Dan Gilroy is an American screenwriter and director. He is best known for writing and directing Nightcrawler (2014), for which he won Best Screenplay at the 30th Independent Spirit Awards, and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 87th Academy Awards.
Background
Ethnicity:
Through his father, he is of Italian, Irish and German descent.
Dan Gilroy was born in California. He was brought up in an artistic and creative family. He's a son of a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, director, and screenwriter- Frank D.Gilroy ("The Subject Was Roses"), and sculptor and writer Ruth Dorothy Gaydos. His twin brother is a film editor - John Gilroy.
Education
Gilroy grew up in Washingtonville, New York, where he attended Washingtonville High School. In 1981, he graduated with a degree in English literature from Dartmouth College, which his father also attended. At Dartmouth, he and Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr were classmates and attended a class taught by David Thomson, another film critic. Gilroy developed a strong interest in written works of the Victorian era - chiefly those of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.
Gilroy began his screenwriting career by co-writing the science fiction thriller Freejack (1992) with Steven Pressfield and Ronald Shusett, directed by Geoff Murphy and based on the novel Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley. After Freejack, he wrote for the films Chasers (1994), Two for the Money (2005), and The Fall (2006).
With Jeremy Leven, he co-wrote for Real Steel (2011), directed by Shawn Levy and based on Richard Matheson's short story "Steel". He co-wrote with his brother Tony Gilroy the script for The Bourne Legacy (2012), which was edited by his fraternal twin brother, John Gilroy. Directed by Tony Gilroy, the film is inspired by Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novel series.
Gilroy made his directorial debut with the thriller Nightcrawler (2014), which starred Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, and Riz Ahmed. Gilroy also wrote the script, which he conceived in 1988 after reading the photo-book Naked City, a collection of photographs taken by American photographer Weegee of 1940s New York City residents at night. Gilroy did not begin writing the script until he moved to Los Angeles two years later, when he recognized an abundance of violent stories on television news. According to Gilroy, he considers the film to be a success story about a modern equivalent of Weegee, and a cautionary tale about the risks posed by capitalism. Nightcrawler was well received by the press on release, as was Gilroy's script, for which he was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 87th Academy Awards, and won Best Screenplay at the 30th Independent Spirit Awards. At the Independent Spirit Awards, Gilroy closed his acceptance speech by lamenting the proliferation of superhero films in Hollywood.
In 2017, he co-wrote Jordan Vogt-Roberts's adventure Kong: Skull Island with Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly, and wrote and directed Roman J. Israel, Esq., a legal drama starring Denzel Washington. Gilroy conceived of Roman J. Israel after doing extensive research about the 1960s where many Americans have staunchly protested and advocated certain individual and group rights. The script had started as a spec, whose titular role he wrote specifically for Washington; Gilroy has said that he would not have made the film had Washington declined to take over the role. After its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), he re-edited the film by trimming thirteen minutes of runtime to get the plot to arrive quickly as the previous cut had lain much emphasis on the characters. On release, although Washington's performance was mostly praised, Gilroy's script for the film drew ambivalent responses from the press: Peter Travers at Rolling Stone praised it as "above standard-issue legal thriller but below the transcendent personal drama it aspires to be", while Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty felt it was ultimately a letdown.
Gilroy was one of the many writers to contribute to the unmade film Superman Lives, and later appeared in the documentary The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? (2015).
Quotations:
"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."
"I had heard about the night-crawling world, and I'm very aware that there are tens of millions of young people around the world who are facing bleak employment prospects."
"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."
"I spend most of my time in a room alone where eight hours go by, and I have no sense of time. I work seven days a week, and I live in this sort of vague subconscious fog a lot."
"Media is extraordinarily important and is an extraordinarily powerful tool. There's a reason that the first things that a rebellion or revolt will take is the media. The story you transmit is the story that becomes a given, or the narrative of a country and people."
"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."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
He’s well-spoken, he’s passionate, and he knows his s**t. (Michael Roffman, Consequence of Sound, 2014)
Connections
Сurrently lives in Brentwood, Los Angeles, with his wife, actress Rene Russo, and their daughter.