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Movies & TV

A Q&A with Dan Gilroy, writer/director of Nightcrawler

Dan Gilroy has done a lot of work as a screenwriter, not all of it especially memorable. (His credits include Freejack, Chasers, Two For The Money and The Bourne Legacy.) So when it came to making his directorial debut, he was careful to try to make something that would stick with people. The result is Nightcrawler, a moody thriller opening this week starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a Los Angeles tabloid videographer who trolls the city for footage of car crashes and violent crime – and discovers that his total lack of humanity makes him great at his job. It does indeed stick. Nightcrawler became one of the breakout hits of TIFF and one of this fall’s most-anticipated releases. I sat down with Gilroy a few hours before the world premiere.

See Listings.

What was the starting point for the project?

I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I was very interested in the crime photographer Weegee. He lived in New York City and was the first person to put a police scanner in his car and drive around to crime scenes. But I couldn’t figure out a way to tell that story – it’s a period story, and it had already been done with Joe Pesci [in 1992 as The Public Eye].

Then I moved to Los Angeles a number of years ago and heard about these nightcrawlers. Shortly after that I came up with the character of Lou Bloom and I suddenly saw a way to plug the two together so that it had relevance to me.

Was it the compulsion that connected them for you?

I wanted to update the Weegee story. They were driving around Los Angeles at a hundred miles an hour [and] they didn’t have cameras like Weegee had. They had video cameras. And then cinematically we were looking at screens within screens – like when [Lou] enters the crime scene and we’re focusing more on his viewfinder than the wider shot. That was interesting cinematically.

The movie’s vision of Los Angeles isn’t what we usually see. It’s utterly unglamorous. Lou isn’t interested in celebrities and never goes anywhere near a red carpet or a fancy hotel. He’s all about crime and blood.

Los Angeles is usually portrayed as a place of social decay and I very much see it more as a place of struggle and survival. There’s just a wild, untamed spirit. It’s a place of mountains and deserts and coyotes and oceans and earthquakes. So Robert Elswit, the wonderful director of photography, and I were trying to show an L.A. that did not have a man-made component. We were much more interested in a sort of natural beauty.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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