Brokeback Mountain: 10 Years On
A definitive oral history of the film, featuring: Ang Lee, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid, Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, and Larry McMurtry
BY AARON HICKLIN
JULY 28 2015 9:30 AM EDT
“The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.” — Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain
The quiet, revolutionary charge of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, 10 years old this year, could be felt not only in the way it was embraced by cinemagoers, but in the way some attempted to neutralize its depiction of same-sex love by turning its most intimate and harrowing scene—Jack Twist’s “I wish I knew how to quit you” moment—into a joke. According to Jake Gyllenhaal, who played the charismatic Twist, that was something Heath Ledger, in particular, was acutely sensitive to. “He was extraordinarily serious about the political issues surrounding the movie when it came out,” he says. “A lot of times people would want to have fun and joke about it, and he was vehement about being serious, to the point where he didn’t really want to hear about anything that was being made fun of.”
Watched again a decade later, that “quit you” encounter on Brokeback Mountain—a culmination of the lovers’ lost years, symbolized in a desperate animal embrace—remains as charged and powerful as ever. Some of us have known someone like Ennis Del Mar, trapped in a world in which he doesn’t fit, and hopelessly incapable of seeing any alternative. Or, as Annie Proulx wrote in the short story on which the movie is based, “There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” It is Del Mar’s tragedy, and by extension Jack Twist’s, too, that he cannot bring himself to choose happiness over fear.
Many have written about the homoerotic subtext of cowboy films, but no story has been as forthright as Brokeback Mountain in reminding us that for all the celebrated machismo of the American West, there have always been men like Ennis and Jack.
In an emailed interview, Proulx says, “Of course there were and are gay men in the world of cattle and horses since the first cow spent the winter on the plains west of Laramie, but the great fiction that evolved in the 19th century and lay over the ranching West is that all cowboy horsemen and ranch hands were heterosexual, strong and fearless, brave and handsome, and though tough and daring, they were shy, sparing of words, always kind to orphaned doggies and children, extravagantly polite to women, etc. All this made up an irresistible masculine ideal that had/has political value. For many, the cowboy image became a potent symbol of American men. It was this confrontation with unreality that the story wanted to show through a look at two characters living in the real world of homophobic closeting.”
Although the movie was well-received and handsomely rewarded—it pulled in more than $177 million worldwide, and another $44 million in DVD sales—there were some outliers. A cinema in Salt Lake City refused to show it, and it was banned in China. But one of the remarkable things about Brokeback Mountain was that it came at just the moment when attitudes were shifting, and mainstream audiences were ready to see two men coupling—particularly when those two men were Ledger and Gyllenhaal. Watching Ledger inhabit the role of Ennis—such a coiled ball of muted pain and rage and repressed sexual energy—is doubly poignant now, for it reminds us of the huge talent that was lost.
As with River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else playing the role, and though all great roles seem like inevitable casting decisions in hindsight, there is a rare alchemy at work between the four central actors that one dud casting note could have destroyed.
Before Brokeback Mountain, the idea of a straight A-list actor playing a gay role in a hit movie seemed far-fetched. Afterwards it became almost commonplace, but it took Ang Lee to make that happen. Actors auditioned for Brokeback because Lee was a big name, but many were hesitant. “During the interviews I had a feeling they were a little, if I may say, afraid, uncomfortable,” recalls Lee. “Usually when they come to meet with [the director] their agents will follow up: ‘How’s it going?’ They didn’t say that to me this time.”
Back then, of course, Hollywood was not unlike Wyoming, a place where homosexuality existed, but was rarely admitted, and—if found out—inevitably punished. That has changed, and continues to change, but stories like Brokeback Mountain retain their potency because shame, fear, and prejudice have not vanished.
And also because the metaphor of Brokeback Mountain—of thwarted dreams and lives unlived—is one to which anyone with a heart can relate.
To mark Brokeback Mountain’s 10th anniversary, we invited director Ang Lee, screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, and actors Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, and Randy Quaid to look back on the making of this seminal movie.
Diana Ossana (screenwriter
I first read the story when it appeared in The New Yorker in 1997. I read it in the middle of the night and again the next morning, and it was just as affecting, so I asked Larry [McMurtry] to read it. He was reluctant to, only because he’s not interested in short fiction.
Larry McMurtry (co-screenwriter
I wondered why I hadn’t written it myself, because [homosexuality] has been hanging there in the West for over a hundred years, waiting to be written. I knew it, and everybody who was really familiar with cowboy life knew it.
Ossana: We wrote Annie Proulx a fan letter and asked her what she thought about us optioning the story. She wrote back and said, “I don’t see a movie here, but have at it,” and we wrote a script in three months, and sent it out into the world. About five days later, Gus Van Sant showed up at our door in Texas wanting to make it. But Gus couldn’t get Ennis cast—that’s what slowed it. Larry believed actors’ representatives were dissuading them from doing the part—they called it career suicide for a straight actor to play a gay person. We just thought that was ridiculous.
Randy Quaid (Joe Aguirre
I read the story in The New Yorker on a treadmill in a gym in Houston. I thought it would make a great movie and even inquired about obtaining the rights, but they were already taken. The short story struck me as having more humor than the film, but perhaps that was due to the novelty of reading about two gay cowpunchers falling desperately in love with each other, leaving the sheep to fend for themselves.
Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack Twist
The script for Brokeback Mountain had been around for a number of years, as is often the case with really interesting films. I’d actually met with another director, who was attached to it maybe four years before Ang came along. I was probably 19 years old.
