Director Bart Layton attends a premiere for his new film Crime 101 in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
British filmmaker Bart Layton is no stranger to pulling off the perfect crime.
In 2012, his acclaimed documentary The Imposter chronicled a French conman who engaged in the most remarkable acts of deception, while his 2018 thriller American Animals followed a teenage gang of book thieves. But Layton’s criminal ambitions get significantly supersized in the new heist thriller Crime 101, an adaptation of a Don Winslow novella that follows four L.A. denizens skirting the edges of the law in their own ways: a slick crook (Chris Hemsworth), a dogged cop (Mark Ruffalo), a crafty insurance broker (Halle Berry), and a psychopath (Barry Keoghan) who might derail everyone’s lives.
Ahead of the film’s release this weekend, Layton sat down with The Globe and Mail in Toronto to talk about making the perfect cinematic getaway.
One of the things that first struck me about this film was the amount of attention you pay to the eyes of the characters. We have a crucial moment involving Chris Hemsworth and contact lenses. We see so much of Barry Keoghan only via the eyes visible through his motorcycle helmet. There’s a big “eye” moment between Hemsworth and his love interest played by Monica Barbaro. Was that a deliberate visual motif?
Yeah, and it’s lovely when someone is paying attention and picking up on these things. Because when you’re shooting for the big screen, you have to think about close-ups in a very specific way. I’ll storyboard things religiously, then I bring in my cinematographer and we storyboard again, and we thought about those moments where a close-up can be very impactful. The mantra about this film was creating characters that you feel invested in, even though it’s a cops and robbers story and all that. How do you create grounded characters, people you can relate to? At a certain point, it’s in the face, right? The eyes are going to tell you everything.
Layton with actors Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo on the set of Crime 101.Photo Credit: Dean Rogers/Amazon Prime
Talking about making this for the theatres, this film feels big, but it’s also character-driven and it’s not a franchise. Its arrival in theatres, and not streaming, feels like something of a balm for moviegoers. And then you have two of Marvel’s biggest stars here, Chris and Mark. Did you guys talk at all about this feeling like an escape from the Avengers playground?
Funnily enough, it really wasn’t until the trailer landed that people started talking about the Marvel connection, you’ve got Thor, you’ve got the Hulk. Halle was Storm [in the X-Men movies]. Barry was in Eternals. Obviously I have an awareness of that, they’re the biggest movies on the planet, but I haven’t been a devotee. I was just thinking about Ruffalo as one of the great screen actors. And Mark has been such a huge advocate for Chris, saying he needs to do something that no one’s seen him do before. It was funny, having the two of them banter during the screen test, but when we shot the scenes with them, they were suddenly really nervous.
There is that crucial scene of them toward the end where their characters are namechecking Steve McQueen movies. But I watched the movie and couldn’t help but think of Michael Mann’s Heat. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought there was a billboard during an early scene that kind of aped the Alex Colville painting, Pacific, 1967, that Mann used as an aesthetic marker for Heat. Was I hallucinating that?
I’m afraid you were. The poster you’re referring to is when Ruffalo’s character drives past this sign that says, “Isn’t it time to live your best life?” That wasn’t a reference [to Heat], but a reference to what was for me a big theme of the film, which is this idea that we should all be living our best life. This phrase that has become part of the Instagram culture, that L.A. is a place where, if you’re not living your best life, you’re probably failing on some level. It’s a completely unrealistic illusion, you know? There are places in the movie where I’ve put adverts that we created, all for the same idea. These little subliminal messages.
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This is your first L.A. movie, but not your first heist movie. Was there ever a temptation to bring over some of the documentary-like style that you used in American Animals, to make it more a hybrid film?
It’s tricky, because you’re so limited by what you can do in terms of shooting with real people, in real locations. I’m not a big visual-effects person, I try to do everything in-camera as much as possible. When we’re at the taco stand with Chris and Monica in Echo Park, that’s a real taco stand, those are the real owners of it, those are not extras but real people.
Don Winslow is one of the top crime writers of his generation, or any, I suppose. What was his involvement in the adaptation?
The short story was just a great, pithy foundation for the kind of movie that I would love to watch. I suspected I wasn’t enough of a big shot to get the rights to adapt it, because I think there was a bit of a bidding war. But through an almost comic coincidence, he had been at a screening of American Animals and loved it. So when I raised my hand, he was like, yeah! I spent a few days with him cruising around San Diego, where the story is originally set. But it wasn’t at all like I imagined. It was so parochial. I needed a cityscape, so I asked to move the story to L.A., and he was very supportive. We didn’t have much communication before it was shot, but he was incredibly generous with his praise.
This conversation has been condensed and edited.