By George & Josh Bate
Despite flying woefully under the radar and getting caught up in the whole MoviePass debacle, Bart Layton’s American Animals was one of 2018’s best movies. Sophisticated, well-acted, and unconventionally blending real-life and actors, the movie established Layton as a filmmaker to look out for, after previously impressing with the documentary The Imposter. It’s taken eight years for Layton to make a follow-up and, once again, the English writer and director dabbles in the world of crime and heists, albeit on a decidedly grander scale this time around. The result is another exquisitely constructed crime thriller, one that embraces its LA setting and Heat-influences.
Based on the novella of the same name by Don Winslow, Crime 101 stars Chris Hemsworth as Mike Davis, an expert thief who carries out calculated heists along the 101 freeway in Los Angeles. Hot on his tail is Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), an LAPD detective determined to catch him after months of being doubted by his colleagues, and Ormon (Barry Keoghan), a vicious motorcycle rider working for crime lord Money (Nick Nolte). When his latest heist intersects with the business of insurance broker Sharon Colvin (Halle Berry), Mike finds his carefully constructed life, including his new girlfriend Maya (Monica Barbaro), at risk.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with Crime 101 director and writer Bart Layton about his new crime epic, its reverence for other LA-based crime movies, what makes a great movie chase scene, his all-star cast, and more.
Crime 101 represents the latest step in Bart Layton’s steady progression away from documentary filmmaking to narrative features. The English filmmaker crafted one of the most compelling true documentaries of the past decade with The Imposter, before applying his sensibilities as a documentarian to a film that blended real people and actors in American Animals. But a throughline throughout Layton’s work has been unconventional crimes, an interest he takes to grander heights than ever in his latest endeavor.
Despite bolstering an all-star cast filled with superhero alum and Oscar winners, Crime 101 retains a level of groundedness that characterized Layton’s previous efforts. “I guess I’m trying to keep hold of some sense of the real world, you know?” Layton reflected. “If you do something on this scale, it’s very tempting to go into kind of a Hollywood blockbuster sort of territory where you’ve slightly lost that sense of the characters as real people and the behavior as authentic behavior. So I suppose I was trying very hard to keep one foot in reality and at the same time still deliver on all of the kind of excitement and the kind of rollercoaster ride that you want from a big movie experience in the cinema.”
As some of the best crime thrillers do, Crime 101 couples its groundedness with spectacle and action. Perhaps the best example of this comes in the form of a riveting chase throughout the night streets of LA between Barry Keoghan’s motorcycle-driving Omron and Chris Hemsworth’s Mike Davis. In adding to the pantheon of great movie chases with his new film, Layton discussed what makes a chase sequence so effective. “I guess, for me, the thing that makes it successful is danger,” Layton stated. “If you can feel a palpable sense of it feeling real and unpredictable. If you look at like what Billy Friedkin did with French Connection or Live and Die in LA, those were kinetic and unpredictable and genuinely had a sense of kind of danger.”
Advancements in technology enable filmmakers to use all sorts of novel movements and shots to craft chase sequences, but Layton opted against this approach in favor of old-school moviemaking. “As equipment gets more sophisticated, there’s a temptation to do really fancy things,” Layton said. “You can have a camera go in and out of one car [and] out of a windscreen, which you then put back using visual effects…You can do really fancy stuff, but actually is that really increasing your sense of either reality, authenticity or drama? And my feeling was, ‘Let’s not do that.’ Let’s come back to this sense of, ‘What would it really feel like?’ And then try and put the camera and the audience in as close to being in the action as you can. And I think that’s the thing that makes it memorable.”
It’s difficult to make a crime movie set in Los Angeles without drawing comparisons to Heat, Michael Mann’s 1995 heist classic starring Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. In writing and directing Crime 101, Layton remained aware of Heat‘s influence, but made concerted efforts to distinguish his film through its inclusion of flawed characters. “Movies like Heat cast a long shadow,” Layton said. “I love that movie. I certainly wasn’t trying to replicate or emulate. I was trying to, I suppose, give audiences an experience similar to probably the one I had in the cinema watching those Michael Mann movies like Collateral. Certainly I felt like it should belong to that lineage, but I also think I wanted the characters to be a little more warm…maybe a little more flawed and they make mistakes and they’re imperfect. And they’re a little bit more like you and me. And hopefully the benefit of that is that you kind of connect with them and you sympathize with them in a way that maybe DeNiro’s character in [Heat] [doesn’t].”
To bring these flawed and authentic characters to life, Layton assembled a cast most filmmakers could only dream of. The trio at the center of the film are played by Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, and Halle Berry, but the film also bolsters Monica Barbaro, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Nolte, and Barry Keoghan, the latter of whom was the only actor who Layton wrote the part for.
Having written the screenplay, Layton had a fully-formed idea of who Mike Davis was. But, upon observing the nuances Chris Hemsworth brought to the role, the filmmaker saw his protagonist evolve as a result of his leading man’s performance. “I knew [Hemsworth] had acting abilities that we had never seen,” Layton stated. “I’m not sure I knew it, but I suspected it. And obviously you want, I wanted a movie star who had a kind of potentially iconic quality. And the more I got to know him, the more I realized there were a lot of hidden depths and sensitivities and insecurities. I think people have thought that what he does as Thor is kind of easy for him, because he’s a big muscly guy. I don’t think it is actually. I think it’s all a big persona that he has created and he slips into now. In actual fact, this character I think is drawing on a lot more of Chris’s own insecurities and fears and vulnerabilities. So he was the thing that surprised me most.”
After years of blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Layton has stepped fully into large-scale narrative filmmaking without losing the instincts that made his earlier work so compelling. Crime 101 is confident, muscular, and unmistakably his—a film that understands both the mechanics of a heist and the messy psychology behind it. If American cinema’s crime genre has occasionally felt stuck in the past, Layton proves there’s still room to reinvent it. Eight years was a long wait, but the payoff suggests he’s only just getting started.
After years of navigating the porous boundary between documentary and fiction, Layton has arrived at large-scale narrative filmmaking with his sensibilities not only intact but sharpened. Crime 101 is assured, muscular, and unmistakably authored. It’s a film that understands the precision of a heist thriller while remaining deeply attuned to the fallible human impulses that drive them. Where the modern crime genre can sometimes feel content to recycle its tropes, Layton injects it with texture, craft, and emotional complexity. If this long-gestating return signals anything, it is that Layton has fully come into his own as a filmmaker and that his exploration of the crime genre is only just beginning.
Crime 101 is in theaters February 13
