Bart Layton on how Crime 101 compares to The Imposter and American Animals
For my money, Bart Layton is among the most exciting true crime documentarians out there. The English filmmaker first caught my attention in 2012 with The Imposter. This stranger-than-fiction documentary follows a Texas family who took in a French con artist who claimed to be their missing son. Interviews with both the family and the con artist mean the movie turns into a battle over their respective narratives, leaving the audience to answer for themselves what's true.
In 2018, Layton tackled another true crime case, but with elements of a narrative feature. To unfurl the bizarre and fascinating story of the Transylvania University book heist, he cast hot young actors like Evan Peters and Barry Keoghan to portray privileged college boys who fantasize about being Tarantino-style criminals. Rather than classic re-enactments, Layton folded in interviews with the real thieves, sometimes having them appear alongside the actors. Together, they'd regard the moment, recreated and so less real, interrogating as we watch where the truth lies and what lies exist to preserve their visions of themselves.
Now Layton takes his big Hollywood swing with Crime 101, an adaptation of the Don Winslow crime novel, starring Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry, Mark Ruffalo, and Barry Keoghan (again). Departing from true crime, Layton translates a novel into a cinematic tale of high stakes and heartaches.
Hemsworth stars as a mysterious jewel thief who targets Los Angeles's 101 freeway for his strikes. However, he's careful to steal from those who can afford it (or are insured), and though he carries a gun, never enacts violence against his victims. This intrigues the detective on his tail (Ruffalo), and tempts a frustrated insurance broker (Berry) to go in with him on one last job. However, a mercurial rival thief (Keoghan) might ruin all of the above's carefully laid plans.
So how does he feel his latest film compares to his previous stunners? In an interview for Crime 101, I sat down with Layton to ask exactly that.
What attracts Bart Layton to crime stories?
For Layton, it's less about the crime and more about how it allows for a structure to enthrall an audience. "You're always looking for a way to smuggle in the layers," he explained. "Crime capers or especially the structure of a heist film is great because you're kind of positing a question at the beginning that an audience knows they're not getting the answer to until like the third act. So within that, you've got a framework that you can hopefully try to hang other ideas or more complicated things on."
He continued, "I'm looking for something that delivers the thing that we all want from a night out at the movies: the roller-coaster ride. I'm looking at how some of those stories will allow this opportunity for exploring. Like in this, there's a lot about the wealth divide and that chasm that is growing. There's also a lot about other things, the gray area of who's really the criminal? Is it the insurance industry? Is it the institutions? Is it the jewel thief? I suppose I'm more drawn to the idea of human beings who live outside the norms or cross a line that they probably shouldn't or never expected to cross than I am specifically in just crime or true crime. We get to vicariously look at what happens when we step outside of those conventions."
Bart Layton on the pressure of going mainstream.
True crime fans and critics cheered his previous films, but Crime 101 is undoubtedly his biggest movie yet, aiming to appeal to a broad audience. Layton spoke to the challenge of expectations there. "As you get into bigger Hollywood [movies]," he explained, "There's more pressure to deliver what a big, mainstream audience wants. That said, I do feel like maybe we've got a little less respectful of audiences in recent times. Because most audiences are really smart, and they do want a full meal, not like a bit of junk food or candy floss that's then disappeared."
For Crime 101, that meal involves the characters' motivations. Whether cop or criminal, each of them is striving for the same thing on some level. "It's not unique to L.A. but the pressure to have a certain image of success and status drives a lot of behavior," Layton said, "So a lot of what I was trying to think about was how these characters have got to a place where almost all of what they've done up until this point has been driven by that status anxiety. 'If I just get to here, if I have this, then maybe other people will see me as a success, and then I'll see myself that way.'" It's that desire that pushes Crime 101's curious cadre of characters to cross those lines of social propriety or legality. And the audience gets the vicarious thrill of watching those lines trampled.
"With American Animals," Layton said, "the motivation was, like, the promise of a special life." He notes one of the gang in that story did just want the money. But the others, who idolized movies like Reservoir Dogs and Fight Club, dreamed of being special in this hyper-masculine and antisocial way. "There was this other thing of, like, 'Oh, here I am. I'm a privileged, white, upper-middle-class kid. I got all of this opportunity, and yet, wasn't I supposed to be like a somebody?' And if you're not a somebody, you're a nobody."
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Layton tied this back to Crime 101, saying, "I think there is a connection to that, what's happening in some of these characters' lives. Which is the thing of, if you get to that number or that car or that apartment, you'll feel like you're a value in the world. And maybe you get there and you realize maybe it's not going to be that."
Asked if the English filmmaker felt that such status-chasing was distinctly American — as all of his movies have been largely set in the U.S. — he said it's not "limited to" this nation. But he admitted that in L.A., he feels the pressure to posture, specifically through car culture.
"I've never thought twice about [cars] — like if I'm hiring a car, I could not give a shit what car it is," he said. "But when I go to L.A., I'm like, 'Oh, maybe I need to think about [this]. Like I need to arrive in a car that makes me look, at least like I'm not a joker. So I definitely don't think it's limited, but it may be primarily an American experience, which is definitely spreading."