STACK #126 Apr 2016

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with DAN GILROY

get to what happened, you suddenly realise that there’s five dead people in a crash on the other lane, and everybody is slowing down to look at what’s going on, I tell myself, ‘Don’t look. Don’t become part of the problem.’ Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don’t. I would hope that when people watch the movie, they think, and they become a little self-aware – ‘why do I watch this? Not that I shouldn’t watch it or should watch it’ – but just to be aware of the world that we live in is, I think, my biggest hope. Do you thinkTV news is really pushing boundaries in the way that Rene’s character does? I’ll give you a very clear example. In Los Angeles, as you know, it’s the car chase capital of the world. In local news, there’s a six second delay, because people sometimes get shot, and theoretically there’s an ethic in local TV news that they’re not going to show that. Well, lo and behold, in the last few years, twice, the delay hasn’t worked, and so you’re watching someone get executed on TV. You watch that and you start to go, ‘Well somebody’s going to come up with the idea of, ‘What the hell do we need a delay for? Because the ratings are going through the roof when we show the execution.’ With the FCC, the fines are not so substantial that you wouldn’t make that decision. Should they raise the fines? I’m so loath to propose a solution. I really only want to try to present an accurate portrayal of what’s going on. I have my own opinion of what’s going on but people should study it. People should talk about it and think about it. Do you see this as relating to the recent ISIS executions, and the availability of those videos? Absolutely. I draw the line there, for myself. I can’t watch that. I do not want to have that in my head. There’s certain things that I just can’t watch, like that crash, I still can’t forget that night. But yeah, there are many people who are very much drawn to that. People say, ‘Violent films instil violence in society.’ I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if watching these images makes people more desensitised or not – I’m not sure. I don’t think, as a society, it is healthy for us to be consuming these clips and images at the level we’re consuming it, but it’s like fast food. I hate to be pontificating here, but you could look at the people who purvey fast food and say, ‘These are criminals; they’re making all of us unhealthy,’ but we want to eat fast food, so who’s the villain?

Is Nightcrawler commenting on the lack of privacy? Well it’s not dissimilar to TMZ and what the paparazzi do. What Lou does is really the news version of what paparazzi do for entertainment, and I think the line gets very blurred in there. With that kind of coverage people can get hurt. People can get killed, and then you film it. Lou seems to represent millions of unemployed young people, who are increasingly asked to go further and further to prove their value. You’ve absolutely nailed the genesis of the character. I’m very aware that there are tens of millions of young people around the world who are unemployed, whether it’s globalisation or corporatisation, or whatever you want to call it. Young people just have very little hope of meaningful careers. It’s internships that don’t pan out, it’s no health insurance, and I’m very aware of that. I started with Lou as a character who desperately wanted work, and he gives a speech to the salvage yard owner early on, and in the self-help world of the unemployed, that’s called an ‘elevator speech’. The reason it’s called that is, some day you may find yourself in an elevator with someone who can give you a job, so you should be able to sell yourself in 30 seconds. Lou wanted the salvage yard job. That would have been a great job for him. He’s not out to hurt people. He’s just a desperate young man, and there are many desperate young people out there who are being forced, I think, to make decisions and take jobs that they normally wouldn’t.

you criticising a world in which Lou can be rewarded for this kind of work? You could look at it as a criticism, but I actually tried to make an objective portrayal of what I believe to be true. I feel that if you came back at the end of ten years, Lou would be the owner of a major corporation. I believe that many people who rise to the head of multinational corporations make decisions that are far worse than anything that Lou does, and Lou will be well equipped to survive in that world. When you can take the pensions away from 40,000 people, and then go and buy a 400-foot yacht that, to me, is far more criminal than anything that Lou does. Lou will be well served, from his experience night-crawling, in the corporate boardroom, and he will thrive. For better or for worse – and I guess you could call it criticism – but I tried to portray what I believe to be true. How did you create the specific language that Lou uses? Once I came up with the idea that he was socially maladjusted – probably somewhere on the spectrum of Asperger’s or autism, if you were going to diagnose him – and abandoned, and that he didn’t have any emotional support, I thought that the internet was really his family, and so everything he says is off the internet. It’s all things he’s memorised and recites back when he thinks it’s appropriate, but it often isn’t. Everything comes out just a couple of degrees wrong, which is ultimately where the humour comes from, because half the stuff he says is absurd. There’s one line in there at the end, when Rick is demanding more money, and it’s all getting very tense. Rick uses a curse word, he says ‘f***’,

In many ways, this is a success story. Are

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