“The story is urban crime creeping into the suburbs. That’s the story,” says adamantly Nina Romina — the news director at KWLA — in the riveting “Nightcrawler” (2014). More than 40 years ago the film “Network” directed by Sidney Lumet warned us TV networks would eventually do anything for ratings and it would debase our society – we seemed to have not heeded to its caution. Since its release, the equally dark humored “Nightcrawler” seems as prophetic and timely as its early influence – denouncing the media’s emphasis on urban chaos and their pandering to the “if it bleeds, it leads” credo and its unsubtle message to white America.
Writer/director Dan Gilroy sets his story in the real Los Angeles nocturnal subculture of freelance stringers – nightcrawlers – who arm themselves with cameras and hunt for crashes, fires, murder and other mayhem to sell their footage to local news. Lou Bloom – who is a cinematic descendant of Travis Bickle – is a young street hustler – a thief – who up until now has been unsuccessful in getting ahead. He finds a pathway when he meets a cameraman at the scene of an accident voyeuristically capturing the action. Lou sees an opportunity and a calling. He steals a bike and resells it for a camera and a police scanner. Soon enough, he’s capturing footage of a dying victim and selling it to Nina who tells him to get better equipment and bring her more. “The best and clearest way that I can phrase it to you, Lou, to capture the spirit of what we air, is think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut,” she sanguinely describes. We will experience Lou’s vertiginous ascent to the TV news world while he holds a mirror to us the audience. “I like to say that if you’re seeing me, you’re having the worst day of your life,” he says.
Lou is a sociopath and a loner. He communicates in sentences that are taken from motivational courses. “I’m a very quick learner!” he exclaims. What makes him compelling is that he’s goal-oriented. No matter how vile or ruthless his actions may be, we root for him because of his determination to seek and climb and his need to connect. It’s a good thing – because he takes us down some violent, seedy, fast-paced and morally complicated streets. Lou finds a counterpart in Nina – the hard-bitten – too-much make-up – 50 year old TV veteran who knows a lot about survival skills. Gilroy builds a satire that is also a psychological character study as well as action-packed thriller.
Gilroy shows you a big moon looming above Los Angeles as the film starts. The city is glittering below like an exotic paradise. Soon it will cut to a hungry wolf on a TV screen. That juxtaposition is not random. Visually, he shows a Los Angeles like we’d never seen before. With cinematographer Robert Elswit, they show us a city pulsating with an untamed energy. Using wide angles and a vivid color scheme they give us a landscape that comes across as a wilderness. In one key scene, in which Lou films a shooting at a fancy mansion – he’s surrounded by lush foliage – as if he were in a jungle. Physically, Gyllenhaal carries on with the metaphor. He lost 30 pounds and his eyes are big with darkness under them. His movement is predator-like. Notices how he holds things. When we first see Lou, he’s driving a blue Toyota Tercel and his apartment is bathed in blue tones. Things are recessive. Eventually, Lou will get a red Challenger and everything will shift into high gear. The moment will be marked by a showstopper of a shot where the car is moving at a fast speed – the camera hovering above it – it will move towards the back capturing the license plate and then cruise along its side. It will then speed up and show the front of the car – all in one single take – articulating the metamorphosis of Lou.
Jake Gyllenhaal is spellbinding and almost unrecognizable in this part. We feel as if there’s a bit of his soul missing – something that I’ve seen a few actors do. Anthony Perkins and Anthony Hopkins come to mind. Gilroy wrote the part of Nina for his wife Renee Russo, and she scorches. Riz Ahmed is so memorable as the hapless homeless kid who agrees to be Lou’s apprentice.
Lou: “You didn’t soften the truth or dilute it. I think being clear with your objectives is more important than trying to present your ideas in a non- confrontational manner.”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Netflix and to rent on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Microsoft, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, Apple TV, FandangoNOW, Redbox, DIRECTV and AMC Theatre on Demand.
