Nightcrawler (2014) on Netflix
Lou Bloom, a Los Angeles thief, becomes a nightcrawler, filming crashes and crime scenes to sell to TV news. He buys a camcorder and a scanner and hires Rick as his assistant.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.8/10681,795 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes95%
Trailer
Plot summary
Lou Bloom steals manhole covers and fencing in Los Angeles and cannot persuade the scrap yard foreman to hire him. Driving home, he stops at a burning car and watches a crew of stringers film it. Joe Loder tells him they sell such footage to local news stations but refuses him a job. Lou pawns a stolen bicycle for a camcorder and a police scanner, then films a carjacking scene and brings the tape to a television station, where news director Nina Romina buys it and asks for graphic footage from wealthy neighborhoods. Lou hires Rick, a homeless young man, as his assistant for thirty dollars a night.
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Nightcrawler (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the role of Lou Bloom, Jake Gyllenhaal lost nearly thirty pounds by eating nothing but kale salads and chewing gum and running fifteen miles every day, after director Dan Gilroy told him he saw Lou as a coyote, a nocturnal predator driven by never-ending hunger.
- Dan Gilroy first conceived Nightcrawler in 1988 after reading Naked City, a photo-book by the American photographer Weegee, who sold lewd and sensationalized photographs of 1940s New York City residents at night to tabloid newspapers.
- Riz Ahmed was one of seventy-five actors who auditioned for the role of Rick; Gilroy told Ahmed he had seen his previous work and did not think he was fit for the part, but let him audition anyway.
- Dan Gilroy wrote the role of news director Nina Romina specifically for his wife, Rene Russo, feeling she would bring vulnerability to a character who could easily have been reduced to a "hard-nosed corporate bitch".
- Composer James Newton Howard wrote a moody 1980s-synth electronica score for Nightcrawler, a break from the large cinematic scores of his career, because Dan Gilroy wanted uplifting, subversive music rather than the expected nightmarish string score.
- Nightcrawler was shot like a wildlife documentary: cinematographer Robert Elswit used wide-angle lenses, depth of field and avoided soft focus, while Jake Gyllenhaal's animalistic performance shaped director Dan Gilroy's vision of Los Angeles as a landscape of primal struggle and survival.
- The production needed licensed background footage for its newsroom scenes, and the Raishbrook brothers, three real-life stringers, supplied it and were later brought on as technical advisers.
