Jake Gyllenhaal discusses creepy new movie "Nightcrawler"

Then he chances onto the scene of a bad car wreck swarmed by cameramen eager to film the carnage for sale to ratings-hungry television stations.

Suddenly Lou is inspired to pursue a new career path, as it turns out there is profit in misery and disaster.

Although Lou is an amoral creep, you might find yourself wondering about halfway through the movie: "Who's the real monster here?"

Here's the trailer:

http://youtu.be/UPawRAHG-0g

Gyllenhaal discussed the noirish film during a visit to Ellen DeGeneres' talk show.

"You lost a lot of weight for that film, right?" she asked.

"Yeah, I lost 25 or 30 pounds," he responded."The character, I felt like, was kind of like a coyote. I just thought of him as this hungry scavenging kind of animal and I just thought he needed to look like that."

In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, director Dan Gilroy said his past career as a journalist and appetite for local television news helped inform Gyllenhall's character.

“The problem is the society that created him and rewards him,” Gilroy told us. (He signed up his star in Atlanta, while Gyllenhaal was here filming “Prisoners,” a thriller in which he starred as a guy on the right side of the law.)

Gilroy's wife, Rene Russo, plays a television producer so desperate for an edge that she overlooks Lou's oddball tendencies.

“Whenever I travel, I watch local TV news,” Gilroy said. “The patterns were becoming part of my subconscious. It seems like the world is becoming more and more reduced to transactions.”

To prepare for the project, Gilroy, a former journalist, binge-watched local news and went on ride-alongs with actual crime photographers.

“The first night, we got to an accident scene, roaring along at 100 mph, and got there before the cops,” he said. “They took footage and soon had the footage sold to networks. It was really bleak.”