Nightcrawler - the American dream at its most warped

Rene Russo smiles. "The odds are against this movie, and we still can't believe that it happened at all," she says.

The actress is talking about Nightcrawler, a film written and directed by her husband, Dan Gilroy. With a story set in the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles television news journalism, it's a blackhearted but utterly compelling drama that even Russo doubted when she first read the script. "I was like, 'This is never going to get off the ground'," she says.

Yet somehow Nightcrawler has crept into cinemas, to deliver one of the creepiest anti-heroes in living memory. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a thief who discovers his questionable morals and appetite for risk are better served in video news. Buying a camcorder, he cruises the streets at night looking for grim road accidents and violent incidents to film and sell to the local TV stations, particularly to Russo's haggard TV producer, Nina.

Inspired by characters such as stand-up comic/kidnapper Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy and Nicole Kidman's demented weathergirl in Gus Van Sant's To Die For, the 55-year-old Gilroy is careful not to label the ambitious, unscrupulous Lou a sociopath. "I was always looking for the humanity inside him," he says. "Jake very much approached the character as a lonely but functioning human being, not a sociopath. He sees the character as an artist, who discovers something that he's good at and cares about."

Delivering the moral ambiguity that was prevalent in 1970s Hollywood, but is now considered box office poison in mainstream entertainment, Nightcrawler is a rare beast. That makes its success all the more surprising. Not only did the film "get off the ground", it's made US$32 million in America, four times its budget. It's even crept into the awards season, with a Golden Globe nomination for Gyllenhaal, four Bafta nominations, and Gilroy up for best original screenplay at the Oscars.