Maggie Gyllenhaal, Young Old Soul

The indie darling on miniskirts, embracing vulnerability and playing a journalist and single mom in the new film "Crazy Heart."

Anyway, we had gotten to know each other better, so by the time we shot [our first appearance onscreen together], it was very fiery. In one take, I watched the air go out of the scene. He was just hitting on me too hard, and so all of a sudden, I was not available in a way that I had been before. You know what I mean? [laughs]

If you’re not trying to stick your landing — that’s my husband’s phrase, I love that — if you’re not trying to be some fantasy of what perfect is in the scene, you’re just trying to do a scene, sometimes it will tilt over too far and you’ll have to pull it back. Jeff would do that, too. We’d do a scene, and he’d be like: “I think we’re loving each other a little too much. We’re loving ourselves a little too much. Let’s pick it up and remember what it is we need.” It was a total joy.

What are the advantages of working on a smaller indie like this compared to a big blockbuster like “The Dark Knight”?

For me, this is how I feel most comfortable. It’s how I learned making movies, and I find myself making movies like this often. I do better when I’m constantly working, when you don’t have three days to shoot one scene. “SherryBaby,” sometimes we’d shoot five scenes in a day. That was incredibly fast. This one, we’d shoot two a day. Perfect for me, I think. You can’t get obsessed with complicated set-ups that are going to take you three hours to light. You don’t have the time. Everybody has to be innovative and ready to work.

You’ve played mothers in the past, but you said that motherhood has changed you as an actor. What did you mean by that?

It changed everything about me. It brought me to my knees and cracked me open and grew me up. I’m able to see the virtues in feeling because of my daughter, as opposed to, like I was saying, bulldozing through. Yes, I played a lot of mothers before I was a mother, and in a movie like “SherryBaby,” I’m playing a mother who’s not really a mother, who’s never had to put a bag of Cheerios in her purse, who just birthed a child and hasn’t had to go through the everyday stuff. It was fine to not be a mom in that movie. In that movie, for example, I play a heroin addict. I’ve never done heroin.

It’s a fine line, but in this movie, I did include a lot of my feelings about being a mother. My daughter was almost two, and I felt this surge that I think mothers have, intermittently. I’ve been focused on her so completely for two years, and got this strong feeling that I need something for me, and the movie was that.

That’s what’s happening to Jean. She’s been taking care of a four-year-old by herself, pulling together what was obviously a tough, complicated life, and putting so much pressure on herself to be a mom and function. She’s at an emergency level of: “I need something for me.” I let that be in the movie, and you know what? I think it’s easier for people to imagine, “What might it be like for me to lose a child?” That’s something you can imagine before you have a child because even for a mother, it’s imaginary. But the other things, like how much higher the stakes are…

In the scene where [Bad's] writing that song on my bed and I freak out, that scene is really about saying, “I’m fucked. Somewhere I know, as much as I try not to think about it, that you’re terrible for me. But I’m in love for you, and it’s over. You slayed me.” So much more is at stake when there’s a four-year-old involved, and I don’t think I understood that kind of thing before.

Beyond Jean’s encounters with Bad, have you ever interviewed someone in real life?

Yes, although I wasn’t thinking about that when I was interviewing him. I mean, I’ve been interviewed by people very successfully, where I went: “Oh my god, I revealed so much more than I intended to.” Jean’s a very green journalist and she’s also a fan. I was focused on trying to find something true about him, and I think she does. I think she’s a good writer, but I don’t think she has a lot of experience interviewing people.

Please tread lightly, but what do you like least about being interviewed?

I don’t like being interviewed by people who I don’t think really see me, who maybe watch the movie and whether they liked it or not, they didn’t understand me. It’s difficult to sit through an interview and try to explain things in a simple, clear way that are important to me about what I do with someone who just thinks in a totally different way. Sometimes that can be interesting, but I would prefer to talk to someone who thinks about movies in a similar way.

Are you into country music?

Yeah, and I came to it completely out of nowhere. I grew up in Los Angeles and I’ve lived in New York for 15 years — I don’t come from country music. So the things I found and picked totally on my own, I don’t know what T-Bone would think of them. [laughs] Gillian Welch is probably where it started, at maybe 19. I like Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, Merle Haggard, and I do like the Dixie Chicks. I just listened to that [side project with] Exene from X, the Knitters. I like the folksy old-school country more than that, but I thought that was pretty cool. See? I really do listen to country.

“Crazy Heart” is now playing in limited release.

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