Heart Throb Heath Ledger stripped down to his birthday suit on the Calgary set of the 2005 drama Brokeback Mountain. In the movie, directed by Ang Lee, he and Jake Gyllenhaal play a rodeo cowboy and a ranch hand who fall in love in the 1960's. Jake, who admitted to being "terrified" of the sex scenes, opted out this full-frontal film moment and had his body double step in. "I know what we have to do and it's very intimate," said Jake in a British publication before filming began. "I'm blanking it out until we start filming." But he insists the movie isn't about "gay" love. " It's about how the impossible love can sometimes be, and I can relate to that." As for Heath, he reportedly says, "Everyone is really excited and nervous. We're all hoping that it'll break some taboos" - STAR MAGAZINE

The Resurrection of 'Donnie Darko'
By, Robert Levine

In April 2002, the director Richard Kelly was walking through the East Village when he saw something he never thought he'd see again: a poster promoting his film "Donnie Darko." An unsettling movie with spiritual overtones that's set in an 80's suburb, "Darko" opened in November 2001 and promptly closed. Given the national mood, it didn't help that a major scene showed a part of an airplane falling into a house. Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Donnie, wasn't yet famous, and the character, a troubled teenager haunted by visions of a man in a bunny suit, was hardly heroic. The movie's only big names — Patrick Swayze, Noah Wyle and Drew Barrymore (who was also an executive producer) — were in minor roles. It took in only half a million dollars.

When he saw the "Donnie Darko" poster outside the Two Boots Pioneer Theater on Avenue A, Mr. Kelly said recently by telephone, he first thought "someone was playing a trick on me." Then, he said, "I heard these guys talking about this movie with an evil rabbit and I thought, `Maybe this isn't over yet.' "

Indeed, it was just beginning. Over the course of the next two years, Mr. Kelly's film developed a cult following. And on Friday a director's cut of "Donnie Darko" will open in New York. Most director's cuts are released with the idea that the movies will build on their original success — think "E. T." or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." In this case, the idea is to give fans who love the film on video — and others — their first chance to see it on a big screen.

Viewers coming to "Donnie Darko" for the first time may well leave the theater wondering exactly what they've just seen. On the surface, Mr. Kelly's film is a pastiche of horror flick and teenage comedy references: the depressed protagonist who reaches through a medicine cabinet mirror; the teacher (Ms. Barrymore) who's just as haunted as her students; the invisible friend who turns real — and evil. On another level, it's a "Twilight Zone" episode writ large, in which Donnie, who may or may not be insane, enters an alternate universe that may or may not actually exist. To prevent the events of that world from happening in this one, he must turn back time or watch it turn back around him: in true "Twilight Zone" fashion, it's hard to know whether Donnie controls events or if they control him. Clever foreshadowing and cryptic dialogue add to a pervading sense of unease. (Donnie to man in rabbit outfit: "Tell me why you're wearing that stupid bunny suit." Man to Donnie: "Why are you wearing that stupid human suit?") The ending is also ambiguous.

"It's designed to be this puzzle," Mr. Kelly said. "There's a lot to chew on." Some of this is deeper — or at least far more challenging — than what's usually served up in indie movies packed with ironic 80's references. The resolution, such as it is, involves the complexities of time travel — wormholes, tangent universes and so forth — in a way that asks larger questions about free will. Like the Wachowski brothers with "The Matrix," Mr. Kelly took a genre usually seen as disposable and worked in a philosophical undercurrent. "What I tried to do is come up with this pop, sci-fi comic-book tale that could resonate on a spiritual level," Mr. Kelly said. Parts of the movie have the questing quality of late-night dorm-room discussions. But the film is too funny to collapse under its own weight. When Donnie asks his science teacher whether predestination implies the existence of God, the teacher replies that he can't discuss that without risking his job.

With its troubled antihero and evident distrust of authority, "Donnie Darko" owes a debt to the writings of Philip K. Dick, whose short stories served as the basis for the films "Blade Runner," "Minority Report" and "Paycheck," among others. "Dick was desperately searching for meaning, and he was doing so with speculative fiction with big ideas like time travel and teleportation," Mr. Kelly said. "I was trying to take these science ideas and have them resonate on a religious level."