Written by Dan Gilroy
Directed by Dan Gilroy
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed and Bill Paxton
117 minutes
Gilroy on the Character of Lou
I had heard about the nightcrawling world, and I’m very aware that there are tens of millions of young people around the world who are facing bleak employment prospects. Italy has 45% unemployment under 30 —it’s insane. So [I was exploring] idea of a desperate younger person looking for work. I stared to think about the character, and that he didn’t have to be classically heroic. He could be an anti-hero. I stared to think of the anti-hero; I think you have to be careful and aware that you don’t want it to be a reductive study of psycho-babble. You are looking for something more. You want the audience to connect in a way that goes beyond a just sort of a pathological study. The idea of a character who had an implied back story of abuse and abandonments; I pictured him alone as a child, and all he had was his computer and he was going on his computer a lot surfing —this is the back story. And in his desperate loneliness and probably raging insanity, the precepts of capitalism became a religion to him. If you only had [one] direction to climb, which is up, then to have a goal would give sanity. I imagine he started to scour the internet for self-help maxims and aphorisms, and Forbes 500 corporate-HR manual speak. I believe he’s an uber-capitalist, and capitalism is a religion, it’s a religion that gives him sanity and which ultimately drives him insane and pushes him over the edge. It’s a mindless pursuit of a goal that can never be achieved. That ultimately leaves only a hunger, which goes back to the coyote —this perpetual hunger that can never be satiated. (indiewire.com)
We never wanted to cast moral judgment on Lou. We never wanted to cast moral judgement on journalism. We wanted to portray things as accurately as possible and let people decide. The stories that Howard shoots, and that Lou shoots in our film, these are stories that lead the news in Los Angeles. The Raishbrooks don’t make the rules, the Raishbrooks are supplying a need. They’re trying to remain neutral, they do a very professional job and they do supply a service, so I see them as a cog in a much larger machine. At the end of the film I hope people might go, well wait a minute, I watch this stuff on TV. I am one of those people that, given a choice between watching an in depth documentary about the national budget or watching a car chase, I’ll probably watch the car chase. What does that say about me? I’m involving people in the equation rather than pointing fingers. (theguardian.com)
Jake Gyllenhaal on Preparing for the Role of Lou
This character was beautifully written. The dialogue is pretty extraordinary. Just even the style of the script was an amazing read. I found it satirical. The irony is that I think it’s incredibly funny. There aren’t many movies that are subversively communicating an idea through a character. I think we all have a part of ourselves who is a little bit like Lou. We all (should) feel a little complicit in creating Lou because he’s a product of our need to consume…There’s a point when you have unimportant information being important and important information being unimportant—when you can go on the home page of a major news site and have a story about the State of the Union address alongside videos of a cat surviving a 40-foot fall. Journalists and the media are giving the audience what they want. When I look at someone like Lou, or local news, I say, “Well, they’re enabled by the person who’s buying this footage, and then those people who are buying footage are enabled by us.” There was this really interesting moment when we were shooting where one of our grips got into a car accident. And she was fine, but she came to the set a few days later and she said, “I was being pulled out on a stretcher and there were stringers videotaping me. In one moment I was feeling my life flash before my eyes, and then somebody was videotaping it.”…A lot of choices I made were from discussion—the look of the character, and, internally, my relationship with Dan and us basically figuring out every little detail of who this guy was right off the page. The brilliance of great writing is that it can obviously be interpreted many different ways. And we struggled with that throughout the shooting, where I would do a take and I was really big, and then I would try and do a take that was a little bit more cunning and a little sharper. In fact, people asked, “Where’d that mirror scene come from?” And I’d say, “Well, we were doing that to every piece of dialogue and soliloquy. It’s just not all over the place.” We had to modulate everywhere, because that was always the difficulty for us. And it’s really a creation of me and Dan and, ultimately, Johnny Gilroy, who edited the movie…I always thought Lou was a coyote. He looked like that. And so, coyotes are starving, in a way. Ambition is a huge part of this film, and how it’s preached as a very good thing—which I think it is. But it can be a very dangerous thing. That hunger—that literal and figurative hunger—was a state that was really important for me to be in. It just drove the scenes. It gave me an opportunity to have a firm foundation. When anybody came to me in a scene and tried to challenge me, I knew what I was doing and how hungry I was. I mean, again, literally and figuratively. And I would drive through them. And that’s Lou. He preys on vulnerable people. But at the same time, no matter what, he knows where he’s going because he needs to get that food. (deadline.com)
About Writer and Director Dan Gilroy
Dan Gilroy was born in Santa Monica, CA on June 24, 1989. Gilroy is a film director and screenwriter. The start of his career began when he co-wrote “Freejack” in 1992. “Two for the Money,” which starred Al Pacino, was written by Gilroy in 2005. In 2012, “The Bourne Legacy” was written by Gilroy along with his brother Tony Gilroy. The movie was a family creative project, which also included Gilroy’s twin brother John Gilroy as the editor. In 2014, Gilroy began his career as a director with the film “Nightcralwer,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal. “Nightcrawler” earned a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the 87th Academy Awards. The film won the award for Best Screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards. In 2017, Gilroy co-wrote “Kong: Skull Island.” He also co-wrote and directed “Roman J Israel,” which stars Denzel Washington. (bookingagentinfo.com) Gilroy’s latest film is “Velvet Buzzsaw” which he wrote and directed and was released in 2019.