Jake Gyllenhaal on Nightcrawler: ‘I’m a bit strange, you know?’

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/30/jake-gyllenhaal-nightcrawler-interview

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Struggling to get a foothold in today’s job market? Remember: the key to success lies in you! You’ve got to make your own chances. Take freelance newsman Louis Bloom, whose break came when he filmed the aftermath of a fatal car crash in the Hollywood hills. The driver had been thrown into the road. Lou was first on scene, but he wasn’t happy with the shot. The blood was too dark, the wounds weren’t clear. So Lou showed initiative. He dragged the body into the light and shot again. The footage led on the breakfast news.

Lou, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is the American success story at the grisly heart of Nightcrawler, a morbid satire of the TV news business from first-time writer-director Dan Gilroy. LA is a hunting ground. Lou and his fellow nightcrawlers – TV cameramen who piggyback police radio to get to the gory stories first – are vultures waiting to swoop on the dead. It’s a comic, cruel film, strapping us in next to Lou – a ruthless self-help junkie – as he races along his road to success.

Gyllenhaal lost 30 pounds for Nightcrawler. He barely slept during filming. His face caved in and his eyes bulged out. He wanted to make Lou look hungry. Today, the day after the film’s press screening at the Toronto film festival, he looks like he’s had Lou for breakfast. He did a boxing movie after Nightcrawler’s punishing regime (“15-mile runs instead of a beer in the evening”) and the muscle has been packed back on. Still, sometimes Lou creeps out. Jake’s got the same eagerness, the same puppyish excitement. He’s endearing like Lou. A teeny bit full-on, too. He loves the film. He really loves Lou.

“It’s important that you feel like Lou is the superhero of a generation,” he says. “People have asked me throughout many interviews over time: ‘Do you ever wish you’d played a superhero?’ I just did – his name is Lou Bloom.”

Lou is a winner. He’s ethic-free in an industry with a rapacious appetite for tragedy. He’s a liar and a manipulator. An irrepressible dreamer who swallows self-help formula whole. He abuses his employee, Rick (a meek stooge played by Four Lions star Riz Ahmed) and terrorises his station boss (played by Rene Russo, Gilroy’s wife). Yet there is a sweetness to him. Lou is insidious and corrupting, amoral and relentless. He is, says Gyllenhaal, the perfect product of our times.

“Young people have been taught what the idea of success is,” he says. “It’s a society of ‘succeed at any cost’. When do we decide that we’ve been successful in what we’ve done? Is there ever a point where that happens? Jobs are redefining themselves and you can find work in the strangest of places. If you have empathy, then I think you know how to navigate that in a way that’s not going to hurt people, but if you’re a character like Lou, it’s dangerous.

“I don’t like to call him a sociopath,” he says. “The reason he doesn’t become unwatchable is because there’s this great innocence to him. He’s almost from another time. You know when you hear those guys – Spencer Tracy, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Stewart? [He stretches his vowels into Stewart’s drawl] ‘Hey! You know what, sweetheart?’ Deeply polite. In a very dangerous way. Like, take a Brit and times 50.”

Gyllenhaal’s a winner like Lou, but his path to success was a little smoother. He hasn’t been ruthless, doesn’t think he’s hurt anybody on the way up. To be frank, he hasn’t needed to. He’s descended from Swedish nobility. His family comes close to Hollywood royalty. His dad is director Stephen Gyllenhaal. His mum is Oscar-nominated screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal. Older sister Maggie has come up with him. Gyllenhaal’s godfather, Robert Elswit, is Nightcrawler’s cinematographer. Elswit shot The Sure Thing, Good Night, and Good Luck and all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, bar The Master. Along with Dan Gilroy’s brother, Tony (director of Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy) he helped get the script to Gyllenhaal, whose heft got Nightcrawler made. Neither star nor film have had to scrap much to get noticed. They’ve both had some powerful mentors.

It’s a bit rich isn’t it? Banging on about this generation’s ideals of success when you’re part of the industry that sells it to them?

“It’s easy to say that,” he says. “But my parents brought us up making films about things that were going on in the world – trying to tell stories that were political. I don’t think they were trying to sell anything to us about some ideal.”

“My nieces [Maggie’s daughters] watch South Pacific and there’s a song that’s like, ‘You can learn to hate’ [“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear” – from You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught]. That’s subversive and extraordinarily important. It was made in 1950-something, but it’s still current.”

Gyllenhaal hasn’t rested on his privilege. He has dabbled with big, lazy films (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The Day After Tomorrow), but he was never the blockbusters’ boy. He ringfenced troubled innocence as a teen haunted by a giant bunny in Donnie Darko; showed that war is a bore as frustrated marine sniper Anthony Swofford in Jarhead; made love with Heath Ledger in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain; and took time out from dropping gangsters to reveal the sweet side of a dude-bro cop in End of Watch. His choices have been esoteric and, for the most part, rewarding. He commits, even when it makes him look a bit silly.

“Jake is someone who wants to jump off the cliff,” Ahmed tells me. “There’s a scepticism around that non-cerebral, shamanistic process. But there’s nothing airy-fairy about it. It involves sweating and bleeding and shedding weight.

“I almost wondered whether him losing weight was a showy thing to do. I did wonder: ‘What has that got to do with anything?’ It was only when we showed up on set together that I realised it was a very simple, genius thing. The character’s desperately hungry, so he decided to be that. He was looking at me like he wanted to eat me!”

Having been Lou, Gyllenhaal can’t judge him too harshly. It was hard to leave him behind. He sometimes finds himself slipping into the rhythm of his speech (he does it a couple of times today; it’s kind of terrifying). It must be strange, I say, having bits of your old characters floating around in your head.

“You make it sound like my head’s some kind of dirty pond filled with Donnie Darko.”

“Well …”

“Well, maybe it is. Yeah – it is a bit strange. But I’m a bit strange, you know?”

The scariest thing about Nightcrawler isn’t that Lou meddles with crime scenes, it’s that he doesn’t think to question it. And no one asks him to. The moralists are shadows at the back of the newsroom, quibbling about ethics while the freelancers get on with making the story better. The film’s a nightmarish caricature of media power, perhaps too much of a Halloween parade to score political points, but it follows Network in making the news industry look both enticing and morally shabby. There is an allure to journalism, says Gyllenhaal. He’s a bit jealous of the anonymity.

“There’s a real Banksy quality to it,” he says. “You have an interaction with me now, but when people read whatever you write, they don’t get to see your face as much as your words. That wields a certain type of power. You have this sword you get to wield and I find that exotic.”

A teaser trailer for Nightcrawler has Lou delivering his sales pitch to camera. He recites a series of mottoes he’s learnt to maintain his focus: “Good things come to those that work their asses off.” “If you want to win the lottery, you have to earn the money to buy a ticket.” The eye contact is good. The smile is well-drilled. He looks sincere and sells the bullshit. He might be hard to trust, but he’s even harder to dismiss.

As I leave the Nightcrawler press screening, a lightning storm hits Toronto. Lou stays with me on the walk home. The rain hammers down. I scuttle along, buzzing from the film, buzzing from Lou. I play Nightcrawler over in my head, backed by a meteorological marching band. The roads are slick and I can’t see through the rain. I imagine Lou is out there, waiting for a driver to skid into a wall. Worse – I hope he is.

• Nightcrawler is released in the UK and US on Friday