Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard: Filmmakers and activists

«UI’m an instinctive revolutionary, therefore perhaps incapable of making a real revolution, but if necessary I can break down a door with my shoulders.” As Peter Sarsgaard.
«Women think differently than men. However, it happens that some of us, when writing or filming, use a language that is not the one we were taught to use.” And this is it Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Scandinavian surnames, North American DNA. Peter and Maggie are husband and wife, “a marriage made in heaven”as they say in their parts, a meeting that takes place in heaven, meaning that two people are so compatible and perfect for each other that one could say it was God himself who orchestrated their union.

Wedding celebrated in Italy, in Brindisi in 2009after seven years of living together and a daughter, Ramona, who is now 16 years old (and Gloria was born in 2016)Peter and Maggie represent a convenient “get two for the price of one” for American independent cinema.

Emotions expressed without words

Interviews Joseph Schuman and Austin Stark, the two directors of Coup!one of the three films that Sarsgaard accompanied at the last Venice Film Festivaland you learn that «Peter didn’t limit himself to being the producer and actor of the film (roles for which he was paid), in fact he didn’t skimp on ideas even in the editing room and very often Maggie was with him who willingly said his”.

Gyllenhaal, who has been exploring the more complex aspects of femininity for at least a couple of decades as an actressstarting – in Secretary – with the role of a masochistic secretary in which she managed to inject good doses of tenderness and irony (she used the stapler with her chin), she is definitely someone who speaks her mind. And, by Hollywood standards, it is never about banality.

At the conversation organized by Miu Miu Women’s Tales in Venice (Peter was all ears and applause in the audience), with director Ava DuVernay and costume designer Catherine Martinfor example, remembered: «When I was 16, the same age my daughter is now, I saw Piano lessons by Jane Campion. It was a shock, images that have never left me since: I had discovered that it was possible to express emotions without words, and if this was so it was because it was about emotions expressed by a woman».

A couple of days later, Peter from the stage of the Palazzo del Cinema, in one of the longest acceptance speeches in the history of the festival, dedicated the Volpi cup won for Memory by Michel Franco, in which he plays a man suffering from dementia with great humanity and originalityto his wife.

The pair of instinctive revolutionaries have good genes. Maggie is a second generation in the film industrydaughter of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter and director Naomi Foner, older sister of actor Jake Gyllenhaal (who introduced her to her future husband). From her parents she learned to “be politically active: they taught me that I am part of a global community and that it is partly my responsibility to fight for what is right.” His CV includes mobilizing voters towards the polls in Florida, supporting activist Chelsea Manning and organizing a charity evening for Pussy Riot.

Peter Sarsgaard, who he admits that he often skipped school and is self-taughtwhich «if it doesn’t make me an outsider, certainly gives me an idea of ​​how outsiders are made», when we ask him for a comment on his character in Coup!a cook who insinuates himself into a family of bourgeois intellectuals during the Spanish flu pandemic, subverting the order of the house in favor of servitude, explains that «if films that talk about class struggle are increasing, it is because the world is asking us to do so. We live in a ridiculous world and have reached our breaking point. Eight multi-billionaires control the technology that is about to take a big chunk of our jobs: they effectively control the world. A journalist, an actor, a writer, a teacher, a lawyer no longer have to be people. The struggle, as I see it, today is “man versus machine”, and when I see managers working inside the machine, it makes me want to tell them what I would tell those who work in the tobacco industry: “Hey manager, you don’t want AI to take over the world either, because we will definitely jump, but then your turn will come too. Sure, you make a lot of money now, but maybe sooner or later you’ll have to ask yourself whether putting humanity up for sale really makes sense. You also have children, and perhaps the choices you are making will condemn them to death.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal: «Paying women less means valuing them less»

As a self-taught person who quotes Pasolini (Theoremand welcomes the comparison with Terence Stamp, for the role of the intruder in Coup!), Peter admits that faced with the success of his wife who made her directorial debut with The dark daughter by Elena Ferrante in 2021taking home the award for best non-original screenplay in Venice and three Oscar nominations, he doesn’t feel at all the urgency to pass to the other side of the camera himself (“it’s like tattoos: I’d be willing to make me one in the face of a real emergency”).

Maggie, who from Miu Miu Women’s Tales was enlisted to be part of the committee that will select the female talents destined to produce the next short films from the precious collection, for its part, does not simplify: «We have a prairie to conquer, there is no point in competing with each other, women must support women and occupy every centimeter of that space. We must watch our films with curiosity and compassion and promote female talent in every department: why are there so few female directors of photography and so few women in the technical categories? And we must repeat endlessly that it is not good to pay us less than men because it means valuing ourselves less.”

The present as a dystopian novel

He quotes Agnès Varda, «who was tired of not being taken seriously by the all-male troupe» (in the issue of I Woman of October 7th Liv Ullmann told us the same thing), and then Jean Rhys, the author of Good Morning, Midnight (title taken from a verse by Emily Dickinson), a book that «reading it on the surface, could result in the stalking of a woman who walks through Paris, buys a dress, books a hotel room and carries out other daily actions. But, in reality it tells the story of the descent into the depths of her mind. Since I read it, every time I perform one of those simple, banal actions, I reflect on the fact that the thoughts I produce while I do it have a value. Women have the right to learn to use their language and it’s wonderful to know that there is something new we can bring to the world».

The Guardianwriting about this intelligent actress-author who – we imagine – will not always have had everything easy (Netflix has withdrawn from its next film project The Brideremake of Bride of Frankenstein by James Whale from 1935), compared her to Mary Pickford who, in 1919, regardless of being the only girl in the group, created the production company United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, David Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks. For Pickford the advent of sound was her downfall. For the couple of instinctive revolutionaries and for all those who imagine Los Angeles as the set of the real and very upcoming “Hunger Games”, Hollywood really is the last trench: «It’s a dystopian novel we live in. We gave the keys to the house to the robots, how is it possible that we didn’t see all this coming?” gloss Sarsgaard who would like to see Tommy Lee Jones, “a serious guy who is also a little scary”, at the head of negotiations on the use of artificial intelligence in cinema. «We must win this battle. Because maybe it doesn’t seem important to you that there are movie stars who aren’t human. But if they can do this, they will also be able to replace doctors with Chat Gpt. What happens in our world, perhaps a little ridiculous, but very visible, and therefore on the front line today, marks the way for everything that will follow.”

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