Daniel Christopher Gilroy (born June 24, 1959) is an American screenwriter and film 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. His other screenwriting credits include Freejack (1992), Two for the Money (2005), The Fall (2006), Real Steel (2011), and The Bourne Legacy (2012)—the last in collaboration with his brother Tony Gilroy. His wife, Rene Russo, has also been his frequent collaborator since the two met in 1992 and married later that year. Early life and education Dan Gilroy was born on June 24, 1959, in Santa Monica, California. He is the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Frank D. Gilroy (1925–2015), and sculptor and writer Ruth Dorothy Gaydos. His brother, Tony Gilroy, is a screenwriter and director, and his fraternal twin brother, John Gilroy, is a film editor. Dan Gilroy remembered that as a boy, seeing his father work and write at home full-time simplified the intricacies of becoming a writer. 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. Career 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. There, he met the film's co-star Rene Russo, whom he married later that year. After Freejack, he wrote for the films Chasers (1994), Two for the Money (2005), and The Fall (2006). In his positive review of Two for the Money, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said Gilroy's script "is about three people who are transformed in relation to one another, as a situation develops that is equally dangerous all the way around". 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