‘Nightcrawler’ Director Dan Gilroy On Jake Gyllenhaal’s Extreme Weight Loss, And Sensationalism In The News
"Jake was literally hungry; in every scene he's starving, because he's not eating enough food. He's like a wild animal."
In Dan Gilroy’s superb thriller Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal plays an entrepreneurial criminal named Lou Bloom: the kind of guy who will steal before reciting a dead-eyed monologue asking for a job.
His night-owl tendencies bring him into the orbit of “nightcrawlers” — the unseen camera-lugging people on the streets of Los Angeles, who film crash sights and murder scenes in the dead of night in order to sell the footage to local news networks. Before long, Lou’s desire for both success and existential confirmation sees him staging crime scenes, and becoming entangled in a murder case that will make or break his career and his mind.
I spoke to the debut director only a few hours after he discovered Nightcrawler was nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. The “indie spirits” unofficially kick of the months-long cycle of awards season, in which filmmakers and publicists jostle for attention amidst a sea of important, acclaimed films, each hoping for their shot at the gold. “It’s a nice way to start the day. I was very pleased with that, it was unexpected.”
Despite the pressure to “go to as many media appearances as possible”, Gilroy seems excited to talk about Nightcrawler to anybody who’ll listen. “If there’s a cheat sheet [for awards season], I’d like to see it. Nobody’s given it to me,” he says, of the seemingly endless circuit of screenings, parties, and ceremonies, that will culminate in February’s Academy Awards. “I think it could drive you crazy if you got too invested.” For him, the silver lining of the season is potential recognition for his star Jake Gyllenhaal, and his collaborators. “These independent spirit awards today were utterly out of the blue, and I really do feel like a winner already. I would love to see Jake and other people I worked with get awards. I really would. That would mean a tremendous amount to me.”
Gyllenhaal’s Physical Transformation
Jake Gyllenhaal was also nominated, for a transformative performance that’s being touted for a potential — and much-deserved — Oscar nod. Gyllenhaal undertook a rapid weight-loss regime to play Lou Bloom: a man on the fringes of society, who’s obsessively determined to become somebody of worth.
The actor and filmmaker met in Atlanta, Georgia, where Gyllenhaal was filming Prisoners (2013) with Hugh Jackman. “Jake read the script … and we had a very long dinner where obviously were just very creatively in tune,” Gilroy says. After months of preparations and rehearsals — three months out from their 27-day shoot – the actor suggested losing weight for the role. “That was Jake’s idea.”
While Gyllenhaal may not go to Christian Bale lengths, his muscle and weight loss lends the character – and, in a way, the film — a lurid kind of sliminess. “He had this idea of the character being a coyote, a nocturnal animal that comes down out of the hills at night to feed,” Gilroy says. “I didn’t know how much weight he was gonna lose, but suddenly — like, two weeks before shooting — Jake has lost 27lbs [12.3kg]. It was this utter transformation.
“It gave the character a tremendously odd, powerful energy — because he’s hungry all of the time. Jake was literally hungry; in every scene Jake is starving, because he’s not eating enough food. He’s like a wild animal.”
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Family Ties
In Nightcrawler, Gilroy worked with three very familiar faces: his brothers Tony and John, and wife Rene Russo. Older brother Tony is best known for having written all of the films in the Bourne franchise – Dan took over writing duties on The Bourne Legacy (2012) – and directing George Clooney and Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton (2007). “Tony was the first person to come on board [in Nightcrawler], and it was a crucial piece of the puzzle … It gave everybody faith.” Dan’s twin brother John is the editor of the Gilroy clan, having worked on all of his brothers’ directorial efforts.
Working with Russo — Gilroy’s wife of 22 years — was easy as well, he says Surprisingly so considering the film’s standout sequence, in which Gyllenhaal and Russo’s characters go for a business dinner that becomes progressively more sexually predatory. “The key to that scene was really letting the camera run, and doing multiple takes while stepping back and allowing them to get lost in the scene.”
For the actress, the role is a comeback: After a run of ’90s smash hits including Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), Get Shorty (1995), Ransom (1996), and The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Russo didn’t work for six years, until landing the role of Frigga in Marvel’s Thor (2011) and Thor: The Dark World (2013). In Nightcrawler, Russo is fantastic, brimming with power and terror as a character who’s petrified that her age means she’s got one foot out the door. Better roles in better films than Yours, Mine and Ours (2005) ought to come her way.
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Despite living in Los Angeles for 20 years, it wasn’t until ten years ago the Gilroy came across this sub-culture of late-night violence scavengers. “Very few people, I think, are aware that these people go out at night and do this job. People go to sleep at 10pm [in Los Angeles]. At night time the streets are barren; nobody really knows what’s going on at night.”
It’s curious that Nightcrawler should come out in Australian cinemas just one week after David Cronenberg’s (inferior, in my opinion) Maps to the Stars (2014); the films share similarly bleak and cynical visions of Hollywood and the ugly, incestuous man-bites-dog world that so many people want to be a part of.
Of course, Nightcrawler speaks to the news world, too. Our conversation takes place less than 24 hours after the Ferguson grand jury decision that brought riots across the country, and we’re surrounded by round-the-clock coverage. While acknowledging the magnitude of this particular story, Gilroy criticises networks for more often neglecting important issues, like nuclear disarmament and geo-political unrest, as it threatens to become full-blown war.
“You can use Gone Girl as an example. Gone Girl is really based on a guy named Scott Peterson. Every once in a while you get these news stories here and abroad where a husband’s wife disappears, and ‘Did he do it?’ — and suddenly these stories dominate news cycles for weeks. And I feel like that that is very much to the exclusion of other news stories that add much more value and weight to our lives.”
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Nightcrawler is out now.
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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer from Melbourne who is currently based in New York City. He tweets from @glenndunks.