9 Deleted Movie Sub-Plots That Changed Everything

9. Nightcrawler - A Sympathetic Backstory

Nightcrawler’s protagonist Lou is a bad person. He’s not likable, he’s not relatable and - as much as we may try - we don’t really understand why he does the things he does to the extent he does them.

It would have changed the film’s entire tone then if we were to be given some deep Lou-lore. For instance if we were shown sequences from his childhood that explained why he was like this - like that he had developed an obsession with death from a young age after his whole family was murdered in a break-in gone-wrong - we could almost understand.

The initial intention was to paint Lou as a damaged person, a ‘survivor’ archetype who was just trying to get by, day to day; his morals pushed to the wayside by harsh reality. There would be a whole sub-plot revealing Lou’s traumatic past and showing how it relates to his current self, but alas this was not to be.

Director Dan Gilroy decided it would be more effective if he went the opposite way and made Lou unimaginably cold. He said it would detract from the experience if he had to set aside time to spend on Lou’s past or to give him some sympathetic scenes and so all of that was cut from the script, and new Lou was born.