Dan Gilroy Quotes

"One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box."

"A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around."

"I find Los Angeles to be a place of great physical beauty, in which you have the oceans and the mountains, and there's a vertical sense and a desert light that you can see forever."

"The real reason why people are going with digital is that it's extraordinarily mobile, and it's cheaper, and it has a great image, and you just can't beat it at night. It's pulling in variations of colors; it's pulling in lights from 40 miles away - a candle would be seen."

"I had heard about the nightcrawling world, and I'm very aware that there are tens of millions of young people around the world who are facing bleak employment prospects."

"'To Die For,' with Nicole Kidman, is great - her desire to be a part of news, how she uses news to further her career and how it can drive you insane. I love that movie."

"Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent."

"A sociopath is not just someone who doesn't care about human emotion. They're someone who understands people to the point that they can manipulate them to an extraordinary degree."

"A lot of times, L.A. is desaturated, and cement and freeways, and downtown."

"I think there is an enormous sea change happening in the global workforce. It has a lot to do with globalization. I think that people used to have a hope for a career or meaningful employment, and its been reduced to internships, part-time work or just grossly underpaid work."

"I think there's a connection with 'Nightcrawler' and 'Blowup' and other films where visual imagery is integral to the story. It allows you to play with images."

"The spirit of L.A. is untamed wilderness. It's earthquakes and wildfires and oceans and mountain lions and fog. There's great physical beauty."

"Has Werner Herzog ever said anything that wasn't true? What a brilliant fountain of wisdom. Everything he touches I'm just fascinated by."

"The friends we have, these are choices that - unlike family, which we have no choice in, and I love my family, thank God - we've given ourselves, to some degree."

"I moved to L.A. and watched a lot of local television news, and I started to see the burn logos up on the upper right hand corner - On-Scene Video, RMG Media Group, and all these other ones. I just became intrigued with it."

"I think a first-time director always has to convince a lot of people that they're ready to do it."

"My screenwriting credits in my career are probably not dissimilar to some other ones in the sense that a lot of the scripts you write don't get made, and the ones that do get made are certainly - as a writer, they're not your vision."

"A script like 'Nightcrawler' gives me an opportunity to truly realize a vision that's mine, which is exciting."

"I watch a lot of television, for better or worse, and I am particularly interested in what Michael Moore brought up in 'Bowling for Columbine,' which is the idea that they're selling a narrative of fear."

"I had written a script called 'Freed,' which I had wanted to direct."

"I'm an enormous Tim Burton fan."

"When an accident or a crime happens, there's a period of time before the yellow tape goes up, before the official response becomes formalized. That allows the nightcrawlers to get very close."

"I'm often stunned when I come up over Mulholland, and I'm looking down at the Valley, and I can see for thirty miles; I can see the mountains, or all the way to the ocean."

"I think Los Angeles is often portrayed as kind of a petri dish, where bad decisions start and then spread to the rest of the world. I don't see it that way. I feel Los Angeles is a place of almost primal struggle and survival. It's not a city that embraces its inhabitants."

"In Los Angeles, you drive around, and you're coming back from a club or something, and all of a sudden, you'll encounter a coyote. And they're very lean, hungry-looking animals."

"A sociopath is just a label and doesn't encompass the entire being of a person."

"There are a lot of sociopaths running around who are probably our friends, if not us, and we don't know it."

"News has become entertainment. Once that happens, a whole series of horrific events start to happen, whether it's the lack of dissemination of something that can inform you or something that actually negatively impacts society."

"I reached a point where I'd watched enough directors do the job that I felt I understood it. And it's not that I'm a slow learner and it took me this long; I also was enjoying writing, and I still enjoy writing - I get tremendous satisfaction out of the writing end of it."

"Everything I've ever written, I had a very distinct vision of what I wanted it to look like. But, other directors never do it that way."