Jake Gyllenhaal: we are all to blame for media scrum at horror crime scenes

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/18/jake-gyllenhaal-nightcrawler-news-addiction

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Television is often criticised for blurring the boundaries of entertainment and public interest when it intrudes on private grief, but we are all to blame, according to one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Jake Gyllenhaal, the Oscar-nominated actor, was talking to the Observer in the runup to the release of his new thriller, Nightcrawler, a darkly damning satire on American media’s obsession with breaking news and the questionable ethics of those who gather the footage. The film focuses on so-called “nightcrawlers” who, monitoring police scanners, race to crime and accident scenes to film bloody scenes and then sell the footage to the TV news channels.

Gyllenhaal said the film, to be released on 31 October, suggests “we are all complicit”: nightcrawlers, TV station heads and the people who watch the footage. He said: “I equate it with fast food. We all know [it’s] bad for us. But people demand it … This narrative of fear and this spinning of news has a great detrimental effect.”

Everyone has something in them of the character he plays in Nightcrawler, he suggests, noting how we drive past some horrible accident and slow down to gawp. But he hopes that we are aware of ourselves lapping up “these images … coming at us so fast and so graphically. It can have a negative effect on us.”

Gyllenhaal’s films include Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and Richard Kelly’s cult hit Donnie Darko. In Nightcrawler his character, Lou Bloom, is an unscrupulous Los Angeles drifter who becomes a nightcrawler prone to rearranging victims’ bodies to provide a better camera angle. In the chase for ratings, a ruthless station editor – played by Rene Russo – further distorts the stories and ethical boundaries, playing on people’s fears of urban crime creeping into the suburbs.

Fiction yes, but not far from reality, Gyllenhaal claims. In preparation for filming, he shadowed nightcrawlers with the movie’s writer-director Dan Gilroycorrect, whose previous films include The Bourne Legacy. What they witnessed was shocking. One night they heard about a nearby car crash. Gilroy said: “We get there and three young girls had been ejected from a [speeding] car. Our technical adviser [a nightcrawler himself] … got out of our car and filmed it. Within five minutes, he’d sold the footage for several thousand dollars to the local station. Next night, we saw [several] fatalities. This is just night-time in LA.” He said that the film’s protagonist descends to measures that real-life nightcrawlers would never admit to. But it is a fine line.

One of them admitted to once spotting a car that had broken down on the fast lane of a major road: “Rather than call the police, he pulled over, pulled out his camera and waited for three cars to plough head on into it – and then sold the footage.”

Asked how nightcrawlers will react to the film, Gilroy said that three attended last week’s internal screening: “One proudly rolled up [his] sleeve … he had the entire LA freeway system tattooed on his arm. On his other arm, he had actual incidents that he’d made a lot of money from.”

Another aim of the film was to show how the media preys on people’s fears. Gilroy pointed to news reports that lean heavily on violent, graphic images, with brief narratives to invoke drama and excitement, and interviews with victims, witnesses or nearby residents expressing shock at the crime. He asserted that the report is usually strung together with some other incident “to give you a sense that there’s some nefarious pattern”. He said that such reports support the queues of Americans wanting to buy guns because they’re “terrified of some nebulous threat out there”.