Imagine being the mother or father of a beautiful little girl, everyone playing there part in being just another sweet innocent family. Now imagine having that world shattered when you get the news that your daughter has been kidnaped.
Actor Hugh Jackman along with fellow co-actor Jake Gyllenhaal brings this nightmarish scenario to life in the suspense thriller Prisoners.
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine Jackman talks about just how intense and borderline disturbing his character became during this film in an attempt to get his daughter back.
“What I loved about the script was the moral ambiguity,” Jackman said after the screening. “The film kind of delves into and plays with the whole idea of whether [my character] is heroic or not. I remember watching the film with my wife and she spent the first hour holding my hand, but squeezing it to the point I had indentations. But there was a certain point in the movie where my wife actually took her hand away from mine. I think that she was getting uncomfortable.”
Even fellow actor Gyllenhaal acknowledged just how much the importance of obsession and intensity becomes in this film and how those emotions are pushed by director Denis Villeneuve.
“Denis is obsessed in the themes in his movies. He picks a number of things that intellectually and emotionally stimulate him and he will follow that through, through an entire movie,” Said Gyllenhaal according to rolling Stone magazine.
However, for all of its plot twists and amazing acting, what makes Prisoners such an impactful film is its ability to make you feel for Jackman’s character. Jackman says himself that he had to stop filming at times because the role was so intense emotionally that he had to take breaks at different times.
“I think that’s where the movie exists,” Jackman said. “And what we concentrated on was making that primal urge for all the characters real, so that even that if you didn’t agree, or if you were uncomfortable, you understood where all the characters were going.”
There even times that during filming even Jackman had no idea where his emotions where going to take him.
“There’s that scene where I smash the hammer very close to his head, and he doesn’t even flinch,” Jackman said in an interview with the daily beast. “By the way, none of that was rehearsed or planned. Even I didn’t know that was going to happen”.
Jackman continues his interview with the daily beast by saying that his character just brings the emotions everyone would feel if they were going through the same situation.
“Violence begets violence, and violence is destructive, and uncomfortable, and horrible, and he unravels. As one character says later, it’s like bringing out the demon in someone. To be honest, the most interesting portrait of the whole torture thing is Viola Davis’s character. She thinks about it and in the end she says, ‘We’re not going to stop him, but we don’t know anything about it, and we’re not going to have anything to do with it.’,” Jackman said. “And isn’t that what a lot of the world, and a lot of people in this country, did after 9/11? People knew that things were going on, it was written about, but because people were terrified and frightened, they were just like, “Let people do whatever they want to do at Guantánamo Bay.” It’s fascinating what happens when people are pushed to a frightening place. They’ll let things happen that they normally wouldn’t”.
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