Stephen Gyllenhaal
Hollywood Director Turns Poet
By Deborah Emin
Stephen Gyllenhaal has been directing film and television since the late 1970s. He’s worked on dozens of projects, including The Patron Saint of Liars, a 1998 made-for-TV movie based on the novel by Ann Patchett, and the 2003 TV series, Lucky. He is married to screenwriter Naomi Foner. They have two children, Maggie and Jake, who are also in the movies. Yet when Stephen Gyllenhaal hit a rough patch, he found himself casting about for a little extra help.
The remedy became writing poetry. It gave him something that making movies (and money) and having a family did not.
Gyllenhaal’s Claptrap: Notes from Hollywood (Cantarabooks, $24.95) came out in June. When an opportunity arose for me to interview him over the phone, I had only one real question: Why would a middle-aged man with a successful career in film and television (he is now 56) be drawn to the world of writing poetry? What would cause someone who has spent most of his working life around large groups of people, where discussions of money and its attendant power are the norm, to become involved in a poetry world which, by its nature, is hermetic and quiet?
His explanation was at first self-mocking. “I was in the 14th form of therapy, Alonon, Adult Children of Alcoholics. None of it was working well. I was mired in the jungle of young children, difficult marriage, and the stresses of Hollywood. I found myself with a diary, observing myself, and one day I stumbled into rhyme and verses. Why? I don’t know why. But it gave me comfort.”
He noted that at first he didn’t take it too seriously, but when he found himself dealing with a cousin’s drug overdose, the poetry helped identify his own feelings, and then became a vehicle for expression. The realization spurred him on.
“I’d write a poem as a birthday gift, and when it moved people, poetry became utilitarian. Buy some chocolate, write a poem. Things started to get better. The kids got older, we stuck out the marriage, and the poetry was of profound importance. It became a mirror, not in a narcissistic way, but something deeper, some element of myself became seen, and this went on for many years.”
As Gyllenhaal spoke about the new creative outlet in his life, he acknowledged that he was not leaving filmmaking. In fact, filmmaking and poetry touch the same chord in him. “Real cinema is poetry,” he said before going on to define that feeling of anticipation associated with both forms as lyricism – “the space for the inexplicable that is dazzling inside you.”
He used, as one example, a scene from his 1992 film, Waterland – not as the viewer sees it, but rather as he saw it while he was directing it. It was a scene in which the older brother (David Morrisey) jumps off a boat naked. “Even with a stunt double,” said Gyllenhaal, “there was this moment when the sun and the water and the movement [came together], and I knew this was all I wanted to do.”
The talk about how the work he does as a director allows him intimacy with the ways in which the rhythms of language meander through one’s life led to a mention of some poets he reads and enjoys: Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Ann Sexton – and Eminem. Now not every poet goes on and on about the musicality of Pound’s Cantos and then invokes his admiration for a rapper in the next sentence. “I think Eminem is the voice of someone who takes his work very seriously, then refines it.”
He described how Eminem worked and reworked his lyrics – a process of great interest to Gyllenhaal. “Rap makes kids poets all over the country.”
To be a poet is to be an outsider, and Gyllenhaal feels that people in Hollywood have become suspicious of him since he started writing poetry – poetry that “represents my gentler side.”
What emerged as we spoke was how multilayered and mysterious the writing of poetry really was. Not only had Gyllenhaal found, seemingly by accident, a means of expression that gave him, as he called it, “comfort,” but also an entrance to the poetry world. Happily, he had not had as much trouble getting his poems published as he thought he might. In fact, within the first year about 20 or so ended up in many of the prestigious poetry journals around the country. Then he received a letter from Cantarabooks. They had read a number of his poems and wanted to publish them. “I walked around with the letter for three days thinking it was a scam. But we’ve been working on the book for the last two and a half years, shaping it, and the process has not been all that different from filmmaking. I don’t know if these poems are any good, but I have found myself now voraciously reading [the work] of other poets.”
Such curiosity led Gyllenhaal to work with a professor at Columbia University, studying the core curriculum, and writing papers that are an amalgam of his newfound love of literature, psychological insights, and a newly emerging political side. This comprehensive way of responding to the world has given Stephen Gyllenhaal more than comfort; it’s a passion that will “go on for the rest of my life.”
