STACK #126 Apr 2016

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with DAN GILROY

and Lou says, ‘Do you know I’ve never once cursed in front of an employer?’ It makes no sense. It’s just absurd. He’s going back to some sort of respectable corporate behaviour that doesn’t have any bearing on what’s going on. He’s disconnected. What were your conversations with Jake Gyllenhaal like? Very intense and very deep. I flew to Atlanta when he was shooting Prisoners to discuss him doing the part. We had a dinner and we decided very early on that we were going to collaborate intensely, with a lot of rehearsal. I’m sort of a degenerate gambler and I just like taking risks. Jake is just utterly fearless and he wanted to try things. He respected the script, and not one word of the script got changed. He approached it like a play, so I was extraordinarily happy to work with him because he respected the work, and I wanted to respect his ability to come in and breathe life into it in a way that I was not capable of. As an example, the weight loss – that was Jake’s idea. How did he propose that to you? We were talking a lot about the symbol of the character, and we thought of a coyote. There’s never a fat coyote – they’re always perpetually lean. They’re just always hungry and they come down out of the hills at night to feed, so we thought of Lou as a nocturnal predator. Jake said, ‘Coyotes are always lean. I’m thinking of getting a coyote look.’ I said, ‘Great,’ but to be honest, as a filmmaker, with people you’re responsible for, it’s a scary proposition. It all makes sense now, but believe me,

when he lost 25 pounds and we started shooting dailies, it’s scary. You start looking at it going, ‘Oh my God, is this really what we’re going to go with?’ But it works perfectly. When you watch Prisoners , Jake created that persona, with the tattoos and the eye tick. That’s terrifying to a filmmaker. But you have to go, ‘That’s a really interesting idea. Let’s try that.’ Jake wants to try, and you get your best with Jake when you allow him to try. I think Jake and I got along so well because we were not afraid to try. There were moments when Jake would do something on set and even I wasn’t sure. I was going, ‘That’s probably too far out there.’ Then you’re in the editing room, going, ‘Dammit, man, that is definitely what you want to do.’ It was just a joy working with him. Every newscaster in our film is an actual newscaster. These are the stars of LA local news. Did any of them hesitate to participate? I asked them, ‘Have you read the script? Do you want to be involved in this?’ They all said, ‘Yeah!’ I think all of them were like, ‘That’s not our station – the other stations do that.’ Tell us about casting Rene Russo. I wrote the part for her because I always saw Nina as somebody who had a really tough exterior. Just like we were always trying to find the human side of Lou, I always wanted to find the human side of Nina. I never wanted people to just look at Nina and go, ‘Here’s a woman who is At the station, are those real newscasters?

desperate and forces things to work out for her own profit.’ This is a woman at a point in her life at which her health insurance is extremely important, and being able to pay her rent is supremely important. I knew that Rene could bring out the other side. What I love about the restaurant scene with Rene is when he talks about the fact that she has a two-year contract, and there’s this moment where she drops her head and she sort of nods a little bit, and you can just see everything break, and you can see that it’s real. Rene has the ability, I think, to bring out a human empathetic side that can add another dimension to a character that might just come across as conventional. I very much wrote it for her. It’s my favourite scene in the movie, that scene between the two of them. We had 80 locations, and only had 28 days to shoot it. There were many times that we moved two different times in a night. You’re taking 100 people and a line of vehicles that stretches almost a quarter mile, moving from one location at 2 o’clock in the morning, and then you have to get to another location and shoot another three pages. The weird thing is, on most films, when you’re shooting outside on a tight budget, it’s usually when the sun goes down that you start to go, ‘Oh, that’s the end of the day.’ For us, it was when the sun came up. Once the birds started chirping, it was, ‘Oh, God! The sun is coming up. Just give us another five minutes of darkness.’ That was the hardest part. When Jake runs down the driveway and he’s telling Rick, ‘You should have done this,’ the birds were chirping, and people were delivering newspapers.” Have the real night-crawlers seen the film yet? Oh yeah, Howard saw it with his brothers – he works with his two brothers – and they loved it. They loved it because it was accurate. It was very important to them that it was accurate. They’ll say, ‘We don’t do that kind of stuff,’ but they wanted the police codes to be right, they wanted their jargon to be right. They said, ‘If we’re involved, it has to be real. You have to really show them what it’s like.’ It is utterly real. Everything we show, Bill Paxton’s character, people like that – I encountered them. This is the world they live in. Tonight they’ll go out. They’ll go out seven days a week. Is it lucrative? Yeah, they make 50, 75, 100 thousand dollars a year. It’s lucrative compared to some other jobs. What was the biggest challenge in making this movie?

• Nightcrawler is out now

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