For his 2014 film Nightcrawler, director/writer Dan Gilroy's spent several years trying to write a plot that would fit the setting, and experimented with conspiracies and murder mysteries as central story elements. Eventually, he decided to start by designing the characters. He attempted to write the lead character Lou Bloom as a standard literary hero character, but couldn't make him interesting so he then envisioned an antihero as the lead character because he found them a rarity in films. Not just because they were difficult to write, but they also stereotypically devolved into psychopaths. To break from that stereotype, he thought of writing an antihero success story. To research how to write antiheroes, Gilroy studied 1983's The King of Comedy, 1995's To Die For, and 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley. Stay tuned!