Interview (Written): Dan Gilroy (“Nightcrawler”)

Scott Myers

01 Nov 2014 • 1 min read

A Blue Cat interview with Dan Gilroy, writer-director of the movie Nightcrawler.

BlueCat: What’s your writing process? Do you outline? Do you try to hit a certain number of words a day or page count?

DG: The first step is coming with the idea. I won’t stand to write anything unless I feel passionate about it. Once I come up with that idea, I outline extraordinarily and in a very detailed way. The length of an average outline for me by the time I start writing a script is one hundred pages single spaced. It’s broken up into bios, dialogue ideas I have, scene ideas I have, backstories, and a structural outline for the film. If someone had six months to write a screenplay, my advice would be to think about the idea for four and a half months and write for the next six weeks. Screenwriters rush into writing, but thinking about the idea is the crucial element of the whole process.

BlueCat: What’s your advice for aspiring screenwriters who are hoping to break into Hollywood?

DG: I firmly believe that if you write a great script, you will get noticed. Hollywood is a vacuum. For all the doors that close on people’s faces, it’s just a fact that they’re always looking for good material. If you write a great original script or have an insanely strong character or an idea that no one’s ever thought of, it will not take much to disseminate through Hollywood — like a wildfire! The advice I would give to people is to not write something if you’re not passionate about it. This means you have to love the idea and the writing. This doesn’t mean that you’re not going to encounter problems on certain days and bang your head against the door. This means that there’s some spark inside you that keeps you going. When you worry whether or not [the screenplay] is good, that’s actually passion. If you’re just trying to hit a page count or quota, that’s not going to be good. It all starts with you being passionate about the idea.

Here is a red band trailer for Nightcrawler:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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