Given Mr. Kelly's ambitions, as well as the kind of genre vehicle in which he tried to realize them, it should come as no surprise that "Donnie Darko" found its audience with midnight screenings. The Pioneer Theater, where Mr. Kelly saw the poster, began showing his movie on Friday and Saturday nights in January 2002, a few months after it left theaters. "We had been discussing where the next generation of midnight movies would come from," said Phil Hartman, the Pioneer's owner. "How many times can you show `Pink Flamingos' and `Eraserhead'? " Each week the movie filled about half the Pioneer's 100 seats — a success for a midnight film — and it was soon picked up for similar screenings by the Visions Cinema in Washington and then the Coolidge Corner Movie Theater near Boston.

The film received its first real media attention in the fall of 2002, when it opened in England. "Britain had been going through a fascination with the 80's, and this had the music and the fashion that people were interested in," said Ekow Eshun, a London cultural critic. One of the songs on the soundtrack, a cover of the Tears for Fears 1989 hit "Mad World," made the top 10.

By that time the "Donnie Darko" DVD, issued in June 2002, was a hit in the United States. Newmarket Films, which had distributed "Donnie Darko," watched the sales figures rising and decided to release it in theaters again, and Mr. Kelly took the opportunity to make some changes. He has added 20 minutes and inserted titles that make the ending somewhat clearer, though still far from straightforward. Not incidentally, said Bob Berney, the president of Newmarket, "I think it will open the door to another DVD version."

Ms. Barrymore, who decided to help produce the film and take a small role based on the strength of Mr. Kelly's script, said she knew the film would find an audience eventually. "But I certainly never expected the cultish aspect," she said in a telephone interview. "I think no matter where I am, the film people come up to me with the most passion about is `Donnie Darko.' "

Mr. Kelly said that the belated success of his first feature has encouraged him to take the same kind of chances with his second. His next project, which he will again write and direct, is "a big epic kind of futuristic comedy," he said.

"I wish I could have made a second film by now," he said. And then, with barely a hint of irony, he added, "I don't want to be a one-hit wonder

Jake Gyllenhaal
For Fighting Floods, Winning Hearts, And Merging the Art House With the Cineplex

Most actors would be in a crap-ass mood if they had to get up early and fight morning traffic to make a 9 A.M. photo shoot in front of an abandoned factory in East Los Angeles. But Jake Gyllenhaal obviously has his caffeine in the car and had arrived in full performance mode. As the camera clicks, he shows off some spontaneous dance moves: an Elvis-inspired hip swivel, a high-stepping riff on John Cleese's Minister of Silly Walks, then it's a West Side Story skip, complete with finger snaps.

While he's hamming it up, a bass-bumping black Ford Mustang creeps down the block. As the low rider shows near the lights, bounce boards, and dancing movie star, it dawns on everyone involved that creating a spectacle in one of L.A.'s grittier neighborhoods might not be the brightest idea. And then a voice comes out from the car's open window: "Hey! Bubble Boy!"

So it's official: Gyllenhaal, brother of actress Maggie, son of director Stephen and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Naomi Foner, is no longer just the pinup boy for the indie film crowd. The 23-year-old may have made a name for himself with thoughtful performances in Donnie Darko, Moonlight Mile, and The Good Girl (and if you ask the homies in East L.A., his 2001 comedy Bubble Boy), But he's poised to, quite literally, take the mainstream by storm.

Case in point: this summer's $125 million disaster extravaganza The Day After Tomorrow, which showcases Gyllenhaal's action-hero chops. As tornadoes and tidal waves pummel the United States, his character is trapped in a New York City library, and his paleoclimatologist pops, played by Dennis Quaid, must rescue him. "He had never done a physical part before," director Roland Emmerich says. "He had to run in high water. And there's a scene where he outruns a wolf. He did it brilliantly"

Continuing to strike a bargain between art and entertainment, Gyllenhaal will follow up The Day After Tomorrow with Proof, in which he plays a math student who helps a professor's daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) realize the genius of her father's work. Then it's on to Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, in which Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger star as cowboys who fall in love on a cattle drive. "Love has no bounds," he explains. "In movies about heterosexual relationships, it's almost impossible to make that idea clear. This movie is putting it in a new context"

Clearly, you can take the boy out of the art house, but can't always take the art house out of the boy. Did we mention that Gyllenhaal's production company is called Nine Stories (from J.D. Salinger collection) and his German shepherd puppy, which he shares with girlfriend Kirsten, is named Atticus? Gee, Jake. You're soooo literate. "Oh, man," he says, laughing at the razzing "Salinger? To Kill a Mockingbird? That's pretty mainstream"   

- Tim Swanson PREMIERE MAGAZINE