How Brokeback Mountain Caught Hollywood's Attention
Screenwriter Diana Ossana read Annie Proulx's 1997 short story of the same name in The New Yorker and asked frequent collaborator Larry McMurtry if he'd be interested in turning it into a movie with her.
They went to Proulx, who told them to "have at it," Ossana recalled to Out magazine in 2015, after which they 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," she said. "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."
Producer and Focus Features cofounder James Schamus picked up their option in 2001 and Ossana asked him to show it to Ang Lee. The director loved it, but opted to make Hulk his next film instead.
"The script for Brokeback Mountain had been around for a number of years, as is often the case with really interesting films," Jake Gyllanhaal told Out. '"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."
"I knew it would be a difficult film to make," he noted, "and something that would put people off, but I didn't know how difficult it would be to get made."
All the Actors Who Turned Down Brokeback Mountain
"I was working on it, and I felt like we needed a really strong cast, like a famous cast," Van Sant told Indiewire in 2018. "That wasn’t working out. I asked the usual suspects: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Ryan Phillippe. They all said no."
In hindsight, he wasn't sure why he was so stuck on casting big stars, concluding he was "not ready" to helm the movie at the time.
"There was something off with myself, I guess," he said, "whatever was going on.”
Mark Wahlberg later had a meeting with Lee, but told WENN in 2007, per the Advocate, that he got "a little creeped out" by the 15 pages of the script that he read.
"I told Ang Lee, 'I like you, you're a talented guy, if you want to talk about it more...'" he recalled. "Thankfully, he didn't...I didn't rush to see Brokeback, it's just not my deal... Obviously, it was done in taste—look how it was received."
Brokeback Mountain Revived Ang Lee
After Hulk flopped, Lee reconsidered and Brokeback "nurtured me back to filmmaking and as a person," the Taiwanese director told Out. "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."
How Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal Were Cast in Brokeback Mountain
Ossana's daughter suggested Heath Ledger for the role of personally tortured cowboy Ennis Del Mar "early in 2003," the screenwriter recalled to Out, and a quick dive into the Australian heartthrob's films convinced McMurtry. But, she added, the studio "didn't really take it seriously."
After another actor dropped out, Ossana continued, Ledger read the script and said it "was the most beautiful script he'd ever read."
"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," Gyllenhaal recalled. He thought his meeting with the director was "somewhat awkward," but then he heard that Lee thought he and Ledger were a good match.
The Stars of Brokeback Mountain Were Unfazed by Controversy
While casting two heterosexual actors was considered a gamble more for the actors' careers than for the movie, Gyllenhaal said he had no qualms about playing Jack Twist.
"I didn't have any fear in the subject matter," he told E! News at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. "I might be naive, but I really feel that a love story can only be told by being retold in a new type of way."
Anne Hathaway, who played Jack's wife Lureen, also didn't bat an eye.
"I never cared what anyone else thought, to be perfectly honest," she told E! at the film's press junket. "I've grown up, literally—and I'm not joking—with gay men in my life since the day I was born, so there's nothing strange about it to me and I never stopped to think about the people it might be strange for because, from my perspective, it's time for them to catch up."
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal Already Knew Each Other
The costars "sort of became friends" several years beforehand after they both lost out on the lead in 2001's Moulin Rouge! to Ewan McGregor, bonding over, as Gyllenhaal recalled to GQ Australia in 2018, their "mutual frustration."
"When Brokeback Mountain came out and it got all the attention it did, I remember, a few months later," the actor continued, "Heath called me and he was like, ‘Hey mate, I got some news for you.' I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Baz just offered me his next movie. I just wanted you to know, I f--king turned it down!’"
He added, "So that was how much Heath loved me, you know. That was how I met him.”
It Was Love at First Sight for Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams
Changing hearts and minds isn't the film's only legacy. While playing an increasingly unhappy married couple, Ledger and Williams clicked and welcomed daughter Matilda Ledger on Oct. 28, 2005.
Shooting the scene where Alma and Ennis are sledding, Michelle fell off and twisted her knee and had to go to the hospital.
"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 told Out magazine in 2015. "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."
Anne Hathaway Was Recruited for Michelle Williams' Part
The script was originally sent to Hathaway to gauge her interest in playing Alma. And while she was "blown away," she recalled to Out, "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."
Anne Hathaway's 10-Gallon Hair
Hathaway was shooting the coronation scene in Princess Diaries 2 when she went to audition, " so I was dressed in a ball gown, wearing this big hairpiece that was way over the top, but also worked for a rodeo queen, so it was fine," the actress said. "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."
And, she added, "I left that room knowing that I had closed it, locked it, and welded it shut. I just knew it was mine."
The production also stuck with the princess look, styling Hathaway in notoriously poofy wigs.
