Bart Layton made his feature debut in 2018 with American Animals, a great hybrid true-crime story that used doc techniques to tell the story of a supposedly victimless art heist that went terribly wrong. It had a mixed reception at the US box office, largely because American audiences felt the film didn’t offer a very flattering portrait of its country’s youth. “I’m not sure as many people saw it as I would have loved,” Layton admits. “But what was kind of surprising about that film was that I guess — certainly for actors — it was admired. And so, I guess they loved it enough to want to connect with me and work with me.”
Two years later, another project came along. “I had COVID,” Layton recalls. “I’d lost my sense of taste. The last fun thing there was to do was eat and drink and even that went. And then I got sent this short story. Aside from the fact that it was set along the 101 highway in California, there was a sort of sun-bleached quality to it, which felt like everything that we didn’t have at that moment. I remember thinking, Wow, this is a really great sort of superstructure for a movie in the vein of the ones that I certainly remembered best as a teenager, or in the ’80s and ’90s. Proper, grownup movies, films that were thoughtful, but they were also great Saturday-night, popcorn movies.”
The result is Crime 101, out next month and already looking like the best-cast movie of the year, beating, hands-down, anything that just premiered at Sundance. Taking its name from Don Winslow’s novella, Crime 101 stars Chris Hemsworth as Mike, a lone-wolf jewel thief operating along the Pacific Coast Highway. Mike doesn’t know it yet but his life is about to become tied up with that of Lou (Mark Ruffalo), the old-school, Columbo-style cop on his trail, and Sharon (Halle Berry), an insurance broker with connections to some of the richest men in the world. Layton frames these three in a sprawling, atmospheric LA noir with an impressive sweep reminiscent of William Friedkin at his best.
“I think, because I decided on this idea of these three — and at times four — characters on a collision course, they each then became their own movie, in a way,” says Layton. “And because they don’t collide until the end really, you kind of have to give each one enough time that you care about the characters. And so, the challenge was really making sure that each of them has a proper narrative that you invest in, and that constantly the stakes are winding up and that you’re increasingly invested, and making sure that the segues between them are really seamless. Most of the stuff that I’ve done has really been a narrative based round a central character rather than three.”
When it comes to casting, Layton says, “I have this sort of, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’ mentality”, a point he illustrates with a story about the casting of Nick Nolte, who plays Mike’s fence. “With that character we were like, ‘Well, what if it was someone like Nick Nolte?,’ and then we thought, ‘Well, why don’t we ask him?’ He read it and said yes. So, I guess there was something about the script that people thought was exciting.”
Layton also thinks that grown-up, character-driven dramas such as this are not being made these days. “I’m trying to think of what were the last versions of those films were. Are they mainly on Netflix? I’m not sure. But, don’t you feel like some of those movies don’t exist anymore?” It certainly explains the appeal his script held for actors, attracting Oscar-nominated actors Monica Barbaro, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Barry Keoghan to vital supporting roles.
Layton is particularly excited for viewers to see Chris Hemsworth in a very different part than the kind we usually see him playing. “I think one of the things that maybe will be really most surprising or gratifying about the film is people seeing how brilliant a performer Chris is,” he says. “But I also wanted a slightly different physicality from him, and we worked a lot on his posture, so that he wasn’t the consummate kind of alpha male who’s confident in every situation, which Chris as a human is — or at least does a brilliant job of appearing to be. But also, he’s a really sensitive and thoughtful person. We registered his voice a little bit. We changed the way he holds himself. We changed his hair color and even his eye color, because he’s so extraordinary-looking that the challenge for me is to make sure the character is also quite real and quite grounded.”
The latter is certainly true of Halle Berry as Sharon, a woman in a male-dominated workplace who has yet to get the promotion she has worked for and deserves. “Halle is at a particular point, I think, in her life and her career where she is pretty comfortable in her skin,” says Layton. “When we first sat down, one of the things she said was, ‘I completely understand who this person is because I’ve been her.’”
“I think she saw that there was a kind of reality to this idea that Sharon is the smartest person in every room. But the people she works for just use her as bait, because she’s so incredible looking. I was thinking of Selling Sunset and those sorts of shows where the currency is youth and beauty. She’s being dangled out there as the carrot, but of course that has a sell-by date. And I think that’s what made her think, ‘OK, I get that.’”
Berry — like Hemsworth and Ruffalo, no doubt — was also likely drawn by the film’s impressive commitment to action scenes, which pepper the movie right through to the final, impeccably plotted heist. “I really wanted to offer up something for a cinema-going audience that felt like a treat,” decides Layton, “a film with movie stars that was going to be exhilarating.”
• Crime 101 is released on February 13