — as evidenced through his strained romantic relationship post-accident and his relatable struggle to work through and accept the challenges of his rehab and healing process — is a tricky AF balance that Gyllenhaal pulls off effortlessly. It is both a simmering, internalized performance punctuated with bursts of pain, laughter and tears. Thanks to David Gordon Green’s subtle and inspired “ground-level” approach to the drama, the audience experiences every one of Bauman’s set backs and triumphs. It’s a game of inches down a very long road to recovery, and Gyllenhaal’s performance carries you every step of the way.

    “Okja” (2017)

    Netflix

    There are moments in Bong Joon-Ho’s environmental fable where Gyllenhaal’s performance as Johnny Wilcox, a quite possibly deranged zoologist and TV personality, seem stripped from another film entirely. But in a story about the manipulation not only of the world’s resources (including animals) for corporate narratives, political goals, and personal gain, his contributions galvanize and amplify the film’s themes and showcase both his remarkable versatility and fearlessness.

    Even in a small role, he demonstrates a consummate understanding of the film he’s in, and how best to serve it.

  • Every Post-Credits Scene From Summer 2017 Movies, Ranked

    Every Post-Credits Scene From Summer 2017 Movies, Ranked

  • ‘The Walking Dead’ Alum Steven Yeun: I Never Felt Like Glenn Got His Fair Due

    Glenn (Steven Yeun) - The Walking Dead _ Season 4, Episode 15 - Photo Credit: Gene Page/AMC“The Walking Dead” character until he was gone.

    In a new talk with Vulture, to promote Netflix’s “Okja” and discuss what he wants to do next, Yeun discussed his most famous role, as TWD’s pizza boy turned badass father-to-be. Glenn was a main character right from his voice piping through to Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) at the end of the pilot, but despite that, Yeun pointed out that Glenn was rarely given solo time (he and Maggie were basically joined at the storyline hip), and Glenn didn’t get his own magazine cover until after he was killed. (Unlike, say, Daryl Dixon.) If Glenn really was so many fans’s “favorite character,” why didn’t he get more leading character promotion?

    Vulture started this part of the conversation by noting there was “some pretty severe blowback to your character Glenn’s death that has lingered.” The reporter then asked, “Do you feel like it was too much?”

    Yeun’s answer revealed how much thought he’d given his character, and Glenn’s public perception:

    “I don’t feel like it was too much. I’ll be honest with you and put a full disclaimer here: I might not be objective, but I truly feel like people didn’t know what to do with Glenn. They liked him, they had no problems with him, and people enjoyed him. But they didn’t acknowledge the connection people had with the character until he was gone. I look at what happened and I think, That wasn’t any more gory than what we’ve done before, per se. No one got their face ripped in half! People got their guts smashed out and their heads caved in. But this one felt gratuitous because one, it kept going, and two, I think they took away someone that I didn’t realize I had made such a connection with until they took him away.

    I loved being on that show. Internally, it was incredible. Externally, it was tough sometimes because I never felt like he got his fair due. I never felt like he got it from an outward perception. I don’t say this as a knock on anything. He always had to be part of something else to legitimize himself. He was rarely alone. And when he was alone, it took several years to convince people to be on his own. I’m thankful to EW for that wonderful cover they ran at the end, but we’ve had many covers before then that he never got to do on his own. Not until the last year did they give him his own cover, and then give him the one as he died.”

    FYI, here’s that cover:

    And here’s a bit more from Yeun to Vulture on Glenn:

    “I didn’t think of it as racism, where it’s like, Oh, this is racist. I caught it in a way of ‘Oh, this is how we’re viewed all the time – as part of some glob, some amorphous, non-individualistic collective.’ We’re like a Borg, and so because of that, they’re like, ‘Well, we don’t need to give the shine to that character. There’s all these other characters who are so cool!’ I’d always hear people go, ‘I love Glenn, he’s my favorite character.’ But the merchandise would go one way. That really might be the market, so I’m not going to sit here and be like, ‘Why didn’t they make Glenn merchandise?’ But there was a disparity….”

    Read the full Q&A for a lot more from Yeun on TWD, “Okja,” the roles he’s turned down, the ones he’d prefer, and how he still struggles even after success as an Asian-American actor.

    “The Walking Dead” Season 8 premieres October on AMC. The first big trailer should be coming later this month at San Diego Comic-Con.

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  • How ‘Okja’ Was Brought to Life

    “Okja,” South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho‘s latest marvel, is one of the very best movies of the year — it’s touching and strange and thrilling in a way few films are. The film (premiering on Netflix and in select theaters this week) follows a young girl named Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) as she attempts to rescue her best friend, Okja, who just so happens to be a giant, genetically manufactured pig. It’s one of those classic, unlikely friendship tales, akin to “E.T.” or “The Iron Giant,” but filtered through Joon-ho’s unique sensibilities, as he fearlessly melds satire, surrealism, broad comedy, and stark horror.

