Nightcrawler: an interview with Jake Gyllenhaal and Dan Gilroy

The media doesn’t get a great press in the movies: Kirk Douglas’s Chuck Tatum in Ace In The Hole, Burt Lancaster’s JJ Hunsecker in The Sweet Smell Of Success or Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen in Network. Adding to this long and nefarious roll call of rogues we now have Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom, the focus of Dan Gilroy’s superb city-set thriller Nightcrawler. Sporting greasy locks, a skinny frame and piercing killer eyes, Bloom is a cold, calculating chancer who stumbles on the world of independent news-gathering, invests in a HandiCam and starts chasing the emergency services around LA to cover all the mayhem and murder that happens there after dark. He’s not there to help. Or as Bloom puts it himself, “If you see me, you're having the worst day of your life.”

Directed by Dan Gilroy, brother of the Bourne series’ Tony, Nightcrawler is fantastic celebration of the antihero that takes potshots at today’s media without ever preaching or patronising. And as its centre is a towering performance by Gyllenhaal, playing a man who not only knows what he wants – he’s ready and ruthless enough to take it. Says Gilroy, “The true starting point for this story was that I was really interested in a crime photographer from the 40s in New York, a guy called Weegee. Really interesting guy; he was the first guy to put a police scanner in his car and drive around looking for crime scenes. I was fascinated by the intersection of art and crime, but I couldn't think of a way to do the story, so I put it aside. Then I moved to Los Angeles a number of years ago, and I heard about these people who I guess would be considered the modern equivalent of Weegee. It was just a much more kinetic, cinematic concept – people driving round at 100mph with a dozen police scanners going. At the same time I was coming up with the character of Lou Bloom over time, and plugging him into that story. It was like an atom coming together – it suddenly made sense.”

Gyllenhaal – who, when we meet at the Toronto Film Festival, has clearly regained the 20lb he shed for the part – bats away suggestions that Bloom is simply a psychopath. “To me,” he says, “what was more interesting was thinking about the character as an artist. Someone who is trying to find his way, and who finds it in the seediest but most random way. Fate hands him an opportunity and he just starts to go with it. It's the birth of an artist, in my opinion, the birth of a cinematographer. Initially I read a number of books about sociopathy and then afterwards I dropped it. Dan and I never talked about anything like that again. It wasn't the right way to go. You can't walk into a scene wondering, 'How evil is this person? How morally abhorrent is this person.' I had to think about the beautiful interactions that Lou would have with these very desperate people, and how much fun it would be for him to use them, to get to where he wants to go.”

Key to Bloom’s power is the look that the actor came up with for him, his hollow cheeks perfectly accentuating that baleful, 100-watt stare. “The idea was that he would be thin and that he would feel hungry,” says the actor. “Dan and I, when we first met, we discussed that. We were talking about Los Angeles, and having grown up there I know that there's this other world that's going on all the time, in the wilderness. Unlike a lot of major metropolises it's surrounded by desert, and there are those wild animals – particularly coyotes – that are lurking around in the shadows. And occasionally you see them, walking down the street, and you think, 'What the fuck is this coyote doing here?' Dan and I talked about that, and I certain point I said, 'Lou is a coyote,' and Dan was like, 'Yessss!' I mean, when you see one of these coyotes they're skinny and they just stare at you like they're going to eat you. Their techniques are all about preying on the desperate.”

As he did on End Of Watch, Gyllenhaal took his research out on the streets. “We did go out with a couple of guys that do this kind of work in Los Angeles,” he says. “We spent a number of nights going around the city, going to crime scenes and accident scenes, sitting round in empty parking lots for hours and hours listening to police radio, hearing something and then going chasing after it. Watching them filming it, editing it, selling it. It was hugely helpful. I mean, these guys get to know the police department, the fire department, who to talk to and how to deal with them, so I really got to know the ins and outs of it.”

Although Gyllenhaal is the focus of the film’s advance buzz, credit should also be given to Gilroy for a screenplay that never sugar-coats or moralises about its subject. “I approached it as a success story,” he says. “The story starts with a guy who's looking for work at the beginning of the film and has a successful business by the end. You're watching the creation of a success. Now, he's also a monster, but you're watching as this thing gets created.”

For Gyllenhaal, Lou Bloom’s appetite was not a stretch to find. “Lou's idea of success is something I can empathise with,” he muses. “The idea of money, or fame, or that unknown thing that you feel compelled to go after. I think that's true of my generation, the world I grew up in, in America, in capitalism – it's inherent in all these things. It's in your psyche. It's cultural. And when I was younger, all those things were very important to me. But I would say that, now, my idea of success is incredibly different from Lou's. That has shifted for me, which has allowed to me comment on those things. But I love the idea that if you don't have empathy, you can take all society's ideals and do the things that Lou does. And there are people that do do that. Our world is a very dangerous place. I'm not a cynic – I don't think it's not beautiful, but the more I spend time meeting people who do real, tough jobs – that's definitely how I feel.”

• A version of this article featured in a past issue of Empire magazine…