STACK Magazine April 2015 Issue 126

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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.
At the station, are those real
newscasters?
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
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.
What was the biggest challenge in
making this movie?
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
This is the world they live in.
ight they’ll go out. They’ll go out
ven days a week.
it lucrative?
Yeah, they make 50, 75, 100
usand dollars a year. It’s lucrative
pared to some other jobs.
with DAN GILROY
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