Like the characters in his new movie American Animals, writer-director Bart Layton has taken some formidable risks.
His new film re-enacts a real 2004 heist where a quartet of students, Spencer Reinhard (played by Barry Keoghan), Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson) and Charles Allen II (Blake Jenner, Glee) stole rare books from the library at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky.
The haul included a first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and the earliest folios of John James Audubon's Birds of America and other rare books with a potential value of millions.
Just as the real-life lads donned odd, if unconvincing, disguises, contacted shady, underworld figures (or folks they thought were shady, underworld figures), and meticulously planned the robbery, the British Layton interrupts his dramatic retelling with the real thieves recounting the heists and having characters even talk to the audience.
These narrative gymnastics could potentially lose viewers, but Layton received a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
When asked how he managed to violate the fourth wall while making the movie relatively easy to follow, he replies, "People were worried about that in the script stage. I felt very strongly that it wouldn't throw you out of the movie. It would kind of be greater than the sum of its parts. In reminding you that this is real and these are real people and the consequences of their actions are real, you engage more strongly."
THROUGH A LENS DARKLY
Speaking by phone from New York, Layton also took on the challenge of embracing the contradictions in each participant's memories about the same events.
"Part of what this film addresses is not just unreliable narrators but also how memory is also unreliable as well," he says. "How do we ever get to the truth of a true story if it happened in the past? With this movie there are different versions of the same event. People remember crucial events differently.
"That was something that I also wanted to pull the curtain back for the audience and allow them in on the process. With these devices and the inclusion of the real guys themselves, you have skin in the game as an audience member in a way which is much harder to do in a conventional narrative film."
An additional obstacle is that the thieves, who wound up doing seven years in prison, pursue a crime not out of poverty or desperation, but out of boredom. All had comfortable lives in Lexington, and turned to crime to give their lives a perverse sense of meaning.
"Did they fall in love with the crime or did they fall in love with the fantasy?," Layton says. "I think they got lost in this adventure and this movie fantasy they created for themselves. I think at least two or three of the four of them never thought that it would go as far as it did. A lot of what the film gets at is an existential question about the need to cross a line you shouldn't cross and the risk you're willing to take. Most of us are not willing to play Russian roulette with our lives this way."
To help explain why the lads thought crime might pay, Layton puts the audience in their heads by presenting the events leading up to the event as men barely out of their teens might perceive them. He includes clips from previous examples of the genre and exaggerated depictions of the other cities in the tale. New York is recognizable, but its energy seems to come from their imaginations instead of the streets.
Oh, and at least the guys loved good heist movies like Stanley Kubrick's The Killing.
"If you were making a movie fantasy, who would you cast in that movie? It still retains a degree of authenticity, but it also needs to have a quality of a heightened reality about it," Layton says.
In the case of Lipka, Layton says that disillusionment with his parents as they were going through a divorce might have led him to pursue the theft. He also had little interest in being the athlete his father wanted him to be.
"He played soccer, and he was an All-American," he says. "Warren realized [he had] spent his whole childhood trying to live up to his dad and follow in his footsteps, and then he looks at his parents and realizes that maybe they haven't got it all worked out. You realize that you're going down the same path that they are."
WISE TO BE ILL-ADVISED
Layton is no stranger to examining people who ignore the better angels of their nature. His first feature was the nail-biting documentary (yes, there is such a thing) The Imposter, which recounted how Frenchman Frederic Bourdin tried to pass himself off as missing American child Nicholas Barclay. The grown Bourdin proceeded with the ruse even though he was a little older than Barclay would have been and his Gallic accent might have given him away.
Layton and Dimitri Doganis, who also has a producer credit on American Animals, shared the award for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Like American Animals, The Imposter tweaks documentary conventions by including re-enactments as Bourdin recounts his attempts at deception.
It's not like there was a camera crew around as Bourdin was misrepresenting himself.
Asked why he pursues stories like these, Layton says, "I guess not so much the crime element as the characters I get drawn to, particularly ones where you have moral confusion. I'm interested in people who make bad decisions and the reasons for those decisions and then the repercussions of them and what happens in the years that follow. It's more that than the kind of true crime obsession. I'm drawn to very ill-advised things, but there is a way we can connect to them and relate to them closely because they are human beings."
MovieStyle on 06/29/2018