S T E P H E N.  R.  G Y L L E N H A A L.  '72.

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication Mosaic in February, 2000.

BRINGING PASSION TO THE BIG AND SMALL SCREENS

Stephen R. Gyllenhaal’s eyes were opened and his future came into focus while watching the films of Frederico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Francois Truffaut in Cinestudio at Trinity College. Masterful visual commentaries on life, the works of these legendary directors were spellbinding for Gyllenhaal, who had been raised in a strict religious community and had never seen a movie before enrolling at Trinity.

Recalling his reaction to Fellini’s Oscar-winning film La Strada, Gyllenhaal says, "I couldn’t get out of my seat. I broke down and wept in the theater. After that, I was full-tilt into filmmaking." Today, he is an award-winning television and feature film director, who has spent the past 28 years creating memorable moments for his audiences.

An English major
Gyllenhaal enrolled at Trinity planning to major in English and become a writer. But far away from his sheltered Swedenborgian religious community in rural Pennsylvania, which followed the teachings of the philosopher and religious writer Emanuel Swedenborg, Gyllenhaal found it was a challenge to adapt to his new life. During his sophomore year, he met poet and Professor of English Hugh Ogden, who acknowledged and responded to some of the personal challenges Gyllenhaal was experiencing. "Hugh Ogden understood the chaos inside of me and delivered literature that addressed it, soothed it, explained it, and allowed me to start to understand it," Gyllenhaal reflects. "There were instruments out there to address the human condition that I was going through. I remember reading Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge. I also remember Hugh’s passion, wildness, and caring."

Ogden vividly remembers his former student and has followed his career. "The comments Stephen made about other students’ poems and the great classic poems he was reading were unique and filled with the passionate kind of questioning that is the mark of what he is today," Ogden says. "His movies are filled with ‘I want to find some answers to life and figure out what it all means.’ That passion is in practically everything he does, and it was in everything he did while he was a kid at Trinity."

As much as Gyllenhaal reveled in the discoveries he made in poetry, the delight he derived from verse couldn’t compare to the joy he experienced upon taking Professor Lawrence Stires’ film course his senior year. "I understood filmmaking in a second," he says. "I didn’t even say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I just started making movies," he says. Enlisting members of the Trinity community -- including Ogden’s young daughter, Cynthia -- as actors, Gyllenhaal began his filmmaking efforts by making a super-eight movie influenced by Fellini. Entitled Brother and Sister, it is about a boy who becomes a girl.

After graduating, Gyllenhaal moved to New York, where he developed his skills by making industrial films. In 1974, he edited and associate-produced his first feature film, a documentary about the Shoshone Indians entitled Broken Treaty at Battle Mountain. Four years later, he experienced a turning point in his career when he wrote, directed, and produced his first short film, Exit 10. The film, which was based on a short story by Katherine Mansfield, was acquired by PBS.

Television movies
Following this success, he moved into television and directed special afternoon programs. He eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he found steady work directing primetime TV-movies. In 1990, he earned an Emmy nomination for A Killing in a Small Town, in which Barbara Hershey plays a woman who murders her best friend with an ax. In 1991, he guided Dennis Hopper to critical notice in Paris Trout, in which Hopper, playing a racist, murders a young black girl. The movie was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival and earned Gyllenhaal a Directors Guild of America Award.

The big screen
Gyllenhaal debuted on the big screen in 1984 with the teen film Certain Fury. A year later, he followed with the thriller The New Kids. In 1992, after concentrating on television productions for seven years, he returned to theatrical releases with Waterland, in which a teacher, played by Jeremy Irons, works through a life crisis in the classroom. In 1993, he collaborated with his screenwriter wife, Naomi Foner, on the study of a mentally disabled woman in A Dangerous Woman, starring Debra Winger, and in 1995 reunited with his wife for the child custody courtroom drama Losing Isaiah. In 1998, he steered a cast that included Billy Bob Thornton in Homegrown, a drama about marijuana farmers. Most recently, he directed a western for Showtime, entitled The Warden, starring James Caan, David Carradine, and Brian Dennehy.

Last year, Gyllenhaal returned to Trinity and conducted a filmmaking workshop for students, in which he shared his expertise and passion for his work. It was a familiar experience for Gyllenhaal, who has passed his love for his art to his two children. Jake, 19, and Maggie, 22, both of whom are working actors who have appeared in feature films.

After being in the film business for almost three decades, Gyllenhaal is modest in assessing his career. "I’ve been very lucky in that I stumbled on some very good scripts," he says. "The other thing I’ve had is passion, which was ignited at Trinity and Cinestudio. What I feel for Trinity is beyond fondness and beyond gratitude. I was given a life because of Cinestudio."

-Suzanne Zack