Jean-Marc Vallée balks a little when the Straight describes his elliptical approach to editing—as seen in the new film Demolition, opening Friday (April 8)—as a kind of “style”.

“My intention with the DP [director of photography] and the crew is to put style away,” says the Québécois director, calling from his home in Los Angeles. “We’re not aiming for style; we’re aiming for truth, authenticity, emotion. We’re shooting handheld, with available light. I know it creates a style, but we’re not trying to have some fancy shots and special colours and special dollies and special editing. It’s always at the service of the characters and the stories.”

Fair enough. Anyone familiar with his filmography recognizes Vallée as an actor’s director, albeit one with a strong voice of his own. Demolition, the tale of a man whose grief over the death of his wife takes a somewhat unpredictable form—he starts to obsessively dismantle things, including his high-end New York home—will almost certainly be remembered for a key sequence in which Jake Gyllenhaal dances obliviously through Manhattan to the tune of Free’s “Mr. Big”. As with his previous Hollywood films, Dallas Buyer’s Club and Wild, Vallée’s classic-rock sensibility, at the very least, is unavoidable.

“Free is one of my favourite bands,” he eagerly admits. “I used one of their tracks, ‘Be My Friend’, in Wild. It’s been a while that I wanted to use ‘Mr. Big’. I tried in Café de Flore and then Dallas. But I use music to define characters. They’re playing the music, so it’s not just some director trying to show off with the track.”

To that end, when Vallée discovered that actor Judah Lewis could also hold his own on a drum kit, it gave him the key to a character who was very different on the pages of Bryan Sipe’s screenplay. Lewis costars as an angry teen with his own debilitating hang-ups, and an obsession with the ’60s, once Vallée was through with him.

“This kid is such a rock star,” he says. “He reminded me of a young Brian Jones. I called our costume designer: ‘Why don’t we make him a young Brian Jones look-alike?’ We used a lot of references from Brian Jones’s wardrobe.” Vallée then added some interior detail, if you will, with a soundtrack including Eric Burdon, Chocolate Watch Band, and that aforementioned Free number—which “contaminates”, in the director’s words, the emotionally paralyzed psyche of the film’s lead. It’s actually around this jubilant, tension-breaking point in the film that we decide Gyllenhaal isn’t simply playing a detestable Wall Street type with borderline personality disorder.

“We’re under the impression that he’s an asshole, so I cut the first 30 minutes like it was an action film,” Vallée explains. “Every three, four, five seconds, there’s a new shot. Then you don’t have time to judge, or to think. After 30 minutes I stopped doing that, and then, whoops, it goes back to my normal rhythm and what I like to do, which is to let the film breathe and see how great these actors are and how good the storytelling is.”

For all you blooming filmmakers out there, that’s some pretty good technical kung-fu from one of the more interesting mainstream directors out there at the moment. Just don’t call it style.