STACK #126 Apr 2016

1

2

3 4

with DAN GILROY

Where did you first get this idea? DAN GILROY: A number of years ago I was very interested in a crime photographer from the 1930s and ‘40s named Weegee (the pseudonym for Ascher Fellig). He’s actually become collectible among people who collect photography. He was the first guy to put a police scanner in his car, in New York City. This was like 1940. He would drive around and get to crime scenes before anyone. He was a wonderful photographer, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do a period film, and so I put the idea aside and I moved to Los Angeles. A few years ago I heard about these people called ‘night- crawlers’ who drive around Los Angeles at night at 100 mph, with these scanners going. As a screenwriter, I thought, ‘That’s a really interesting world,’ but I didn’t exactly know what to do with it. It was part of an idea. For me, ideas come piecemeal; they don’t come fully formed. That was a part of the idea, and I didn’t know what to do with until I thought of the character to plug into it, which was Lou. Once that character plugged into the world, it was like two parts of an atom that fit together, and suddenly it just made total sense to me, and I knew what I wanted to do with the world and the character. Did you meet some of the real night- crawlers? Yes, Jake [Gyllenhaal] and I and Robert Elswit, our DP, went out a couple of nights with a guy named Howard Raishbrook, who was our technical advisor, and it was bloodcurdling. The first call we went to was a horrific car crash, in which three girls had been ejected from a car after hitting a wall head on. I’ve got to be honest: I don’t think I’ll ever get that image out of my head. I think Jake and Robert and I were rather stunned, watching it, but the gentleman who filmed it very professionally got out of the car, shot the footage, edited the footage within five minutes, downloaded it, and sold it to four television stations. Now, the gentleman who does this, I don’t judge him, and actually he’s become a friend of mine. He and the other people who do this very much see themselves as providing a service, and they legitimately are providing a service. In their minds, the stories that they’re filming become the lead stories on local Los Angeles news, so if there’s a demand to watch this, who am I to judge them? Or to say what they’re doing is wrong? Obviously Lou’s character crosses the line at certain points, and drifts into a world that’s amoral, but I never wanted to portray them or the news media or even Lou’s character in that way. I never wanted to put a moral label on it and say, ‘This is wrong.’ I think once a filmmaker

Has your own view on news changed during the shooting? No. My view before I started the film and my view now is the same. I used to be a journalist. I used to work for Variety , a number of years ago, so I’m interested in journalism, but I’m aware that in the United States, a number of decades ago, networks decided that news departments had to make a profit, and historically they did not have to make a profit. I feel that once news departments are given the task of making a profit, news becomes entertainment, and I think we all lose something enormously important when that happened because rather than getting in-depth stories that educate us and inform us, we get narratives built to sell a product. The narrative in Los Angeles, and I believe the narrative you’ll find in most local TV news, and Michael Moore touched on this in Bowling for Columbine , is a narrative of fear. It’s a very simple equation: if you’re not watching the station you’re in peril, because there are things outside that could kill you and your family, and if you don’t watch this, through the commercials, you’re not going to know about it. It’s a very powerful formula, and it’s very effective. That’s what drives the whole equation. What should change? It is such a big problem that there is no solution to it that I can really see. To be honest, I would not want to be the person to put any moral barrier to what could be shown. My only hope is that we should be self-aware. As an example, when you drive down a freeway in Los Angeles and encounter a traffic jam, and you finally

applies immorality to something, it stops the viewers from being able to make a decision for themselves. My morality might be very different from yours, and what I find important might be different from what your priorities are. We wanted to create as realistic a portrayal as possible of this little niche market and the Los Angeles media world, and let people decide for themselves who the villain is and what the issues are. It comes from us because statistically, as a race, humans seem to like to watch things that are graphic and gory. It probably goes back to Neanderthals watching a lion kill a gazelle, and saying, ‘Oh, there’s a bloody thing going on over there, that’s interesting.’ We seem to respond to watching violence. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of people do. Look at the dilemma that Rene [Russo]’s character is in as a news director. Her ratings are based on what she shows, and the more blood you show, the more ratings you’re going to get. I think my biggest hope, at the end of the film, is that people might say, ‘I am one of those people who watches those things on TV. That doesn’t make me a bad person, but what does that say about me? Why am strangely connected with Lou? Why do I find what he does interesting, and why am I not walking out of the theatre at this point? Because what he’s doing is so reprehensible. We really don’t judge him, and in fact, we go out of her way to celebrate what he does, or to legitimise what he does. Where does the demand for this coverage come from?

www.stack.net.au