Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy: 'It was harrowing'

Are you looking forward to Oscar night?

Yeah, I’m gonna go with Rene [Russo – Gilroy’s wife, who plays Nightcrawler’s TV news director Nina] and my daughter Rose, and I’m just gonna soak it in and enjoy it. It doesn’t matter if I win or not, I’ve already won in the sense of the response to the film, so I’m looking forward to it being a nice night.

Have any reactions to the film particularly surprised you?

What’s been illuminating is how much people respond to the idea that it’s made them think or feel, or look at their world in a certain way. People compare this to a 70s film. Coming out of the 60s and the Vietnam War in America, it was commonplace for people to make films that had relevance to them. And since the 70s, cinema has gone almost entirely in the direction of spectacle and escapism and superhero films. This film is very personal to me, there’s a lot of very personal themes and ideas in it, about socio-economic equality, about capitalism, about journalism.

You and Jake Gyllenhaal shadowed Howard Raishbrook [one of a team of three LA news video stringer brothers]. What was it like?

The first night, we met Howard at 10pm. Howard listens to six [police] scanners, and about an hour in a call came of a crash with injuries. We got there right after it happened. Three young girls had been in a car going over the freeway overpass at 80mph. It dropped 40ft and went head on into a wall, and they’d all been ejected. It was really horrible. Howard, in his professional way, got out of the car, got the master shot, got the close-up shot, sold it within 10 minutes and we moved on, and the rest of the night was like that. It was harrowing to step into that world briefly.

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How did it feel to get out the car and see something like that?

I had my cellphone out to film it, following Howard, and I suddenly look and I’m 10 feet away from shattered girls on the pavement. And I had to stop filming. I stopped and stepped back. I felt I was violating a private moment of pain and horror. But at the same time I didn’t judge Howard; he was shooting something that I know by definition is newsworthy, but I couldn’t shoot. I had to stop.

Many see the film as a criticism of what stringers do.

Here’s the way I feel about it. We never wanted to cast moral judgment on Lou. We never wanted to cast moral judgement on journalism. We wanted to portray things as accurately as possible and let people decide. The stories that Howard shoots, and that Lou shoots in our film, these are stories that lead the news in Los Angeles. The Raishbrooks don’t make the rules, the Raishbrooks are supplying a need. They’re trying to remain neutral, they do a very professional job and they do supply a service, so I see them as a cog in a much larger machine. At the end of the film I hope people might go, well wait a minute, I watch this stuff on TV. I am one of those people that, given a choice between watching an in depth documentary about the national budget or watching a car chase, I’ll probably watch the car chase. What does that say about me? I’m involving people in the equation rather than pointing fingers.

You’ve said the film is a success story. Do you admire Lou’s enterprise?

No! I do not admire his enterprise. Lou is a cautionary tale. Lou is capitalism gone amok.

But what about his work ethic?

If you isolate the acts from the traits, yes, he’s a hard worker; he’s driven, respectful and polite. There are many attributes that I love about the character. But Lou’s put his hand on the dial and turned it up to 11 and he’s distorted these traits into monstrous qualities.

Gyllenhaal has said he isolated himself during the shoot. Was that your experience of him?

He was always available to me and the people working around him. He was never isolated creatively. He lost 27 pounds; he was always starving and in a very strange emotional and physical state. Shooting at night, you’re cut off from your family and friends. He was on a different time schedule from everybody else around him; he couldn’t enjoy meals with other people and he was under a lot of physical and emotional stress from losing the weight. Once he was on the set he was plugged in and we were all working close together.

The film explores media bloodlust, and it’s interesting watching it again in the context of the Isis hostage videos.

The smorgasbord of images now presented to us is getting bloodier. They’re becoming more frequent, almost hourly. I have not watched the Isis beheadings. We all make that choice: are we going to watch this or not? I don’t know too many people who, when the TV announcer says, ‘Viewer discretion is advised’, then turn the TV off. Those are codewords for ‘Turn the sound up, this is gonna be really good.’

We rely on editors of blogs or websites and television stations to supply us these images, and the filter is becoming very thin and very porous. The ratings race for TV and websites is incredibly fierce and one of the ways of getting people to watch is through graphic violent images. That’s why they’re becoming more graphic and more violent.

Nightcrawler is released on DVD and Blu-ray on 2 March