20 Well-Kept Details From Behind The Scenes Of Brokeback Mountain

Much was made of the love scenes between Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal’s characters. And in 2010 Gyllenhaal remembered it all. Speaking at the New Yorker Festival, he said, “We just basically went up and slammed our mouths together. We were the instruments for something that was much bigger than both of us.” What did Ledger think, though?

Well, before his untimely death, Ledger gave an interview to The Guardian. In January 2006 he said, “It was certainly a surreal moment the first time I had to kiss Jake. But once that was done, I quickly realized that it didn’t make me want to run out and do it again. And you think, ‘Okay, what’s the next shot?’ Those scenes were just a small part of the package.”

Anne Hathaway really wanted to be in Brokeback Mountain, and she really wanted to play Lureen. So she told a little fib to keep herself in the running. What was it? Well, when Ang Lee asked her if she could ride a horse, the actress answered that she was very good at it. But in fact, she’d never ridden in her life before.

Hathaway did quickly start to teach herself how to ride before filming started – but it wasn’t quite enough. She remembered to Out magazine in 2015, “I went to a rehearsal in front of 300 extras, all of whom work in rodeos, and the horse wouldn’t do a damn thing I wanted it to. And at the end, it threw me — in front of everyone.”

Ang Lee, the director of Brokeback Mountain, won an Academy Award in 2006 for helming the movie. However, he’s humble about his success, to say the least. In 2019 he told The Star newspaper he was “practically half-asleep” while making the picture. He said, “I just secured the actors and got them to perform. The shots are boring, really basic.”

Lee went on, “I just make pretty shots. It’s the easiest thing. Shoot some pretty shots, I can do that all day. It’s, like, really easy. I had limited time, and the actors were great, Texas was good. It was a gay drama, and I didn’t think many people would see it.” He was, of course, wrong on that front.

In a 2015 interview with the radio station SiriusXM Progress, the Brokeback Mountain screenwriters discussed the process of finding someone to play the character of Ennis. It was, Diana Ossana said, “the most difficult role to cast.” And despite another actor committing to the part, the filmmakers had their hearts set on Ledger – against the wishes of the studio.

Ossana said, “The studio didn’t feel he was macho enough. I thought that was a rather odd comment. But we just sort of stuck with it.” When the first actor backed out of the project — Ossana wouldn’t say under what circumstances — she was able to call up Ledger’s agent and get him involved again.

When Brokeback Mountain first came out, the film proved controversial in some parts of the world. In China, for instance, the censors refused to put the movie in cinemas – even though homosexuality is legal in the country. So anyone wanting to see the picture had to make do with bootleg DVDs.

Despite this, the official newspapers of China celebrated director Ang Lee’s Oscar win, with China Daily writing, “Ang Lee is the pride of Chinese people all over the world, and he is the glory of Chinese cinematic talent.” Still, Brokeback Mountain wasn’t the last film with gay content to be pulled by the country’s censors.

No film is universally acclaimed on its release, and Brokeback Mountain was no exception. Gene Shalit, the film critic on Today, was one reviewer who gave the movie a poor write-up. But the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) was angry about his description of the character of Jack – as Shalit had labeled him a “sexual predator.”

Shalit felt compelled to issue a statement that said, “I did not intend to use a word that many in the gay community consider incendiary... I certainly had no intention of casting aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself. I regret any emotional hurt that may have resulted from my review of Brokeback Mountain.” GLAAD accepted the apology.

In a 2005 interview with the website liveabout.com, Gyllenhaal talked about some nervousness he’d experienced on set. He said, “When it came to doing love scenes and stuff like that, the best metaphor I can give is that it felt like [me and Heath Ledger] were both like, ‘Are you ready? Yeah. Let’s go,’ and we dove off the boat into the deep end.”

Gyllenhaal went on, “It’s like when you’re terrified of the water, you see a little kid thrown in the water and they’re trying to get back to the boat as fast as they can. That’s what it was like. But at the same time when we were there, we really went for it.” Gyllenhaal also admitted he couldn’t remember a lot of those scenes.

Randy Quaid, who played the sheep farmer Ennis and Jack work for, ended up suing the Brokeback Mountain producers in 2006. His complaint was that the filmmakers had sold the film to him as a low-budget endeavor to convince him to take a smaller salary when they actually stood to make millions of dollars.

However, Quaid dropped the lawsuit shortly afterward. Later in 2006, a Focus Features spokesperson released this statement: “Focus Features never negotiated, offered or agreed to any settlement agreement with Mr. Quaid or his attorneys, but we are happy to put this behind us, and do wish [him] all the best.”

Ian McKellen doesn’t appear in Brokeback Mountain, but because he is an openly gay actor he was asked about the film in 2006. And he appeared to take issue with something Gyllenhaal had said in the press. McKellen declared, as reported by World Entertainment News Network, “I got very upset when one of the actors said it was the most terrifying job he’d ever had because it involved him kissing another man.”

The veteran actor went on, “Imagine how rude that is. Suppose I’d said the most appalling thing I ever had to do was kiss Helen Mirren!” In fact, McKellen seemed fairly ambivalent about Brokeback Mountain in general. Asked about it at another point in 2006, he said the film probably wouldn’t do much to help gay actors.

Ledger was an up-and-coming young star around the time Brokeback Mountain was being written. In fact, in 2015 screenwriter Diana Ossana told Out magazine that it had been her daughter who’d suggested Ledger for the role. So she and her co-screenwriter Larry McMurtry sat down to watch Monster’s Ball, a movie in which he starred.

