Louis Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a freelance reporter who is recording the violent events taking place in the middle of the night in downtown Los Angeles, and sending them to the local television news station. He is an ambulance chaser, a hack, and a voyeur of the worst kind who is using the public's salacious appetite for gore (as long as it is happening to someone else) and fascination with serial killers to make a lot of money. It was one of two movies that Gyllenhaal starred in in close succession about the symbiotic relationship between violent criminals and the news media, Zodiac being the other.
Gyllenhaal played a major role in the film's production as well. Both written and directed by first-timer Dan Gilroy, the movie took a mere month to shoot. Its promotion was, at the time, pretty groundbreaking; the movie's characters were given Facebook and Twitter profiles; "real life footage" of some of the violence Lou witnesses were shared on Craigslist. This created an appetite for the film that was belied by the less-than-stellar opening weekend performance. Gilroy not only directed the film; he also wrote the screenplay, and it was somewhat different to the screenplay he had actually sat down to write. He had seen a collection of lewd and lascivious photographs by a photo journalist named Weegee, also known as Arthur Usher Fellig; Weegee spent much of the 1940s going out into New York City at night and taking photographs of the goings on there, selling the more sensational photographs to the newspaper. An intended biopic of one of the first paparazzi became Nightcrawler when Gilroy relocated to Los Angeles, where he noticed the unusually large amount of violent crime that was shown on the nightly news, to the exclusion of almost everything else.
As well as being a largely voyeuristic crime thriller, the film also takes a jab at the way in which the news is reported. Could this be the first time that the issue of fake news is brought to our attention? Maybe, and the way in which news anchor Nina (Rene Russo) selects news stories that she knows will draw in her target audience, instead of simply reporting the news as it happens, definitely supports the contention that the nightly news is more interpretation and less the reporting of facts than it used to be when families would gather around the television to find out what was really going on in the world. The role of Nina was written especially for Russo, who is married to Gilroy, because he felt she could soften Nina and make her likable, when most of the time she is not.
The film was a critical and box office success, gathering momentum after a lackluster performance on its opening weekend. It also received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
