A thief pulls up behind a jewel courier. He pulls out a gun. He stuffs the guy into his trunk and peels out to the wail of sirens and the screech of pursuing tires. Only he’s not entirely the bad guy.
At least, that’s what Crime 101 seems to suggest. The star-studded crime thriller looks at the intersection of three different characters — a diamond thief (Chris Hemsworth), the jewellers’ harried insurance agent (Halle Berry) and the even more disillusioned cop (Mark Ruffalo) tasked with untangling it all.
But coming as it does from British filmmaker Bart Layton, there’s clearly something else going on here. After first making the acclaimed documentary The Imposter — about a con-artist tricking a Texas family into believing he’s their son — he moved onto American Animals, a half-documentary, half-feature about a group of college students stealing an extremely valuable art book.
Given the themes percolating through those movies and this newest one, CBC News spoke to Layton about his newest film, casting superstars and sneaking serious themes into heist movies.
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From The Imposter to American Animals to Crime 101, there seems to be a clear throughline in your work. Where did the interest in crime come from?
I’m not sure the crime, per se, is the driving interest. I think there’s more of a fascination with people who live outside of the norms and the decisions we make. We all live fairly conventional lives — there’s a spectrum, but most of us are on the right side of that line. And then there are these people who choose to live outside of it. I suppose I have an interest in: ‘What are the consequences of that?’
With American Animals, for example, that was a group of young men who really had all of the opportunities and all of the privilege that shouldn’t ever see them move into criminality. And yet they’d grown up on an expectation that their lives were going to be interesting and special because that’s what people who have privilege are led to believe, and promised. And of course, they cross a line that should never be crossed. The decisions that led them there were of interest to me.
With Chris Hemsworth’s character in this film — there’s allusions to a dim, terrible childhood he went through, motivating him to amass wealth in order to protect himself from returning to those circumstances. Combined with American Animals and The Imposter, it does seem that elements of wealth inequality and class struggle are embedded in your work.
Especially in Los Angeles, there is a great and growing wealth chasm. Not just there — the UK’s the same, but that’s a city where you see it rendered in pretty unremarkable terms. So in Crime 101, there’s a questioning of: is the corruption just limited to the jewel thief who is basically intercepting jewels which are being couriered between A and B, insured by these companies? Which, when it’s your turn to make your insurance claim and you’ve been paying your premiums and all the rest of it, their first response is to try to avoid paying you what you’ve been paying?
My background is in documentaries, so I’m doing a lot of research into the real people who do these jobs. Believe it or not, there are real jewel thieves. Some of them are in prison. You can speak to them. You can communicate with them. That’s what we based Hemsworth’s character on. There are real fences, as the one played by Nick Nolte in the film. Ruffalo’s character is based on a real LAPD guide that I spent a lot of time talking to. He actually left the LAPD because he felt the pressure — he felt it become like a corporation. The pressure was on the numbers, rather than the actual community policing.
And I spoke to a jeweler in downtown LA who told me stories of him being the victim of really elaborate heists that were more outlandish than anything I came up with. The more you can do your research and communicate with real people who are close to the characters, you get all of these brilliant details for free, which I try to borrow and fold into the narrative where I can.
Director Bart Layton, Chris Hemsworth and Halle Berry on the set of Crime 101. (Merrick Morton/Amazon MGM Studios)
Speaking of characters, Chris Hemsworth is really playing against type here as a self-effacing, shy and vulnerable man who orchestrates elaborate robberies even while struggling to make eye contact. What about his past work made you think: ‘This is the guy I want for this role’?
He was a huge surprise because, you know, if you want to make a movie for the cinema, you need movie stars. There’s just no two ways about it. And I felt like he has this iconic movie star look and magnetism, but, in truth, I’d never seen him do anything that was close to what I wanted him to do in this.
So initially, he was the one chasing the role. And I thought, ‘Well obviously I’m going to have a meeting with Chris, because he looks the way he does and he’s a big star.’ Then we met, and I was struck immediately by how thoughtful he is as a person. His parents were social workers in some difficult places, so he has a lot more life experience than maybe people realize. Even though he is this larger-than-life guy, he’s much more insecure than you’d expect — probably like all of us. And he had a lot of depth and, I guess, wanted to do the work, wanted to do the research.
Were you the one to write that backstory or were those Chris’s decisions?
It’s a bit of both. A lot of it came from doing research with young men who had ended up in prison for the theft of jewels or valuable items. When I began communicating with them, there were similarities: many of them have been in foster families. Many of them had absent fathers. They’d started off robbing small things they’d found. They got in with a fence. If they sees promise in these young guys, they begin this slightly false father-son relationship, and then they start commissioning them to go and steal — which can get more and more elevated in terms of the value and the complexity of the thefts.
So all of that was based on that research. Then Chris and I found Soft White Underbelly, which is a series of brilliant testimonial documentaries with people from Skid Row who’ve been through difficult experiences. That led to a lot of the physicality and the way Chris’s character moves and speaks. You’ll notice his voice is slightly different — he holds himself in a very different way — which is borne of a character who’s not a super-confident alpha male in the world, which Chris is.
Barry Keoghan stars as Ormon in Crime 101. He’s part of a star-studded cast that includes Halle Berry, Chris Hemsworth, Nick Nolte and Mark Ruffalo. (Merrick Morton/Amazon MGM Studios)
This is your first feature completely detached from documentary. What made you decide to make it a heist film?
The beauty of a heist movie, or a crime thriller, is that you set up a question at the beginning, and the audience knows they won’t get the answer until the third act. So we have this inbuilt ‘How is this going to go?’ and you’re fascinated to see, ‘Are they going to get away with it?’
Within that structure, it gives me, as a filmmaker, the ability to develop characters and then, hopefully, smuggle in ideas and themes that elevate that. So you still get all of the things we want from the movies I grew up loving — you know, those 90s, early 2000s, even ’70s roller-coaster rides — but you’re also, hopefully, being given something a bit more thought-provoking or nourishing, in a way.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