Ossana remembered, “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.’” So the writers sent the script off to Ledger’s agent, and luckily the actor loved it from the moment he read it.

If you’re selling a romantic movie, the poster needs to be instantly recognizable as something, well, romantic. So the poster-makers of Brokeback Mountain decided that to convey their film’s themes, they should look back over movie posters of the past. They therefore started searching around for the most acclaimed romantic movies and their corresponding posters.

In 2005 Focus Features co-president James Schamus told Newsweek magazine, “If you look at our poster, you can see traces of our inspiration: Titanic.” Indeed, the films’ posters – with their designs of two lovers looking away from each other to hint at unhappy endings – do bear some similarities.

One thing Gyllenhaal always remembered about Brokeback Mountain was how good Ledger was with the animals. He remembered in a 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “Heath, you know, would walk up to a horse and could, like, silence the horse. Just literally, he’d be like, ‘Shh. Shh.’ And then he’d get on the horse.”

An old interview from Ledger himself attests to this. In 2005 he told straight.com, “I grew up in Australia, where you are around farm folk, and I think there is something universal about someone who spends all day on horseback. Even when they get off, they walk like they are still on the horse. I adore horses and horseback riding.”

Gyllenhaal got plenty of good reviews for his performance as Jack Twist. For instance, when the movie was released, The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper said, “Gyllenhaal may be full of charm and easy affability, but you miss none of the longing he harbors or the frustration which slowly begins to coarsen him.” Yet Gyllenhaal didn’t expect to play that role initially.

Gyllenhaal assumed he would play Ennis. He said to liveabout.com in 2005, “I thought, ‘Oh, Ang will probably want me to play the Ennis part,’ because I’ve played much more isolated characters before, and that’s a very obvious, very actorly way of thinking about it. Because, actually, Heath and I as people are really more of the characters that we play.”

One scene in Brokeback Mountain sees Ledger’s character punching a wall in desperation… but it wasn’t scripted. In 2015 Hathaway told Out magazine, “The plan was for him to put his face against the wall — that’s what the shot was supposed to be — and he just wound up punching the brick.”

Hathaway went on, “Everyone was freaking out because it was a real wall. It wasn’t a movie brick wall. It was a f**kin’ brick wall. And he did it, and they got it, and they said his hand was mangled. He might have actually broken it.” Incidentally, Ledger had such an intense time on set that he immediately went on to film a comedy, Casanova, once Brokeback Mountain was done.

As the world knows, Ledger died of an accidental sleeping pill overdose in 2008. Though it may have been a blow to the industry of moviemaking, it was of course a much bigger one to those who knew him. That includes Diana Ossana, who told HuffPost in 2015 that she was left “stunned” by the news.

Ossana told HuffPost, “To be honest with you, I haven’t been able to watch the movie since he died. I’ve watched it probably 150 times before that. But since he passed away I haven’t been able to watch the film. And I’m destined to watch it again. I’m hoping that I can get through it.”

One unexpected problem on the Brokeback Mountain set was the sheep. There were lots of them – and getting them from place to place proved difficult. The wildlife authorities wouldn’t allow the filmmakers to take their sheep into the mountains, either, for fear that the animals would either be killed by predators or spread disease.

The animal authorities eventually decided that the moviemakers could film with the sheep on the mountain – if they followed some strict rules. The conditions? They had to stick to one isolated mountain, they had to count and check the sheep every day, and they had to have a wildlife biologist to oversee everything. The movie crew agreed.

Before Ang Lee became the director of Brokeback Mountain, Gus Van Sant was tipped to helm the project. He planned to get A-list actors on board, too. But, he told the website IndieWire in 2018, there were few takers. Van Sant said, “I asked the usual suspects: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Ryan Phillippe. They all said no.”

IndieWire emailed Diana Ossana for confirmation, and she told them, “Yes, all those young gentlemen (at the time) turned down the project, for various reasons.” The lack of willing actors discouraged Van Sant. He told IndieWire, “What I could have done, and what I probably should have done, was cast more unknowns, not worried about who were the lead actors.”

Ledger and Michelle Williams played husband and wife in the movie, and while filming they fell in love. In her 2015 interview with Out, Diana Ossana remembered that at one point Williams had to go to the hospital for a twisted knee. She said, “Heath was not about to let her go alone, and as he was getting into the vehicle with her he was smoothing her hair back.”

Ossana went on, “I remember him looking at her, and she looking up at him with these wide eyes. She was almost startled by the attention he was giving her, but you could see it every day from thereon. For him, it was truly love at first sight. He was so taken with her.” Ledger and Williams went on to have a daughter together, but they split up in 2007.

Ledger wasn’t up for jokes about Brokeback Mountain’s gay love story. In a 2019 interview with Today, Gyllenhaal explained, “He would never joke. Someone wanted to make a joke about the story or whatever, he was like, ‘No. This is about love.’ Like, that’s it, man. Like, no.”

And yes, the rumor is true. Ledger refused to present the 2007 Oscars because he thought homophobic jokes might be involved. In 2020 Gyllenhaal revealed to Another Man magazine, “I remember they wanted to do an opening for the Academy Awards that year that was sort of joking about it. And Heath refused.”

Brokeback Mountain was a big moment for many people. In 2018, for instance, the Focus Features website posted an interview with writer and journalist Dave Cullen, who said, “Watching Brokeback Mountain, I was thinking, ‘This is us too. This is me.’ I was just as deprived because I was just as scared as Jack and Ennis.”