Ossana: In 2001, [producer] James Schamus picked up the option, and he and I tried to get some directors to sign on. People loved the script—we kept hearing that—but no one would commit. At the end of 2002, I asked James to show it to Ang, and he came back a few weeks later and said, “Ang loved the script, but we’re going to do The Hulk.”
Ang Lee (director
I was pretty wrecked by making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. My friend Jim [Schamus] introduced me to this little story by Annie Proulx, and towards the end when they talk about all they’ve got is Brokeback Mountain, that was an existential question to me. What is this Brokeback Mountain? They say, “We don’t really have a relationship, it’s just Brokeback Mountain,” and I cried there. That really perplexed me. I grew up in Taiwan, so nothing is more remote to me than gay cowboys in Wyoming. At the time, I was in the flow of doing something pulpy and picked to do The Hulk, which wracked me even more. But the story just refused to leave me.
Gyllenhaal: I knew it would be a difficult film to make, and something that would put people off, but I didn’t know how difficult it would be to get made. My closest family members, my godfathers, were a gay couple, so it was something I just inherently had no prejudice about.
Quaid: It was definitely a movie that needed to be made. It afforded an opportunity for society, particularly American culture, to confront its core issues with the gay community. Placing the confrontation in a milieu that is traditionally perceived as hetero male–John Wayne and the Western cowboy–was a brilliant stroke by Proulx.
Lee: After The Hulk I thought about retirement. I thought I’d had enough. My father had just passed away, and I was exhausted. Brokeback Mountain nurtured me back to filmmaking and as a person. I’m not the creator of that movie—I’m just a participant. It was meant to come out, to see the world, to affect people. I think everybody involved felt that way, like we were blessed. I don’t have another movie I feel that way about.
Anne Hathaway (Lureen Twist
I received the script for Brokeback Mountain with a note that said, “Please read for interest in the part of Alma.” And I read the script, and was, of course, blown away by it, but I remember thinking, Alma’s not my part–I’m Lureen. It’s not dissimilar to the feeling of meeting someone that will become very important to you on some soul level. It had that same magnetic pull that I feel for certain very important people. And like all of those wonderful feelings, it made me hot, it made me flush, it made my blood pound.
Lee: I met Annie Proulx for the first time in New York. She scared me. But then I spent two days in Wyoming with her. The first day I was still afraid of her, since she is stern and I am a city boy, but the first night we had dinner, and I saw an item on the menu, Rocky Mountain oyster, and I ordered it. I had no idea what it was, but I’m an adventurous eater. I think that was the icebreaker. When it came she took a bite of it, and said, “Women are not supposed to eat this,” and cracked a smile. After that she was quite lovely.
Ossana: My daughter had suggested Heath [Ledger] early in 2003, so we did a little movie marathon. I had Larry watch Monster’s Ball, and he watched it until Heath’s character killed himself, and he stood up and said, “I can’t watch any more of this, it’s too brutal—but that young man is Ennis.” We suggested Heath to the studio, but they didn’t really take it seriously, and then the actor who’d committed to playing Ennis backed out, and I called Heath’s agent and asked him to get Heath the script. He read it on the way to Australia with Naomi [Watts] for Christmas, and said it was the most beautiful script he’d ever read.
Gyllenhaal: When I first met with Ang there were a number of different combinations of actors he had in mind—and each combination of actors was different. None stayed the same. You would hear, “Oh, this person and that person, or not them at all.” Or “this person and that person,” and then “not them at all.” After I had met with Ang—a brief, somewhat awkward meeting—I heard, “Now he’s thinking about Heath Ledger and you. But if Heath doesn’t want to do it, then it’s going to be somebody else.”
Hathaway: I was filming Princess Diaries 2, and I was working on Universal Lot [where] Ang was going to be meeting with people. So I was able to get a slot during my lunch break. We were shooting the coronation part of the movie, so I was dressed a ball gown, wearing this big hairpiece that was way over the top, but also worked for a rodeo queen, so it was fine. I just put on my jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, and drove across the lot in a golf cart with my big princess hair. I remember being very, very calm, which is unusual for me under any circumstances, especially at 21. I just felt so centered and focused, and in way like a predator: I knew what I wanted.
Ossana: When we were casting Alma, Michelle [Williams] wasn’t even on the radar. I was the only one who put Michelle on my list, and that was because I’d seen her in Dawson’s Creek and remember thinking, What the heck is this young woman doing on this show? You could see the depths she had.
Hathaway: When I’m done with an audition, I can usually tell if I’ve left the door open for another actress to come in behind me, but I left that room knowing that I had closed it, locked it, and welded it shut. I just knew it was mine. People were struggling to see me as anything other than a Disney princess at the time, so to get the endorsement from Ang made me realize that maybe I could take this a bit further. It made me think for the first time that I could be a legit artist. I remember thinking, I got one! Show up. Don’t be the weak link. Keep pace with these people!
Ossana: When Larry and I sat down to write the script, we decided what other scenes we wanted to add. We felt in order to make it full and really understand the impact of their relationship on the people around them, we had to include the children and their wives. A tragedy like that, the ripple effect of someone who was homophobic—which Ennis was—on everyone around them is tremendous.
Hathaway: When I got the part and had my first rehearsal, one of the things Ang told me was: “On the night Lureen and Jack first meet, that’s her Brokeback Mountain, the only one she ever got.” So that kind of fed into the bitterness.
Gyllenhaal: I’d known Heath for a really long time before that movie. We were friends. We went to a sort of boot camp, where we’d all hang out and learn to ride. Heath already knew how to ride really well, but we’d ride and hang out on the ranch outside of Los Angeles. It was really, really amazing.
out.com
I miss you Heath, everyday!
