Jake Gyllenhaal takes aim at journalism in 'Nightcrawler'

Jake Gyllenhaal isn't just playing a hungry video journalist in his new flick, "Nightcrawler," he's addressing the state of the news industry in general.

In a recent interview with SkyNews, Gyllenhaal highlighted the rapid growth of viral news, which as he explained, is run alongside a hot button issue in the daily news programming "... a video of a cat falling 40 stories and surviving next to some huge political issue."

"We're living in a time where information has equality and that is unfortunate - there should be a hierarchy in which we're told the current political state of things over the survival of a cat," he continued.

In his new flick, viewers get a creepy look at the underbelly of the news industry and how a story makes the broadcast. The 33-year-old thesp plays Lou Bloom, a dedicated freelance videographer who navigates the streets of Los Angeles at night to film violent crime scenes to sell to local news channels.

In the film's trailer, Rene Russo, who plays the producer of a local news channel, described the footage she desires to Bloom. "To capture the spirit of what we air, is to think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the road with her throat cut."

The movie certainly isn't for the faint of heart, but Gyllenhaal seems to effortlessly navigate the role, and his strength earned the flick a big opening weekend.

"Nightcrawler" narrowly edged out horror movie "Ouija" in it's debut weekend at the box office and reportedly netted $10,909,000.

To hear more about Jake Gyllenhaal's role, tune into the AOL BUILD (in the video above!) at 1 p.m. EST.