Jake Gyllenhaal’s Nightcrawler is about a crime journalist who blurs the line between observer and participant to become the star of his own story. The actor talks about the desperation for success in today’s age
Tell us about your character lou Bloom.
lou is a winner. He’s ethic-free in an industry with a voracious appetite for tragedy. He’s a liar and a manipulator. He abuses his employee, his assistant Rick, (Riz Ahmed) and terrorises his station boss (Rene Russo). Yet there is a certain sweetness to him. lou is insidious and corrupting, amoral and relentless. He is the perfect product of our times. I wouldn’t like to call him a sociopath. There’s this great innocence to him. He’s almost from another time.
How was it working with director Dan GilroyIJ
We spent the better part of four months putting in the preparation for lou Bloom. And mostly, it was a subconscious thing. We both had an idea about what lou was like and we just put it together. He was always open to all my ideas and questions. He let me experiment, with my weight, hair. I think he always knew what I had in mind but he waited for me to get there on my own. I always say it’s the stupid questions people would be embarrassed to ask that always lead me somewhere.
What inspired the look of the character and the subsequent weight lossIJ
It was my idea to lose weight, but it was this mutual idea of mine and Dan’s that he was really an animal. He was really a coyote. And then I tried to figure out how I was going to make him into that and the choice became a physical one. The ponytail too just happened one day. The hair thing was my Ninja take on the whole thing. When he’s deciding he’s going to rock it out and do something bad or something he’s going to get away with, he puts his hair up. He doesn’t want it to get in the way, he’s a Ninja.
Do you think there are more people like lou Bloom out thereIJ
Young people have been taught what the idea of success is. It’s a society of ‘succeed at any cost’. When do we decide that we’ve been successful in what we’ve doneIJ Is there ever a point where that happensIJ 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.
You also produced the film. How did that change thingsIJ
It doesn’t change much because that is already fed into lou as he is really like that — very fastidious and detail oriented, dealing with the finances as well as the creative part of it. So, it was bit helpful with the character, to be playing both roles. But it all came down to the fact that we were shooting the film in 110 million dollars and shooting it in 28 days was very little time. And trying to figure how to film all these really complex scenes played into being producer. But as an actor producer, you are hyper aware that time is money.