Anne Hathway Fibbed About Knowing How to Ride a Horse
"We went to a sort of boot camp, where we'd all hang out and learn to ride," Gyllenhaal told Out. "Heath already knew how to ride really well, but we'd ride and hang out on the ranch outside of Los Angeles."
Hathaway, meanwhile, had never even been on a horse, but she told Lee that she knew how to ride.
Eventually, she explained, "I got really, really, really good. But I was given a horse on set without being told it was a verbal command horse, so I couldn't figure out how to make it ride. And 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."
Jake Gyllenhaal Was More Likely to Quit the Script
Gyllenhaal went off-script filming the scene where Jack and Ennis discuss the latter's childhood, Lee recalled, and Ledger wasn't having it.
"Heath just got really upset—really upset, like his whole progress was disrupted," Lee told Out. "Jake is more of an improv actor—try this, try that—but Heath's preparation was really deep. He kept his teeth clenched and his face scrunched up for about two months—he didn't let go."
Heath Ledger May Have Broken His Hand
Filming the scene where Ennis steps into an alley, doubled over by the pain of heartbreak after Jack drives off, "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 told Out. "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."
Kate Mara Felt a Kinship With Heath Ledger
Kate Mara, who was 22 when she played Ennis and Alma's teenage daughter, remembered Ledger taking her "under his wing" despite being only four years older than she was.
"It's so beautiful," Mara said on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen in 2020. "I was auditioning just to play that age because I think my character is 19 at that point. But then Ang Lee decided that he would just use me to play—I think she's like 14 or something early on—so he added a couple of those scenes as well."
"I was like, ‘This is never going to work,'" she recalled. "But Heath was so amazing and he made it work."
Heath Ledger Approached Jake Gyllenhaal Kiss Like Any Other Love Scene
"Unlike my character, I am a huge fan of love," Ledger told E! when the movie came out, shrugging off the notion of having to prepare for intimate scenes with Gyllenhaal any differently than if they were with a woman. "I'm in love with love and I've investigated love. I'm very expressive. I know how to feel love, whether it's love that's trapped and unable to be expressed, I have a thorough understanding of that. And if it's kissing someone, I know how to kiss someone, I know how to make love to someone. You just kind of [do] the same thing but it's with a different person. It's just with a man. But you kind of know how to kiss someone, you just do it."
Heath Ledger Didn't Want to Be In On the Joke
While there are some light-hearted moments, Brokeback Mountain is a melancholy film with a tragic ending that serves as an indictment of society's worst impulses. And yet the movie was also the subject of a lot of jokes, "Brokeback" becoming a common reference to same-sex male relationships and "I wish I knew how to quit you" turning into a laugh line.
"One of the things I really remember about the process after the movie came out was Heath never wanting to make a joke," Gyllenhaal told Vanity Fair in 2022. "Even as I think, culturally, there were many jokes being made about the movie or poking fun at and things like that."
Ledger even refused to poke fun at the Oscars, where usually all the films are fair game.
“I remember they wanted to do an opening for the Academy Awards that year that was sort of joking about it,” Gyllenhaal told Another Man in 2020. “And Heath refused. I was sort of at the time, ‘Oh, okay... whatever.’ I’m always like: It’s all in good fun. And Heath said, ‘It’s not a joke to me—I don’t want to make any jokes about it.’”
How Heath Ledger Handled the Film's Most Tragic Scene
When Ennis visits Jack's parents after his death and discovers a token of Jack's devotion to him in his bedroom, 20 years of pent-up emotion pours forth.
And that wasn't an easy scene for Ledger to shoot.
"He got so overwhelmed by emotion that he ran out of the building into the dark," Ossana told Out. "I ran after him and asked if he was OK, and he said, 'I just need to be alone for a little bit.' And then he came back about 30 minutes later and did the scene again. Actors like that don't come along very often in one's lifetime.
Jake Gyllenhaal Couldn't Watch Brokeback Mountain After Heath Ledger's Death
Gyllenhaal told Out that, among the many sad aspects of the story, "one of the saddest things is that I won't be able to exchange ideas creatively with Heath again, because that was one of the most beautiful things to come out of that."
Reiterating he still couldn't watch the film in 2020, 12 years after Ledger's death from an accidental prescription drug overdose, he told Another Man, "There are things you’re chosen for—a quality, an essence—and Ang did that. And it’s still a mystery to me. And something that Heath and I shared: that it was a mystery to us at the time.”
Michelle Williams Knew They Were Making Something Special
"People were so open about it," Williams said on Watch What Happens Live in April 2025, asked if she knew what a profound impact the film would have. "I remember doing the junket, you don't really get a lot of opportunities to see grown men cry. And that was the moment I think we all knew that it was going to be special to people."