“Crime 101” is nearly here.
The thriller, based on the 2020 novella by Don Winslow, concerns a slick thief (Chris Hemsworth), whose path eventually crosses with a dogged detective (Mark Ruffalo), an insurance broker (Halle Berry) and a loose cannon criminal (Barry Keoghan). How the characters intersect and under what circumstances is part of the fun of “Crime 101,” which is set in Los Angeles and has a sprawl reminiscent of the town itself. The spectacular feat of “Crime 101” is that it doesn’t just feel like the movies that it was clearly influenced by (like William Friedkin’s “To Live and Die in L.A.” and Michael Mann’s “Thief”) but that it adds memorably to the canon.
Bart Layton, who wrote and directed “Crime 101,” remembers being sent the story. It was during lockdown in the U.K. in the dead of winter. He had COVID and had lost his sense of taste and smell. By the time he had been sent the story, part of Window’s collection “Broken,” it had already ignited a bidding war.
“I remember reading it and the whole quality of it felt like this breath of sunshine and fresh air,” Layton remembered. “There was something classic about it.”
While Winslow’s story was an homage to crime novelist Elmore Leonard and the effortless cool of Steven McQueen, for Layton it sparked memories of the movies that he had seen with his father as a young person. “I remember thinking, If I were ever going to get to do a big-ish movie for the cinema of scale, it would have to be like this,” Layton said.
He wondered if it would stick the landing in the end – and it did.
“I called my agent and I said, ‘I have to do this.’ It felt like a kind of movie that we weren’t getting offered up in the theaters much and I felt like I would want to make the kind of movie that I’d really want to go and see, whether it was a date night or just a Saturday night at the movies.” The heist movie structure is so well-known that it gives you “this good template to smuggle in slightly more thoughtful ideas and provocations towards thinking about bigger things, somehow.”
Layton added the structure of each major character existing in their own little movie – Rufflo’s rumpled cop is getting a divorce from his wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh); Berry’s insurance operator is on the verge of getting squeezed out at her firm; and Hemsworth is struggling to find connection with a lovely young woman he gets in a fender-bender with (Monica Barbaro). There was a joke on set that they weren’t shooting a movie, but rather a miniseries.
“I felt like I could probably make the characters feel a little more relatable and maybe a little more flawed and then probably bring some of my doc sensibility to make it feel like, even though it’s a proper big movie, you still get a sense that we’re operating in the real world,” said Layton, who has an extensive background in documentary features and is one of the major forces behind Raw, a production company responsible for recent documentaries like “The Tinder Swindler.” His debut narrative feature, 2018’s “American Animals,” was based on a true story and utilized nonfiction elements.
When the script was done, Layton leaned on his experience putting together projects to assemble a “package” for “Crime 101.” “You expect to go down this list of – here’s the first choice and then they’ll say ‘no.’ But everyone said ‘yes’ almost instantly,” Layton explained.
He got a call from CAA head Bryan Lourd, who told Layton that Hemsworth was very interested.
“We got on the phone and I explained that it would be a very different kind of role for him, that it wasn’t going to be a flawless action hero, it was going to be someone who had had issues, and it was going to be very grounded,” Layton said. “That was very much what he was looking to do for his next chapter and because he was so on board and committed and passionate, it all went very quickly.”
Hemsworth, Layton said, changed everything about himself – from his posture (“so he’s not that classically alpha”) to his voice (“it’s a different register”), drawing on extensive research that he had done with real jewel thieves, some of whom were still in prison. “Chris took that very seriously. I was really surprised at how much he wanted to dig in and really do the homework,” Layton said.
Part of what makes “Crime 101” feel like such a throwback is the fact that it was actually shot in Los Angeles. You aren’t bracing yourself for a very obvious car chase speeding down an Atlanta highway or a Canadian hotel standing in for a real one in Beverly Hills. Layton said that there were discussions about scouting different potential filming locations – the Gold Coast in Australia and South Africa were options. But ultimately it didn’t work. (The “101” in the film’s title refers to the 101 freeway, which connects disparate areas of Los Angeles.)
“I wanted to represent the whole social strata of LA, which is, topographically, you have the wealthiest living at the highest. They’re driving from their beautiful mansions to their beautiful offices on the 101 freeway, and underneath the 101 freeway there are a lot of homeless people. And I wanted all of it,” Layton said.
Concerned producers asked if he really wanted to shoot at an actual taco stand in Echo Park with Hemsworth and Barbaro without stopping traffic. “And I was like, ‘Absolutely, because it will be fine, and it will have this quality to it that we haven’t seen for a while. I think I almost would have rather not shot the film than tried to shoot it somewhere else for L.A.”
While scouting the locations for the film, he would listen to Blanck Mass aka Benjamin John Power, an experimental electronic artist and former member of British electronic duo Fuck Buttons. He wanted to get the sensation of the city at night. “I kept coming back to Blanck Mass, because he’s got this rare combination of pounding, foot-tapping bass where you feel like, Okay, there’s a heist quality. But it’s a super contemporary ancestor of David Shire or Lalo Shiffrin or Tangerine Dream,” Layton said. He eventually hired Power to do the music for “Crime 101.” “My question was, Would he find the emotion? And he did. He’s just great.”
As for what’s next, Layton said that he’s got a few things in the works that are too premature to announce, but that it wouldn’t be as long as the gap between “American Animals” and “Crime 101.”
Right now, it must feel like Layton has gotten away with the perfect crime – he’s convinced a major studio (Amazon MGM) and a gaggle of the most accomplished actors working today, to make an R-rated thriller for adults, something that doesn’t come along very often (and when it does, it’s usually relegated to streaming).
“Honestly, I’m very, very grateful. You never know if anyone’s going to show up and do people still want the things that I want in the cinema? But I definitely feel like the fact that I got to make the film that I wrote and that I wanted, and that it does have this big, global cinema releases, is awesome. It’s a dream,” Layton said. “And also coming from docs and stepping up in a way that, there was a point where I was pretty scared, that it was getting that scale and I felt out of my depth. Now looking at it, if you told me that we would be where we are now and what the response has been so far from audiences in London, in New York, the response has been so amazing, lpeople coming up and going, thank you so much for bringing this back.”
“Crime 101” is in theaters this Friday, February 13.
