“We ultimately looked at it as one long accident,” writer-director Dan Gilroy told BuzzFeed News. SPOILERS ahead!
Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed in Nightcrawler
Chuck Zlotnick / Open Road Films
The French Connection. The Road Warrior. The Bourne Identity. Bullitt. The Matrix Reloaded. The Fast and Furious franchise. A great, thrilling, propulsive car chase has long been a badge of honor for some of cinema's most celebrated — or merely successful — thrillers, and this weekend, the new psychological thriller Nightcrawler joins their ranks. (Caution: Some MAJOR SPOILERS follow.)
After tracing the uneasy rise of freelance crime scene videographer Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his assistant Rick (Riz Ahmed), the film concludes with a tense police standoff in an L.A. restaurant that leads to a harrowing police chase through the streets of Los Angeles, with Lou and Rick in hot pursuit.
The result is one of the most thrilling and satisfying movie car chases in recent memory, but writer-director Dan Gilroy (The Bourne Legacy) had originally conceived the sequence to be far more elaborate. After sitting down with his stunt coordinator and second unit director Mike Smith, cinematographer Robert Elswit, and producer (and older brother) Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), however, the filmmaker realized he needed to focus his vision.
"We ultimately looked at it as one long accident, rather than a car chase, in which it was more compressed and more violent," Dan Gilroy told BuzzFeed News.
"A lot of times, in a car chase, when the car is not crashing or something is going on, it's [just] high-speed driving. They go on and on and on. It's spectacle. And we didn't want the spectacle to overwhelm the story."
Open Road Films / Via youtube.com
Gilroy estimated that it took roughly six weeks to plan the sequence. "We got little Hot Wheels cars, and we were moving them around [on] a model," he said.
![Gilroy estimated that it took roughly six weeks to plan the sequence. "We got little Hot Wheels cars, and we were moving them around [on] a model," he said.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sjqMHvnfuvjcgdLW75HbXzj_nV1MVP6V3acYIKRF0yk-cM_SelS06-sMKPweF15D9N_tkpQEHg=s0-d)
"We started working out how to shoot it, which was trying to stay inside the car as much as possible. On a lot of films, they would have gone outside the car and gotten the wide shot, and go, Here comes the car! It's a spectacle! Let's get it from a big angle. But we tried to get as much of the car chase as possible through the windshield, from inside the car. I think it makes it more visceral and real in a lot of ways."
Open Road Films / Via youtube.com
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