    “Okja” is a wonderful movie, beautiful and bizarre, and without a convincing creature, it wouldn’t have worked at all.

    Bong has said that a sad-looking animal that he saw in Seoul in 2011 initially inspired him. Based on sketches by Bong (one he showed to Tilda Swinton got her interested in the project) then went to his go-to creature designer Jang Hee-chul (who also designed the monster from Bong’s outstanding 2007 creature feature “The Host“) and then to visual effects supervisor Erik-Jan De Boer (an Oscar-winner for “Life of Pi”).

    Comparing the process of designing the two creatures, Bong told me (through his very helpful translator, Jason), “There were a lot of iterations to the design and a lot of trial and error but the difference is whereas the Host was a monster, Okja, even though it doesn’t exist in real life, has to have a sense of familiarity and a sense that you’ve seen portions of it in real life.” Bong went on: “So we needed to create an animal that would seamlessly fit into a National Geographic Channel special and so with that we looked at combining elements of a manatee, hippo, and pig.”

    De Boer, armed with “mature concept designs” from Jang, just had to finesse the design in the computer. “That concept is not that different from what you have seen in the movie. So once we had the maquette, we scanned the maquette for rigging and once we had it in the virtual world we played around with the paws, the tail, the ears shape, there were more indicated lips in the original design that we smoothed out because it got too goofy and humanistic. We made it more canine.”

    The other big thing he and his team added was hair. “That wasn’t something that Bong was necessarily asking for but I felt like it was necessary because it took some of the plastic sheen off of her and gave us more tools and opportunities to light her more interestingly.” De Boer added: “It softened her up and made her more girly and more feminine.”When you look at Okja in the movie, you can tell that this is a truly brilliant design, both because she looks so real, fitting into her environments seamlessly, and because you can relate to her on an emotional level, which is probably the rarest magic trick you can pull off in visual effects. I asked Bong when he knew they had gotten her right.

    “It was the spring of 2015 when we were transitioning from the first draft to the second draft, there was a design that came up with Okja was so lovely and sweet,” Bong said. “And we wanted to lean on it because it looked so plush and soft.” (That draft, by the way, was co-authored by British writer Jon Ronson, who Bong hired because he was a big fan of the movie “Frank” that Ronson had written. Bong said of the experience: “It was incredibly enjoyable, we’re on the same page with how we view humanity. Every character pathetically resides in the gray zone. There are no heroes or villains.”)

    Of course there had to be something on set. Something has to stand in for her and to be there for the cast to interact with. There are a lot of shots with hugging or sleeping on Okja, or Jake [Gyllenhaal, who plays a gonzo television host] grazing on the side of Okja,” Bong said. (De Boer said that these moments of “tender physicality” are extremely hard to pull off in CGI.) Bong (who said his next film was a fully Korean genre movie about “very peculiar group of people”) continued: “To take her place we created something called a stuffy, which was a fiberglass material that replicated the size and shape of Okja and had a puppeteer who moved Okja.”

    De Boer said that there were about 25 “stuffies” in all, “They were foam and shaped depending on each set-up. Sometimes it was a piece of the butt or flank or head. We had hats with Velcro ears. For each of these shots, we had a very specific solution. Sometimes these were solutions designed just for one shot.”

    When Okja is running around in the forest, that’s a “weird hybrid solution.” De Boer’s animation supervisor was dressed in something that made him look like a sumo wrestler and mounted “tennis balls on his head.” “For each of these tricky set-ups, all we focused on was legitimizing all the contact and really felt that Mija was trusting her weight to the pig.”

    Another goal for the team was to make it feel like there was really a six-ton creature in the forest (it then went to a team of animators tasked with “selling that weight” via “subtle shape changes in the feet, dynamic and harmonic motion in the skin that betray the collision that happens with the great”). To De Boer, this was one of the most important aspects of creating the character. “We could have animated the face and make Okja as cute as possible but if you don’t believe that gravity is yanking all that weight down and trying to push it through the ground, I don’t think anything is worth doing, because you won’t believe that she’s there,” he said.

    Later, when I asked De Boer if he used every trick in the book to bring the character to life, he said, simply, “Yep.”

    “Okja” is on Netflix and in select theaters now. Don’t miss it.

  • The 11 Best Movies of 2017 (So Far)

    The 11 Best Movies of 2017 (So Far)

  • Jake Gyllenhaal Talks ‘Life,’ ‘Okja,’ and the 10th Anniversary of ‘Zodiac’

    “Life,” the brand-new science-fiction thriller about a crew of unlucky astronauts (led by Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jake Gyllenhaal) who pick up a soil sample from Mars that isn’t just soil, will scare the hell out of you. It’s an unrelenting, terror-filled journey into the deepest, most uncomfortable parts of space exploration and an absolutely thrilling time at the movies.

