TORONTO -- Jean-Marc Vallee can't help but offer up his two cents as a photographer sets up a light for a quick photo shoot before an interview.
It's too close, too bright and too hot, the Quebec director says.
This is not the way he likes to shoot, Vallee adds wearily as a long day of media interviews takes place at the Toronto International Film Festival.
And it's certainly not the way he approached his latest film, "Demolition."
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a young widower who is unable to express his grief and spirals into increasingly erratic and destructive behaviour.
As with Vallee's previous films "Wild," "Dallas Buyers Club" and "Cafe de Flore," this emotion-laden drama featured a loose production style that eschewed lights, makeup and blocking.
"It's not (a situation where) the actor has the feel of the light of a spotlight -- like (the light) that was so bright earlier for the picture -- so when you have this on set, the actors they know, they feel the light and now they want to be lit," he said during a round of interviews last September.
"Now, when you don't have this, they don't get self-conscious, they don't have to hit a mark and it doesn't put style on top. Style doesn't matter. It's not about style, it's about storytelling and characters and emotion."
It's an approach that has established Vallee as a master of drawing out raw, emotional performances --not to mention Academy Awards attention -- from his actors.
That includes the Oscar-winning turns from Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in "Dallas Buyers Club," and Oscar nominations for Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern for their work in "Wild."
This time, Vallee found a willing partner in Gyllenhaal, who plays the emotionally stunted Davis, and co-star Naomi Watts, as a single mom who is gradually drawn into his grief-stricken orbit.
Watts said she embraced Vallee's unconventional approach, which included using only natural light sources during filming and virtually no makeup or hair-styling.
"There's really no vanity involved. Once you let go of that, the actors can be free," Watts said at the festival, adding that "every day you'd go to work and never know what was going to happen."
"Ideas just flow out of him. You can be doing a scene and if he doesn't like it he'll take a break. For instance, there was a scene we were shooting on a bench in Coney Island and he just wasn't feeling it. So he said, 'Get up, climb the fence and run down the beach.' Jake and I both started running down and the birds flew in and suddenly it started coming to him because it felt more poetic. Then we came back and did the scene and it worked better. There was something really refreshing about that."
Not that it's easy.
Vallee called "Demolition" especially tough to make, although it was moving for him personally.
Much of it hung on Gyllenhaal, and he described their relationship as one of "great partners, great friends."
"His face has a quality, he has an intelligence, a sadness, a subtle sadness, and a goodness. And so that helps for Davis's character. And then he starts to act. And then you go, 'Wow, so natural.' This is the kind of actor that explores and tries some stuff totally different from one thing to the other. It's challenging and it's beautiful to watch and to witness."
Vallee traces his distinct style to "Cafe de Flore," when he worked with several child actors with Down syndrome and had to improvise new ways of coaxing out authentic performances.
"I asked everyone to get out of the set and I asked the (cinematographer) not to use light and no reflectors and no bounce and nothing, just a set.... And let's even sometimes hide the camera, put it outside through a window," said Vallee, who teams with Witherspoon and Dern again for the HBO limited series "Big Little Lies."
"We did it on 'Dallas' because it helped us with the budget we had, that was so small. And then I kept doing it, shooting handheld," he continued.
"That gives (the actors) a space of freedom and a feeling of freedom and they can use the space however they want."
"Demolition" opens Friday.
-- With files from David Friend