    I was lucky enough to chat with Gyllenhaal the morning after the movie’s uproarious SXSW world premiere, where we talked about getting drawn to the project, what it was like shooting the movie, and whether or not he’d return for a sequel. I also had to ask him about “Zodiac,” one of his very best performances (and one of the very best movies, well, ever) and an upcoming movie I’m very excited about, “Okja,” due out on Netflix this summer.

    Moviefone: This is the first time you’ve done a movie like this. Had you always wanted to do something in the space/horror genre?

    Jake Gyllenhaal: No, if you ever talk to me I don’t have any specific desire to do any particular type of film. It mostly has to do with the community of people you work with and the opportunity to play around and explore. And [director] Daniel Espinosa is very particular in that way and really allows for that type of exploration. That was a promise he made. That was part of it, along with a terrifying script. And Seamus McGarvey was already shooting it and we had some incredible department heads so I thought, Hey, these people are going to do some very interesting things with this idea.

    Daniel has said that part of the appeal was the Janet Leigh aspect of getting rid of a major character early. Was that fun to play around with as well?

    Absolutely. I think those qualities that the movie has are great and subverting things is always fun. There are so many things that are really trying to pander and in a lot of ways this is pure entertainment but in that space it’s always fun to f*ck around.

    What was it like shooting the movie?

    Oh, it was fun. Being on wires every day, we came in and didn’t have to wear shoes and wore jumpsuits. It was the easiest costume to put on and take off. You fly around on wires every day … There are definitely physical strains on your body at a certain age that aren’t always fun. It was claustrophobic and there are some tense moments when you’re trying to create those things but ultimately it was really fun. Daniel is lovely and his attitude is great and he has a great sense of humor. It was a wonderful, great cast that was very humble and happy to be there. I haven’t been on many movies with such a lovely process.

    Did they show you what the monster was going to look like, or was it pure speculation on your end?

    They more showed us where it would be. Daniel wanted us to use own own imaginations. And we had these ear pieces in, where our characters could communicate with each other in the movie but Daniel could get on there and he would tell us to look at things or turn our heads in different directions and explain to us what was happening. It was a strange discovery as we went. We had kind of an idea of what Calvin would look like and what he’d change into but it was mostly our imagination.

    What did you think when you finally saw it? Did it line up at all?

    It changes, so I think in that way, as it grows and behaves that way … It was a little bit of both. But definitely f*cking scary.

    The writers of “Life” have talked about being open to a sequel. Is that something you’d be open to if called upon?

    Always! I’ve never done that before but always!It’s the 10th anniversary of “Zodiac” this year. Looking back on the process — and with some distance — what was that experience like?

    Oh man … It was life-changing and career-changing, and to work with David Fincher and to have that experience was extraordinary. I was very young at the time and thought very highly of myself, which has absolutely changed. When you’re that age and you’re not even so clear about the kind of geniuses I was working with — performers, filmmakers, all the crew around me. It was definitely such a dark movie to create and make and so ambitious in a lot of ways. Not necessarily in the ways we consider films ambitious but in this very subversive film that I think is ahead of its time and is a classic in a lot of ways. It’s an honor.

    It’s great, too, that people still talk about it. Has the fact that it has remained, even after getting a lackluster initial release, surprised you at all?

    No. David hadn’t made a movie in a while when he made that, and I remember the script was a certain way. It was 100 pages when it was written, and when he got on it became 180. He knew about it before, obviously, but as he tried to shape the movie he was trying to figure out who this person was, even to the day we were shooting it, up until the end of shooting, to see if we could find out who the Zodiac Killer was.

    Really?

    Yeah! The thing that is incredible about David is that he’s really not afraid of these corners of the world, and he wanted to figure it out as much as all the characters in the movie want to figure it out. I think that need, that want, that desire, that ache is in the movie because it’s his ache. He grew up with the Zodiac Killer in his hometown, so all of those things run very deep inside him and they run in the movie and that’s what I think makes it so special.

    You have another movie that is coming out that I am so excited for: “Okja.” What can you tell us about that movie and what was it like working with Bong Joon-ho?

    Well, again, another brilliant mind. He’s a true visionary, from his early movies in Korea to the movies he’s ventured out with a more international cast. He’s so incredible to work with and he’s such a visual artist so, in a way, you’re just fitting into this painting. But he also loves the idea of absurdity and creation, so in terms of creating a character with him it’s truly inspiring and so fun. The creature he’s created is beautiful, and I think he’s created a story in the vein of the classics we love; I’d say things like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “E.T.,” where you watch the journey of a child growing up and moving to adulthood in a way that’s really beautiful and heartbreaking and moving.

    I can’t say enough wonderful things about it. There’s no one I know working today that has the agility with tone that he has — visually, with humor. There are moments in the movie where I’m crying and then immediately start laughing, and I found myself crying and laughing at the same time. There’s something about him. Maybe it’s his understanding of all of our cultures, his understanding of the connection between all of us in the world and where similarities exist. But, man, is that man a craftsperson and I love him as a person and it was a joy to work with him. I can’t wait for you to see the movie.

    “Life” is in theaters Friday.